For example, in 2006, researchers at University of Padua coupled together living brain cells and silicon circuits for the first time, opening new avenues for neurological bioengineering. In fact, diatoms are not alone in their silicon liveliness. Diatoms contribute in significant ways to the modern oceanic silicon cycle, as they are the source of most biological production. Diatoms are found in oceans, waterways, and soils everywhere in the world and are thought to generate 20 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, taking in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon each year from the moisture in which they live. In formulating this alternative chemical cosmology, perhaps Wells was not aware of diatoms, first categorized by Danish naturalist Otto Friedrich Müller in 1783, a class of Earth-bound and carbon-based photosynthesizing algae distinguished by having cellular walls composed of hydrated silicon dioxide. Wells wrote about his visions of silicon-aluminium organisms on other planets, wandering through atmospheres of gaseous sulphur and the shores of a sea of liquid iron. Popular science fiction and cosmology alike have speculated about the potentialities of silicon-based life. A big gap still exists within the life sciences attempts to come up with a theory of life that might involve other classes of carbon compounds, compounds of another element (such as silicon), or other solvents instead of water (such as ammonia or methane). Life forms with alternative biochemistries might not necessarily have observable properties that could distinguish them from inanimate matter. A definition of life that could guide the search for life outside Earth is also still very rudimentary. Life itself has morphed as living things are rearranged, simulated, and tampered with, "destabiliz any naturalistic or ontological foundation that life forms" (Helmreich 2011, 673). With silicon, we can speculate about alternative biochemistries of life-say, in alien extraterrestrial worlds-which could have a different chemical baseline for life. If life is ultimately always a “biochemical becoming,” as Hannah Landecker (2018) has suggested, where beings and entities are never fixed but rather in constant processes of change, perhaps then silicon is a valuable trope to further trouble humanist binaries and dogmas. These discoveries have renewed speculation on how alternative ways of life might arise on other planets and moons, and how chemically different such life might be. In recent years, biologists have renovated their understandings of the origin of the four major biological domains of life-viruses, bacteria, archaea, and eukarya-from which all microbes, fungi, plants, and animals are derived. whether its content is chemical or informational?” For Grosz, viruses of “both biological and silicon form” (45) are linked by their programming logic. Grosz (1998, 45) asks, does it matter whether viruses “are enacted in carbon or silicon-based form. There are remarkable parallels between biological and computer viruses in terms of how they self-replicate. But this blurring of the biotic and abiotic also finds precedent in the existence of self-reproducing organisms such as viruses. This blurring of boundaries reached new levels in 2010, when geneticist Craig Venter created the first synthetic life-form by building the genome of a bacterium from scratch and coating its DNA with watermarks to trace its descendants. The boundary between life and nonlife, the organic and the inorganic, has become increasingly difficult to draw. If carbon is the element of biotic life, now widely understood as “a metric of the human” (Whitington 2016), silicon is perhaps the element of machinic life the metric of the robotic, it is the building block of information processing systems. While silicon is inorganic, carbon is elemental of all known organic life-forms and plays a vital role in the metabolic processes of all of these life-forms they use carbon compounds for their metabolic and structural functions, to define and control their genetic code and form. But silicon and carbon have major differences too. They react and behave in similar ways, and many of the compounds created using carbon or silicon are almost identical. Two nonmetals, they are neighbours in the fourteenth series of the periodic table of chemical elements. Silicon and carbon, both abundant throughout the universe, are chemical kin.
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