Well, we didn’t find any sort of sweet-ass bacteria on Titan. Son of a bitch. What was found by Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon is life previously thought impossible. It was snagged within Mono Lake in Menlo Park, California.

What exactly do you mean?

Phosphorus, along with hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, make up the fundamental building blocks of life as we know it.

Okay, if you say so! God, it’s been a long time since my high school science classes. If you can’t psychoanalyze it for imagined tropes, I’m useless. So, go on!

Wolfe-Simon has discovered a bacteria that swaps out phosphorus with arsenic. The discovery that a life form can be comprised of something other than the six fundamental building blocks of life changes everything.

Oh shit! Now that is interesting. What exactly does this mean in the long run? And why is NASA involved?

For Astrobiology, the study of life elsewhere in the universe, the impact of this discovery is tremendous. For years astrobiologists have been basing the potential for alien worlds to support life on the presence of the fundamental building blocks of life. Now that we know they aren’t as fundamental as we first thought, the search will have to change.

Well then! Pretty fucking rockin’, no? It opens up the parameters for our searches for life off-planet! Now go out and find that shit, people! I’m still a little bit disappointed. I was really hoping for the planet that supported life, whose only inhabitants were the other-worldly equivalent of Swedish supermodels. Male and female, of course. Where the lakes were comprised of Diet Mountain Dew.

But this? This is still pretty cool.

Via.