No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

jamesbarns

i hate when scientists are like ‘this planet cant have aliens on it because there’s no water! the atmosphere is wrong! theres not enough heat to sustain life!’ because dude theyre aliens, nobodys saying they need any of those things to exist

carryonmysociallyawkwardson

we’re so humanocentric it’s infuriating. just because we can’t live there doesn’t mean nothing can! like, never mind aliens, we do this with our own fucking planet! scientists used to think nothing could possibly live at the bottom of the oceans, because “all life needs sunlight to survive, of course!” yet what did we find when we invented submarines that could go deep enough? the barren wasteland the scientists were expecting? fuck no! the bottom of the sea is teeming with all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures even wackier than anything they ever came up with in star trek! when we discover aliens, we probably won’t even fucking realise it, because they’ll be so different from what we’re used to as ‘life’, we won’t even recognise them as living beings

antisanity

things are heating up in the alien fandom

nientedal

oh my god this bothers me EVERY TIME because like

okay let’s talk about oxygen. can i? talk about oxygen? if you aren’t about this post just hit ctrl+j and skip it because i’m gonna talk about oxygen and extremophiles for a minute here.

so! humans and a lot of other Big Life Forms on Earth need oxygen to survive. we use oxygen in our electron transport chains. this is what allows us to respirate. this is how we breathe.

but it doesn’t have to be oxygen! there are other elements and compounds that also work as electron acceptors: manganese, mercury, sulfate, nitrate. these are used in anaerobic respiration (as opposed to aerobic, which uses oxygen). as far as i know, the only anaerobic respirators out there are teeny-tiny, microbes and such. but that doesn’t mean anaerobic organisms can’t evolve into big, complicated critters like humans–it just means they probably can’t do it on Earth, because Earth is covered in oxygen, and these teeny-tiny critters can’t breathe oxygen. (also, oxygen is a really efficient electron acceptor. sulfate and nitrate are less efficient, so less energy is released per oxidized molecule. which is fine, but life could develop a more efficient energy utilization system to compensate! it could happen! and, on a planet without oxygen, it would be so much easier for the teeny-tiny critters to thrive and expand! and there might be other equivalents for biosynthesis that work just as well! we don’t know!)

the thing about life is–it uses what resources it has. it shapes itself around what it has. what else can it do? the organisms around the ocean vents have no sunlight and very little molecular oxygen, so they use other stuff: hydrogen sulfide, inorganic reduced compounds, carbon dioxide, iron, sulfur. do me a favor and read the wikipedia article on lithotrophs. chemolithotrophs are especially fascinating to me.

and there are acidophiles! teeny-tiny things that live in highly acidic environments! we’re talking, like, a pH of 2 or below. (vinegar has a pH of 2.) take Ferroplasma, for example. these are microbes found a lot in acid mine drainage–Ferroplasma uses sulfur cycling to convert sulfide in the metal ore into sulfuric acid. sulfuric acid is bad news for you and me, but the other acidophiles are totally fine with it. and F. acidarmanus is a microbe that lives on one specific mountain in California–this little critter lives in pHs close to 0. it lives in an environment just north of battery acid in terms of habitability.

and oh, man, you guys, we have not even scraped the surface on extremophiles. i can yell forever about extremophiles. but you get the point! so now imagine if the whole planet had a low pH–maybe not that low, but LOW. and now let it percolate for, oh…three billion years.

WHAT THE HELL WOULD MACROSCOPIC LIFE EVEN LOOK LIKE

I CANNOT EVEN GUESS

BUT I BET IT WOULD BE SUPER COOL

tl;dr yes hush about “atmospheres being wrong.” if it HAS an atmosphere, there could be something there. anything.