Silicon Life

Life as we know it is based on carbon. In fact, everything that our bodies create contain carbon. Even organic materials are defined by the presence of carbon within them. As important as carbon is, other elements share many important characteristics with it. One of the more important shared characteristics can be the number of valence electrons. An element that has the same number of valence electrons as Carbon is silicon, Carbon's less talked about cousin. Silicon has already made waves in the technology industry with its importance in the manufacturing of semiconductors. but Silicon has also made way in the field of astrobiology with its key characteristics with carbon. With all of these similarities, the ability of Silicon to form life has been pondered on. But what is the feasibility of Silicon Life? This is quite an intriguing question!

Due to the fact that Silicon and Carbon have the same number of valence of electrons it is possible for silicon particles to fully replace carbon without changing the physical properties of the organic material. So hypothetically life could use Silicon as a substitute for Carbon.

However, a major limitation of Silicon is that it does not have the special ability that Carbon has to stack long chains of itself on top of each other with Hydrogen bonds. There is a limit to how long silicon chains can get while Carbon chains are seemingly infinite. For this reason, the silicon counterpart of the organic compounds would never be able to get large enough to support complex life. In fact, it might not even be able to support simple-celled life as DNA wouldn't be able to contain enough information.

This size limitation that Silicon has is the biggest reason for its inferiority to Carbon and the infeasibility of Silicon-based life throughout the universe. There might even be no instances of there being intelligent life as we have not even seen Carbon-based life and carbon-based life actually has a higher chance of evolving throughout the universe. We don't know much about silicon-based life but we do know that the probability of it even existing is far exceeded by the probability of there being carbon-based life.

Even with the low probability of there being silicon life, it is a fun thought experiment and an interesting astrobiological scenario.