Extra Terrestrial Life

[Chemeyes]

Could it be made of dark matter?

[steg]

I remember some one saying (can't remember who) if there is ET life out there, it might be so different that we wouldn't recognise it as life

[RandyMarsh]

dark matter?, i can't see it.

[Bazile]

You should be asking someone like professor brian cox

He should be able to shed some light on this question

[Old_Geezer]

Well it would depend on what dark matter is if and when we find it. But as the leading suggestions tend to be weakly interacting particles or high-energy particles, it seems unlikely. Doesn't life need a independent stable physical body in order for it to be the same living "creature" from one moment to the next ?

[scowie]

No. Dark matter is some difficult-to-detect matter that is inferred to be present due to the rotation curves of spiral galaxies and the lensing effects seen in distant galaxy clusters. The most sensible candidate for this missing matter is molecular hydrogen, the most abundant form of matter in the universe. Cold H2 is almost impossible to detect spectroscopically but we have found enough of it to account for the missing mass in a warmer galaxy than our own:
http://bit.ly/1HhBbmR

The reason that the scientific consensus says it can't be baryonic [regular] matter is that if it was, it would give off thermal radiation of around 3K — the equilibrium temperature of interstellar space. Well, that's exactly what we see coming from all around us, the so-called "cosmic microwave background". The problem is that the big bang theorists had already decided that this radiation is the left-overs of their hallowed creation event and they were not gonna admit that they'd got that wrong. So they invented this meta-physical "non-baryonic" [and non-emitting] stuff in a desperate attempt to keep the big bang theory alive and named it "dark matter".

Molecular hydrogen is of course a gas, so life can't be made out of it.