Carbon chauvinism is a relatively
new term meant to disparage the assumption that
extraterrestrial life will resemble life on Earth. In particular, it would be applied to those who assume that the molecules responsible for the chemical processes of life must be constructed primarily from
carbon.
[1] It suggests that, as carbon-based life forms who have never encountered
any life that has evolved outside the earth’s environment, human beings may find it difficult to envision
radically different biochemistries. The term was used as early as 1973, when Carl Sagan described it and other human chauvinisms that limit imagination of possible extraterrestrial life in his
Cosmic Connection.[2]In a 1999 Reason magazine article discussing the theory of a fine-tuned universe, Kenneth Silber quotes astrophysicist Victor J. Stenger using the term
There is no good reason, says Stenger, to "assume that there's only one kind of life possible" - we know far too little about life in our own universe, let alone "other" universes, to reach such a conclusion. Stenger denounces as "carbon chauvinism" the assumption that life requires carbon; other chemical elements, such as silicon, can also form molecules of considerable complexity. Indeed, Stenger ventures, it is "molecular chauvinism" to assume that molecules are required at all; in a universe with different properties, atomic nuclei or other structures might assemble in totally unfamiliar ways.[3]
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