the.com/xenobiology
The study of life that never read Earth's rulebook on carbon, water, or DNA.
means The scientific study of hypothetical or alien life forms that might operate on biochemical principles different from life as we know it on Earth.
from Built from Greek parts: 'xenos' (stranger, foreigner, guest) plus 'bios' (life) and the '-logy' suffix for study of. 'Xenos' gives us xenophobia and xenon too — that noble gas was named 'the stranger' because it was such a rare, hard-to-find element. Xenobiology joins a modern family of science-fiction-adjacent coinages (like exobiology and astrobiology) that emerged as scientists began seriously theorizing about life beyond Earth, borrowing the ancient word for 'foreign' to name a field that, so far, has no confirmed subjects to study.
- chemistry swap
- imagines arsenic or silicon subbing for carbon's backbone
- solvent rebel
- liquid methane could replace water on cold moons
- synthetic cousin
- overlaps with xenobiologists building alien-like DNA in labs
- zero confirmed cases
- still entirely hypothetical, which is half the fun