It obviously wouldn’t be life exactly as we know it, no! I’m pretty confident that if you replaced all the elements heavier than carbon with carbon, some form of life would be able to emerge. Carbon is where the complexity comes from—everything else is optimization.
Seriously, that’s the most blatant case of the failure of imagination fallacy I’ve seen since I stopped cruising creationist discussion boards.
I’m substantially less convinced. While carbon is the main cause of complexity, that’s still carbon with other elements. Your options in this hypothetical are hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron and carbon and that’s it. Helium is effectively out (I think, I don’t know enough to be that confident that basic bonding behavior will be that similar when you’ve drastically altered the fine structure constant.) The chemistry for that set isn’t nearly as complicated as that involving full CHNOPS. And the relevant question isn’t “can life form with these elements” but rather “how likely is it?” and “how likely is complex life to form”?
It obviously wouldn’t be life exactly as we know it, no! I’m pretty confident that if you replaced all the elements heavier than carbon with carbon, some form of life would be able to emerge. Carbon is where the complexity comes from—everything else is optimization.
Seriously, that’s the most blatant case of the failure of imagination fallacy I’ve seen since I stopped cruising creationist discussion boards.
I’m substantially less convinced. While carbon is the main cause of complexity, that’s still carbon with other elements. Your options in this hypothetical are hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron and carbon and that’s it. Helium is effectively out (I think, I don’t know enough to be that confident that basic bonding behavior will be that similar when you’ve drastically altered the fine structure constant.) The chemistry for that set isn’t nearly as complicated as that involving full CHNOPS. And the relevant question isn’t “can life form with these elements” but rather “how likely is it?” and “how likely is complex life to form”?