Crafting Carbon-Based Life Form for Space

[hsdrop]

Would it be possible to craft a carbon based life form throw dna manipulation and selective breeding that could live in the cold vacuum of space??
Also if I posted the thread in the wrong place I'm sorry I didn't know where else to place it.
Once again thank you to anyone that will tack the time to reply to my post.

 

[Drakkith]

About the best you could do is to create one that can merely survive a trip through space, most likely through a suspension of most bodily and cellular functions. Call it hibernation if you'd like. Living in space implies metabolic activity and such. But the problem is that there is neither food nor air in space, so the creature would have nothing to live off of. Even photosynthetic organisms need air and other resources to live.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Here's a nice review article from a scientific journal on the subject:
Moissl-Eichinger et al. 2016 Venturing into new realms? Microorganisms in space. FEMS Microbiol Rev 40: 722. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/femsre/fuw015

An important concept in space microbiology or astrobiology is ‘habitability’, which is essentially an assessment of whether an environment can support the activity of a given organism, where activity might be maintenance, growth or reproduction. Due to the fact that we have only one example of a life-bearing planet so far, these considerations are restricted to life as we know it, even, if in some theoretical studies a broader approach has been considered (Baross 2006). For an environment in any location on Earth or elsewhere to be habitable, it must have several characteristics. They are:

• availability of water, at least temporarily in a liquid state,
  
• appropriate temperature conditions,
  
• availability of an energy source,
  
• carbon plus major other elements required by all known life forms (HNOPS) and
  
• other elements required by a specific organism as trace elements.

https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/femsre/fuw015

The article explores the limits of these conditions in known terrestrial organisms both under natural and experimental conditions.

You may also be interested in reading through a previous PF thread on the topic: https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...le-to-earth-bacteria-thriving-on-mars.906191/

 

[rootone]

Yep, there is no significant amount of carbon in interstellar space, so no organic chemistry can happen.

 

[hsdrop]

Thank you for the article. I truly do appreciate the passing of info like we do on the forum hear.

Yep, there is no significant amount of carbon in interstellar space, so no organic chemistry can happen.

Does all organic chemistry have to be carbon bass?
I was under the notion that silicon based life might be possible out there some wair or even something that we just have not found yet.
sorry I'm not meaning to put your comet down at all. I'm just one of the individuals that believes that you have to keep an open mind if you are to discover anything new.

 

[Drakkith]

Does all organic chemistry have to be carbon bass?
I was under the notion that silicon based life might be possible out there some wair or even something that we just have not found yet.

The term "organic" has a specific meaning in biology and chemistry, where it means molecules containing carbon. All known examples of life are carbon-based, but it is not known whether life can be based on something other than carbon. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound

sorry I'm not meaning to put your comet down at all. I'm just one of the individuals that believes that you have to keep an open mind if you are to discover anything new.

Open-mindedness has nothing to do with this. It's simply just another example of how terminology differs between laymen and scientists. And also between forum members.

 

[rootone]

I was under the notion that silicon based life might be possible

Silicon does have some similar chemistry to carbon but there are no known silicon analogs to anything like DNA.
One very big difference though is that whereas carbon oxides are gases and are soluable in water Silicon oxides are solids (at Earth like temperature) and not soluable,
This means that any silicon based biochemistry would have to evolve not in water, but in something like volcanic lava.

 

[Fervent Freyja]

It could be possible in the future to send a carbon based nanoelectromechanical human-like robot into space that uses mechanical parts that mimic genetic/cellular processes. Both technologies are under study. It would not be considered a life form, as it would be chemically inert. Powering and maintaining it would be much easier to do than for a human in space. Why would we need to do that though?