Experiment I'd like to see done

[Moontanman]

I'd like to see an Urey-Miller type experiment done except substituting boron hydrides for methane or other carbon compounds. It would have to be done in cold and or highly pressurized conditions so the ammonia would be liquid with just a small amount of water dissolved in the liquid ammonia.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

 

 

Possibly to test some of this....

 

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/boron-based_life.html

[Zolar V]

I would like to see it done to, and produce no results. If it did produce the predicted result i would be thoroughly amazed. I just don't see the logical jump from ordinary plain old chemicals to living thingy.

[Moontanman]

I'm not sure anyone really expected living things to pop out of the Urey-Miller experiment but some complex organic molecules did. Doing it with boron compounds would be interesting to see if some sort of organic boron analogs emerged from the experiment... Up till the point of the Urey-Miller experiment those complex organics were thought to be only produced by living things...

[StringJunky]

I would like to see it done to, and produce no results. If it did produce the predicted result i would be thoroughly amazed. I just don't see the logical jump from ordinary plain old chemicals to living thingy.

 

Well, the Earth is just a bunch of plain old chemicals and produced living thingies.

[Mr Skeptic]

I would like to see it done to, and produce no results. If it did produce the predicted result i would be thoroughly amazed. I just don't see the logical jump from ordinary plain old chemicals to living thingy.

 

You don't even know what "living" means. Also, that's off-topic.

 

I'd like to see an Urey-Miller type experiment done except substituting boron hydrides for methane or other carbon compounds. It would have to be done in cold and or highly pressurized conditions so the ammonia would be liquid with just a small amount of water dissolved in the liquid ammonia.

 

And might as well try with silicon analogues too.

[Moontanman]

And might as well try with silicon analogues too.

 

 

What would you use for a working fluid? Silanes react violently with water and silicones are not soluble in water.

Edited August 26, 2010 by Moontanman

[Mr Skeptic]

What would you use for a working fluid? Silanes react violently with water and silicones are not soluble in water.

 

Hm, you're right. I think silicon-based life has an undeserved position in scifi. However, in a very hot or high pressure environment the solubility problem disappears. According to wikipedia, ammonia would be better than water for silicon life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

[Moontanman]

Hm, you're right. I think silicon-based life has an undeserved position in scifi. However, in a very hot or high pressure environment the solubility problem disappears. According to wikipedia, ammonia would be better than water for silicon life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

 

 

Possibly liquid methane or ethane would be better for silicon life...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

 

5. Silicon-Based Life

 

Silicon can form long chains as silanes, silicones, and silicates. Among them, silanes have been considered the most proper compounds to sustain life because they present the closest analog to hydrocarbons, which are so important to terrestrial life processes. However, such silicon-based life would have to be different from life as we know on Earth.

 

Silanes burn spontaneously when in contact with oxygen to form silicate and molecular hydrogen. Hence, a biochemistry based on such compounds requires an ambient free of oxygen. The affinity of silicon to oxygen is so strong that whether silicon is placed in water, it will form a silica shell, stripping the oxygen from the water (LeGrand 1998). Thus, water is not a compatible solvent for silicon compounds. Methane, ethane or any compounds that contain methyl groups are more compatible solvents for a silicon-based system.

 

The strong Si-O bond can be avoided and the carbon scenario reproduced if oxygen is replaced by sulfur. Then the resulting ratio of bonding energies of Si-Si to Si-S is comparable to the ratio of the C-C to C-O bonding energies (Firsoff 1963). Also, silicon polymers have been obtained with nitrogen instead of oxygen, where nitrogen acts as an electron donor. In hydrogen poor environments, hydrogen is often replaced by a halogen such as chloride, and long linear chains of silicon and chloride are formed (Firsoff 1963). Large molecules based on Si-NH-Si backbone, with halogens as side-groups, could provide a basis for complex chemical systems. Silanes can form flexible, macromolecular assemblies in the form of sheets, strings, tubes, and other shapes, similar to those formed by lipid bilayers in carbon biochemistry (Unno et al 2000). Furthermore, oligosilanes having up to 26 consecutive Si–Si bonds can be chiral, support a variety of functionalized and non-functionalized side chains, have alkyl side chains that are generally soluble in nonpolar solvents and self-aggregate into amphiphilic structures in water, creating vesicles and micelles (Benner et al 2004).

 

Although the stability of silanes decreases with increasing chain length, if hydrogen is replaced by organic groups, stable compounds are obtained. For example, polysilanes with molecular weights of above 106 have been synthesized (Sharma et al 2002). Although polysilanes are not stable at the temperature and pressure conditions of Earth’s surface they are adequately stable at low temperatures, especially at higher pressures. These studies altogether suggest that whether silicon-based life exist, it may be restricted to an environment with minor amounts of oxygen, scarcity of water, a compatible solvent such as methane and low temperatures (at least below 0°C). Titan provides the best target in our solar system for investigating this possibility. It meets all the described criteria (Fulchignoni et al 2005; Naganuma and Sekine 2010). Although has been considered that the abundance of carbon compounds on Titan may compete with silicon as the building block of life, silicon may have advantage in such extreme cold environment due to its higher reactivity.

 

 

Possibly H2SO4 could be used as solvent for silicone experiments? but what chemicals would you start out with ?

 

The reason i brought up boron compounds for the Urey-Miller experiment is due to Boron forming long chain polymers and rings as well as Bucky balls, carbon forming Bucky balls shows how well it creates large molecules, the fact that boron does the same thing is suggestive that boron might share more of carbons properties...