Cultural Anthropology - Patricia

Silicon 

      Silicon, one of the most common life forms in the universe by mass which makes up more than a fourth of the earths crust by mass and is almost the most abundant chemical element only second to oxygen, is one of the most important materials on the planet. It has been used by humans for a long time as some of the earliest human ancestors used silica flints for tools, and is still used in many products to this date! Silicon is very commonly used in the creation of alloys, dynamo and transformer plates, cosmetics, hair conditioners, solar cells, water proof sealants, and semiconductors.
     Carbon and silicon are chemical kin and are nearly identical so many chemical compounds made using one or the other are almost the exact same. However, of course there are some major difference between the two as well such as the fact that silicon is inorganic and is like the building block of information processing systems meanwhile carbon is completely organic and plays a major role in the metabolic processes of many lifeforms. The boundary between organic and inorganic has over time become more and more difficult to draw though. It got substantially more difficult to draw after geneticist Craig Venter created the first synthetic life form by building the genome of a bacterium from scratch then covering its DNA with watermarks to trace its descendants.
     In recent years the understanding of the origins of the four major biological domains of life; viruses, bacteria, archaea, and eukarya - what all fungi, plants, and animals are derived from. discoveries made people begin to look back on how different ways of life may exist on other planets and how chemically different they would all be. This is because with silicon we can begin to question alternative biochemistries that may be composed of a completely different chemical baseline for life. However, these different lifeforms may not have properties that can be observed and that would set them apart from inanimate matter. Popular science fiction and cosmology has questioned the potential of silicon-based life. Even without the chance that silicon-based lifeforms could exist elsewhere, humans are chemically bound with silicon, making us silicon life and lifeforms.

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