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A comment on The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it. Parent comment

Re:The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it by bsder on Thursday February 02, 2023 @06:55PM (#34635103)
My comment is about the building blocks.

We seem to find amino acids everywhere. It seems like once conditions exist that they can form, they DO form.

We don't have any equivalent building block which is anywhere nearly so ubiquitous.

In addition, these building blocks are reversible within 3kcal/mol. Life requires reversibility. http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2008/10/unbearable-he...

We have no other building blocks with this kind of versatility. None.

So, life may not be based on DNA/RNA, but it's almost certain to be based around amino acids.

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Re:The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it by pfdietz on Thursday February 02, 2023 @07:11PM (#34635256)
Ah, ok. You were talking about the small molecules, not life. That seems ok, although realize that the amino acids formed are a large superset of the ones life has ended up settling on. So it's conceivable another OoL event would settle on a different (if not disjoint) set.
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