Extraterrestrial

Alien life could thrive on exotic elements

By T.K. Randall
November 18, 2014

Image: Global View of the Surface of Venus (1991)
Credit: (PD) NASA/JPL The discovery of extremophiles, organisms that live in some of the most extreme and inhospitable conditions on Earth, has opened up the doors to the possibility that extraterrestrial life doesn't necessarily need the conditions that we do in order to survive.

Now scientists have taken this approach one step further by investigating whether it may be possible for life forms to thrive on an exotic form of carbon dioxide that exhibits properties consistent with both liquids and gases.Supercritical carbon dioxide is essentially carbon dioxide that has reached a supercritical state due to a certain combination of pressure and temperature. While regular carbon dioxide is generally considered an inviable solvent to host the chemical reactions for life, in its supercritical state it becomes far more hospitable to the point where enzymes can be even more stable than in water.

"I always have been interested in possibly exotic life and creative adaptations of organisms to extreme environments," said study co-author Dirk Schulze-Makuch. "Supercritical CO2 is often overlooked, so I felt that someone had to put together something on its biological potential."

Source: Space.com

Tags: Extraterrestrial, Life