So whenever the topic of extra terrestrial life comes around people always mention how they could be way more different than we could predict and rather than being carbon based they could be silicon based. My question is why silicon? What makes it possible to sustain life?
In: Biology
Because silicon is in the same group as carbon on the periodic table and is able to form a decent number of large and complex molecules that would be required for life, there’s speculation that it might be a plausible alternate biochemistry to carbon-based life. It’s also abundant on rocky planets and asteroids (at least in our solar system) so we expect that there would be an abundance of it available for life to use on other words.
Silicon does have a lot of drawbacks though. It can’t form as wide a variety of molecules as carbon, it’s unstable in the presence of water, and in the presence of oxygen, it become silicon dioxide (aka quartz) which is just inert rock. So silicon-based life isn’t going to happen on an Earth-like planet, and may not be possible at all.
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