re:
>Evolving photosynthesis/discarding 02 seems (to a non-chemist like me
>anyway) unlikely, a little like trying to get rich by discarding gold.
>You are right it's a key question for Europa. Assuming simple life
>evolves frequently in the universe, I wonder where on the scale from
But for billions of years that 02 was nothing but a poison, not only
unusable by any life on the planet, but in most cases highly hazardous to
it. The explosion of multicellular life forms 500 million years ago
represented a rare case of life turning a poison into gold (and it took 3
billion years, more or less, to do it). Photosynthesis supplies 02 merely
as an accident of chemistry--I don't think it's impossible to suggest that
other complex chemical pathways, albeit based on different types of
chemosynthesis than we have on Earth--might evolve to do the same thing.
M. Taylor
==
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