In a noble attempt to catch up on the backlog of Scientific American magazines building up on my house, I came across an article from the December issue about searching for "alien" life here on Earth. The SciAm website has a slideshow with some beautiful and weird artist's conceptions of how these unusual microbes might look.
The idea is that if life is likely to come into existence given certain conditions, then it's possible it could have happened more than once on Earth. SciAm explores how there could be life that functions in biochemically different ways from our own:
Researchers have hypothesized that in alien organisms arsenic could successfully fill the biochemical role that phosphorus plays for known life-forms. Arsenic is poisonous to us because it mimics phosphorus so well; similarly, phosphorus would be poisonous to an arsenic-based organism.
Also interesting to consider is that if scientists were to discover a form of life on Earth that emerged independently from the rest of life as we know it, this would be a good indication in favor of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, as it would seem to be almost inevitable under certain circumstances.
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