Aliens and water.

Does EVERY living thing need water? what if its not even Carbon based? would it need to drink water then? i dont think it would. We need to change the things we look for in life. We are just used to having animals that need water to survive. What if theres some animal on another planet that needs to breath helium? Thats why we should expand on the idea of life.

btw, i have a confusing post. what i ment was does everything living need water. even if its not carbon based.

[Edited on 9-5-2004 by masterofpuppets]

Agreed. I'm not sure what else to add to this though. Kinda hard to figure out where you're going with this post.

lol, yea i re-read it and it doesnt make sense. but what i ment was does everything need water? even if its not carbon based?

Originally posted by masterofpuppets
lol, yea i re-read it and it doesnt make sense. but what i ment was does everything need water? even if its not carbon based?

Well, we don't know. All we have to go on is that everything that we have seen HERE needs water and is made of carbon. I believe carbon makes up most of the mater in the universe (if my HS edumication serves me right), so then perhaps it would be apropriat to say that from our knowladge, the majority of ET life would most likely require water.

what i dont get is how we know that Carbon makes up most of the universe if we have never been out of the solar system.

All life so far discovered is based on carbon, contains amino acids and has the ability to replicate. This is often regarded as the basis for all biological life, however, over the past few years scientists have begun to think that there may also be a kind of chemistry based life following discoveries of unusual loop structures found in deep underwater caves. These loops are organised in a biological fashion that follows neither crystal or geological formations that could be determined. They do however contain careful structures and filters that seem to allow the surrounding waters to permeate and circulate in a way that (if one makes an imaginative stretch) mimic how animals take in air and nutrients from food, then pass these around the body in a closed circulatory system.

I remember seeing a documentary programme where scientists found thousands of these loops on the roof to a cave but unfortunately I don't recall what programme it was. (I imagine it was BBC Horizon or Ch4 Equinox - and this was going back a few years)

Silicon based life - Could it be true?

This link says Maybe: www.newton.dep.anl.gov...

This link says No: www.madsci.org...

Originally posted by American Mad Man

Originally posted by masterofpuppets
lol, yea i re-read it and it doesnt make sense. but what i ment was does everything need water? even if its not carbon based?

Well, we don't know. All we have to go on is that everything that we have seen HERE needs water and is made of carbon. I believe carbon makes up most of the mater in the universe (if my HS edumication serves me right), so then perhaps it would be apropriat to say that from our knowladge, the majority of ET life would most likely require water.

well with fusion withoin stars, (which would be nice if we could do that here on earth) they can make carbon at alarming rates

There truly is no way to ascertain whether other forms of life are carbon based and reliant on water until we're actually able to study them. Until then we can assume within a certain degree that if OIL is carbon based they would have a need for water.

The conclusion that carbon is prevalent in the universe comes from the spectrographs of stars, as well as deductions from physics. Most of the material in the universe is the 'ashes' of stars that have gone nova. In short, carbon is one of the more common middle wieght elements created by this solar fusion.

The original question, "do aliens need water" is not silly at all. What is really being asked is are alien bodies the end result of metabolic processes?

I think my answer would be 'no.' Most of the eyewitness accounts describe greys as not being biological the way we are. The same thing was said of fairies by previous generations. They can appear and dissappear at random. They don't eat for nutritive purposes. They can will themselves to be invisible.

Incedentally, Celtic belief holds that supernatural creatures cannot cross running water. Hmmm.

"It's life Jim, but not as we know it."

i totally agree with dr_strangecraft in his conclusion about life from other worlds and fairies and celtic creatures.

but if a life form is not carbon based then what element is the life form of take a look at the periotic table, a life form would have to be from the same numberd area as carbon on the table.

Catchya on the flip side

I have thought this for years, and it's nice to see others put this out there. To say that all life must be based on carbon is to say that the only kind of life that exists must be like us. This seems very naive and self-centered to me. Okay, there is a lot of carbon in the universe. Okay, carbon is key to life as we know it on earth. But who is to say we are the only kind of life form? Of the known universe we have explored only a tiny, tiny part of it. Of the unknown universe: by far the hugest part - we have explored none. How can we be so terracentric as to think that our kind of life is the only kind of life there is? Kinda like understanding, for the first time, that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth.

As cheesy as it can be at times, Star Trek TNG did a lot of posing of possibilities of different life forms. While we can't take the show as anything more than entertainment, a lot of ideas that found their way into scientific query began in science fiction.

I find it exciting to discover that there is so much we don't know. So much we have yet to know. And so much we may never know.

My argument was that Aliens are probably not material beings at all. Probably just invisible pools of bad vibes, which cause humans to hallucinate from fear.

Other life forms.
Well, the handy thing about carbon is its valence. It has 4 little handles to attach to other molecules, which makes it extremely versatile. Any other element would be nearly as useful, though the weight of 12 (a mystical number) makes carbon light enough to participate in reactions that similar elements cannot. Oxygen is similar, but weighs more, if I remember.

I think sulfur is simlar to carbon. Maybe venus has life, instead of mars. Didn't TNG have an episode with sulfur based life?

Mr. Spock had green blood, which used copper to carry oxygen to his cells, instead of iron.

No chemistry degree here, btw. Someone get out the periodic table and check my ramblings for f.o.s. factor, please.

reply to post by masterofpuppets


If we use as a given, that there are many life forms such as ourselves, more evolved and less in the universe, then we can safely assume that those all need water and oxygen. In the 1500 and 1600's, world sailors found islands in the oceans where they could re-supply with food and FRESH WATER. They mapped these for future explorers. It only makes sense that carbon based life-forms, no matter what level of evolution, would still need water and oxygen. As with submarines of today, using H2O to produce breathable oxygen and energy producing hydrogen from water only makes sense as to why UFO's are here. They really don't care about us. Earth is just a "fuel stop" in the cosmos...