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All life on Earth is based on DNA. If we ever find life on other worlds, are there viable alternatives for coding for life that it may be based on?

Mike Follows
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK

Life on our planet relies on carbon-based DNA. The panspermia hypothesis suggests that life could have originated in a different part of the universe and then been transported to Earth. In that case, the coding we see on Earth might be universal. However, while molecules like amino acids have been discovered in space, the extraterrestrial formation of complex molecules like DNA and…