Major news for space enthusiasts: NASA has found “life as we do not know it” in California! The arsenic-based life form apparently uses completely different metabolic processes from anything else we know of!

According to a 1962 article by science and science-fiction giant Isaac Asimov (titled “Not as We Know it: The Chemistry of Life”), there are six completely different chemical processes that might theoretically support life. I don’t know what progress has been made in proving or disproving any of them since then, but before this, only one of them was known to work (the one we’re based on). Now we can add a second working one, which wasn’t on the original list at all. 🙂

This, along with the recent discovery that there are probably three times as many stars as we thought, means that the chances of eventually finding extraterrestrial life have just jumped significantly. 😀

(Thanks, Ploni!)