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
human beings, as carbon-based life forms who have never encountered any life that has evolved outside the earth’s environment, 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
