Very, very unlikely like astronomically so. Most microorganisms are so small they're practically transparent so we have to exploit biochemistry to "stain" them - hence why you'll often hear of bacteria classified as either Gram positive or negative, because of the Gram stain. If the biochemistry is unique or even slightly different i.e. right handed chirality, we'd basically have zero of our usual tools at our disposal.
There's already a whole world of terrestrial microbes that we expect or even know for certain to exist but can't culture, let alone stain, which means we can't really study them. We'd (theoretically) eventually notice them on electron microscopy slides though, which is how we know there's many unculturable microbes, but whether we'd recognize them as alien is a completely different matter. The microbial world is very diverse and there's nothing I can think of that'd set something apart as alien since we can analyze the chemistry with an electron microscope.
> There's already a whole world of terrestrial microbes that we expect or even know for certain to exist but can't culture, let alone stain, which means we can't really study them.
That sounds pretty cool for a hobbyist to potentially spend time on. Anything you could recommend to look at, for following up on this unknown stuff?
There's already a whole world of terrestrial microbes that we expect or even know for certain to exist but can't culture, let alone stain, which means we can't really study them.
I'm going to bookmark this for the case someone asks: what piece of information that seems basic did you ignore until very recently?
A question that often arises is: if current life evolved from chemistry that's simpler than DNA, why has that one disappeared? Maybe it hasn't.
> A question that often arises is: if current life evolved from chemistry that's simpler than DNA, why has that one disappeared? Maybe it hasn't.
Probably for the same reason we don't see relay or valve based digital computers anymore. They were outcompeted to extinction by their more sophisticated descendants.
> A question that often arises is: if current life evolved from chemistry that's simpler than DNA, why has that one disappeared? Maybe it hasn't.
The general thinking is that DNA evolved from RNA, which has certainly not dissappeared.
As to pre RNA chemistry, there is a good chance that the relevent chemicals still exist and are well studied. The issue is more that we have not worked out the specific proccess that led to the development of abundant RNA.
There's already a whole world of terrestrial microbes that we expect or even know for certain to exist but can't culture, let alone stain, which means we can't really study them. We'd (theoretically) eventually notice them on electron microscopy slides though, which is how we know there's many unculturable microbes, but whether we'd recognize them as alien is a completely different matter. The microbial world is very diverse and there's nothing I can think of that'd set something apart as alien since we can analyze the chemistry with an electron microscope.