In a recent article for Nautilus, Harvard physicist and cosmologist Lisa Randall speculates about what she calls “dark matter life.” Since dark matter is thought to constitute 85 percent of the mass in the universe, is it reasonable to imagine some kind of life based on this mysterious substance? Dark matter does not seem to interact with the stuff we are made of, but it might interact with itself, or at least some fraction of it might. If it does, what kinds of structures could it build? Could any of those structures constitute “life?”
Unfortunately, if dark matter life does exist, Randall says it would be incredibly difficult to detect. It would interact only very weakly with familiar matter, most likely by gravitational force, which is the weakest of all nature’s forces. In principle, it could exist right under our noses here on Earth, and we wouldn’t see it.
The idea of dark matter life, of course, is highly speculative. But the concept of a type of biology unknown to us, coexisting but not interacting with the familiar life on our planet, has been suggested previously by Carol Cleland and Shelley Copley. They proposed that a second type of life may exist on Earth that originated independently to form a “shadow biosphere” that is different biochemically from our own. Paul Davies and colleagues later elaborated on how such a shadow biosphere could be detected.
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