http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

Holy awesome sauce. Also, it's made of arsenic.

And it's here on Earth. That's great! I'll be with friends when the conference happens but I'll be sure to read the articles!

Yeah, I'm happy that it actually is a new form of life that the conference is about. I'll avoid the obvious religious debate in this topic for now, but I imagine will get into it sooner rather than later. Gogogo NASA.

I don't see why this would fuel any religious debate (or at least add anything to it). There are basically three explanations:
1) Evolution is weird
2) It's from SPACE! (the coolest answer)
3) God did it. Isn't he clever.

Being made of arsenic doesn't really preclude any of those things; and really, this doesn't strengthen either side. And they aren't even mutually exclusive (life on another planet evolved to be made out of arsenic, and then it go here through transpermia, all of which could've been dictated by God).

And thus begins the debate.

Or, they bacteria could have lived near the lake and the only form of food was in that lake. In order to survive they had to change their DNA blocks to be based off of Arsenic, which that lake has high concentrations of.

It could also very well be an evolution at it's finest here on Earth.

Right, that's number 1 on the list. I still don't see a debate. Or, at least, I don't see how this in any way changes the debate.

No doubt this is the cause of a freak accident I will cause while working on my transporter technology in the future, and it travels back in time until a point that it will eventually negate our existance.

Or it is something epic cool that fell from space. :p

Can't wait to see/hear more about this.

Well, the whole fundamentalist "in God's image" thing might have a problem resolving arsenic-based life forms, no? I'm torn between being convinced this is not the right thread for this discussion, and knowing that it's inevitable. :S

We're made in God's image, not everything. This doesn't change that at all. And even if everything is, there are all sorts of differences between us and other species, this is just another one of those differences.

Cool. Can't wait to see what other discoveries come about from this revelation.

Or maybe this is all an April Fool's Day joke... FROOOM THE FUUUTUUUURE!!!

[edit]There is more to this than meets the eye. Methinks the latter of my post is correct >_>

[edit] c.f. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/02/mono-lake-bacteria-build-their-dna-using-arsenic-and-no-this-isnt-about-aliens/

Like Merth said, we are, not everything else, and we are hardly a physical likeness of God, a being so transcendent that He exists outside the physical universe. So I don't think chemical makeup has much relevance to that belief.

Also, just for the record you're much more likely to hear "in God's image" from anyone but fundamentalists. Any denomination with a message about social justice (Catholics, Quakers, Social Gospel/Mainline Protestants, Liberation Theologians, etc) will be big on that. Reformed/Calvinist traditions (most fundamentalists) not so much, because it doesn't play well with Total Depravity (point numero uno of TULIP).

I agree that it's meant to be a philosophical message, but I was (perhaps falsely?) under the impression that Fundamentalists took that to mean that God literally looks like us.

I suppose it's possible that some do (though I still don't see how that would impact their view of bacteria that aren't related to us), but I think you're confused over the details of one of their objections to evolution or theistic evolution. Namely, even if other lifeforms evolved, they think we must still have been created specially, because it seems bizarre that at some point God simply bestowed His likeness upon a group of hominids that were sufficiently advanced. I would actually tend to agree that this is a bizarre conception, which is why most people who accept theistic evolution don't claim to know how God went about making us in His likeness, or think it was an instantaneous event.

That's an excellent point. By the way, I've been reading a bit more on this, and I think some of the articles are overstating the find a bit. It's the same as current forms of phosphorus-DNA-centric life forms, but has been forced to adapt to thrive using arsenic in its place. It's not a completely separate evolutionary branch.

woo, arsenic organism! My life dream has become a reality!

Sarcasm much? I still want NASA to find extra-terrestrial life, even if it's just bacteria on Europa or Titan.

no, just a running joke with my friends on how I have tendencies to light food on fire (cooking accedent) (very complicated stuff, you had to be my friend for a few years to get it.)

This is awesome And I read an article saying that arsenic might very well be what aliens would be made of (if there are any).

Ironically, 2010: Odyssey II had a scene where an alien whale swallowed a human but died because of biochem differences. Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future yet again.

Citation needed. Can you give me a URL for that? It sounds hugely speculative to the point of indistinguishable from fiction at first thought.

Well, you can look back at any mixing of cultures throughout history where explorers or invaders brought diseases with them that killed the natives, flora and fauna that overwhelmed the native species, etc, and extrapolate from there, in my opinion,.

That was the first thing that came to my mind too.