Alternative Biochemistries

There's always the possibility of silicon-based life.

I remember reading an article about plasma/dust-based life. Scientists were simulating dust and plasma and accidentally found life-like structures in the simulations, in particular a kind of self-replicating DNA like structure.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12466

kuwisdelu said:

There's always the possibility of silicon-based life.

Click to expand...

Not really, the silicon-oxygen bond is too strong and the silicon-nitrogen bond too weak for it to do the range of things carbon does.

Have you read James White's Sector General stories? They are my favorite medical mystery sci-fi. I highly recommend them if you haven't checked them out before. He has all these types of critters:
http://www.sectorgeneral.com/articlesclassification.html

In general I think the key to a cracking story of practicing-medicine-on-aliens isn't hyperrealistic biochemistry (tho it helps to be mildly plausible) but rather a mystery that is so hard to crack because the aliens are truly alien. Like humans can't even conceive of the alien's social and biological processes, so they are at a loss until they can think way way outside the box. Like the Sector General novels. Or 'Speaker For the Dead' by Orson Scott Card.

I think you can create a more compelling story by saying, 'The aliens were beings of superheated gas and so...' rather than try to figure out how an alien made of superheated gas could work in terms of the sheer physics and chemistry.