"alien" life

Yesterday NASA announced it had found a new lifeform that defies "life as we know it". This lifeform is an adaptive form of bacteria that has managed to thrive in what we refer to as a poisonous environment. It is immersed in and feeds off of arsenic. Adaptive, indeed!

Arsenic is poisonous to "life as we know it". It is the only lifeform to date that has been found living in such conditions. Originally this bacteria lived in a phosphoric environment which is not outside the accepted boundaries of basic life requirements.

It managed to adapt to arsenic-based life when it depleted its phosphoric medium. Quite an accomplishment, to be sure, but, then, life is not static. As Darwin implied it will adapt, or die off.

These scientists that claim "life cannot exist unless ...." are clueless. These bateria cannot exist because "life as we know it" cannot do anything but perish in an arsenic environment.

The finding of life in an unexpected environment is not a new premise. There were lifeforms found thriving in an extremely hot hydrogen sulfide climate near the ocean floor. Hydrothermal vents are basically cracks in the Earth's crust that force super-heated gases through the surface.

The hydrothermal vents I am referring to exist on the ocean floor and the water surrounding is extremely hot and would likely boil the blood in an organisms vessels should they get close to it. Furthermore, the water around these vents is primarily a Hydrogen Sulfide concentration, which is not very habitable as far as the experts claim.

Yet, there is a whole ecosystem that has learned to adapt to living in such volatile, non-life-supporting conditions (as we know it). There are a host of adaptive invertebrates including tubeworms, clams, shrimp, and mussels  that all survive in this harsh environment.

How can this be? How do the baterial lifeform announced yesterday thrive? When you look at the requirements for "life as we know it"  there is no way these organisms can survive.

Sooo ... how is it that these experts can claim that there is only ____________   planets in the entire solar system that can support life. We keep finding things that defy explanation and those blanket statements are not universally true.

The more we know, the more we learn what we don't know.