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Thomas Gold believed that silicon-based life may be found below the deepest part of the known biosphere. He has been an icon to me and I use his model(s) in alot of things. I wanted to have him speak at the Dec. AGU meeting in San Francisco. His death has taken away the greatest bridge from what we know to what seems likely to be. It is in that repsect that I would pause to consider silicon-based lfe.
What about it?
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Is this the Gould that regularly contributed articles to Natural History ? In spite of the great respect due him, I think he guessed wrong on this one. Once carbon based life self organizes, it rips apart all competitors until it develops species with enough technology to design non-carbon based forms for specific tasks. Due to the prevalence of the CHON elements over S and Si and other suspects, carbon based life has too large an advantage due to the charge based affinities amongst the CHON elements. Whether evolution can incorporate enough Si and other elements into the carbon based forms to confuse taxonomists prior to technology development is another question. With the right but highly improbable environmental changes such hybrid forms may morph to non-carbon based ones.
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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?
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