We are carbon based life. So what is Carbon and does that mean all life on Earth aswell?

Answer 1

Yes, all life is based on carbon. All living systems have carbon compounds in them.

Because carbon is unique among the elements in forming long complex chain molecules it is generally believed that any life we find in the universe will be carbon based. This may not be true if electronic only forms of "life" are found.

Answer 2

most life is carbon based, carbon is an element look at a periodic table, not all life is carbon based there is silicon based life as well.

Whether or not silicon-based life exists, or can exist, depends entirely on how you define it.

There are well over 10,000 known species composed of silicon, silicates and organicsilicates. However, all the known species are DNA based lifeforms. As yet, there is no known silicon-based analogue for DNA. So if your definition of silicon-based life requires an alternative to DNA then, no, we haven't found any yet.

It's the flexibility of Carbon-based DNA to easily compact and expand that allows it to store the vast quantities of biochemical information that encodes life. Silicates are rigid and fairly inflexible and would require a much larger "cell" to contain them. That's not to say they can't exist, just that if they do, then they'd be more fragile and have a far slower metabolism. In competition with Carbon-based life they would sorely lose. However, there are alternatives. Silicon-based life could be primarily symbiotic: lots of small independant cells each with a different genome. Or it could have a self-replicating genome. Or it could be acellular, existing as a single planetary organism of organosilicate soup. Or it could encode biochemical information with higher efficiency, 16 data bits instead of the 4 base pairs that DNA is limited to. Or it could have non-redundant transcription, 64 from 64 chemical transcriptions, instead of the 20 from 64 with DNA. There are many alternatives, and the building blocks are certainly there: Silane (SiH4) gas instead of methane (CH4) gas, Silicon dioxide (SiO2) instead of Carbon dioxide (CO2). It's far more likely that any silicon-based life form will be made of organosilicates, chemicals made from a mixture of Carbon and Silicon, rather than an inflexible Silicon only base

Answer 3

carbon is an element with four valancing electrons in its outer orbit.that means it needs four more electrons to be stable.carbon is present in all living and dead material.it's true that we are carbon based life but it doesn't means all life on earth.we need hydrogen and oxygen as well for the life because only the combination of carbon,hydrogen and oxygen could make an organic compounds.

Answer 4

Carbon is an element. burn a match the black stuff is mostly carbon
also the graphite in pencils is mostly carbon. words like carbohydrate refers to the fact that these kinds of substances contain carbon hydrogen and oxygen

Answer 5

that's not likely there is one in our photo voltaic equipment besides earth. yet there are,no doubt, tens of millions or billions of planets through out the universe that could want to help useful ours. Any alien existence might want to be in line with some form of DNA that can make it the most probable candidate for carbon depending existence.

Answer 6

lol. you've watching too much star trek. there is no known silicon based life. all living things known have carbon.

carbon is an element. one of the 100 or so elements that makes up all normal matter.

Answer 7

silicon based life? on page 3??

Answer 8

silicon based life? where?