Sara Seager and son challenge 'water chauvinism': sulfuric acid as alien life's solvent
_onionesque · x · 2026-11-11
Quanta editor Natalie Wolchover writes for the NYT 'Other Worlds' series about findings by planetary scientist Sara Seager and her son Max challenging 'water chauvinism' in astrobiology: sulfuric acid could serve as the solvent for an entirely different kind of extraterrestrial life.
The story began in summer 2020 when 17-year-old Max tested metals and ceramics in restricted 30-ml bottles of sulfuric acid on his front porch, to inform a potential Venus probe mission — Venus is shrouded in sulfuric acid clouds. Platinum held up well. The work grounds the hypothesis that life need not require water.
More from Research
- Immunologist uses Fable 5.2 to produce a stunning 8m40s T cell film end to end — DeryaTR_ · 2026-11-11
- 10 Frontier Models Tried to Drive a Surgical Robot; All 213 Success Claims Were Wrong — Exp_Mark · 2026-11-11
- Jon Finger: binary-operating coding models could be a video tokenization strategy — mrjonfinger · 2026-11-11
- SpliceCraft Launches a Free In-Terminal Plasmid Engineering Workbench — yawnxyz · 2026-11-11
- KITP Team Led by David Gross Releases Lean Formalization of Yang–Mills Existence Proof — danintheory · 2026-11-11
- pi-H3 generates video in 2–4 steps with no VAE decoder — 5s clip in 3.8s on one B200 — Apprehensive_Sky892 · 2026-11-11