What would a lifeform that spends its entire life in the vacuum of space be like?

It would have to be microscopically small since there's virtually no material in space to fuel their growth

What in the ever loving fuck are you trying to say?

Possibly, but you would expect its "mouth" to be much wider than its body, more like a funnel.

We can know one thing for sure, it still wouldn't be as big as your mom.

Improbable.

>What would a lifeform that spends its entire life in the vacuum of space be like?

I want to say the Aliens from Gunbuster if only because I don't know any better and I really like their design and it makes sense to me:
-I'm not expecting them to look like traditional animals or even just 'spaceships' since they wouldn't need to fly in and out of the atmosphere or other planets, so their shapes and forms would probably be pretty weird asymmetric, or even just a complete mess to our perspective.

-There's a near infinite supply of resources and energy sources within space, so I don't think it's a matter of 'what' they're eating or using, but more about how they're using the various: meteors, comets, solar energy, radiation, and those big pretty gas clouds. I remember thinking about how they might have a unique series of microbial life within their bodies and organs that individual break down and convert all these inorganic materials into useful food and energy. You know? Plant cells to convert light n' radiation as well as a number of other organic cells and microbes to convert and replicate synthetic kind of processes.

-While being a "living" satellite that lay dormant for decades while orbiting around maybe a planet or a sun picking up whatever scraps of space dust they can get inbetween larger objects is obviously extremely plausible.
If there is such thing as 'FTL' travel and it is even remotely possible: they'd evolve it, it'd be like eyes- once one organism had figured it out nobody else could afford not to have it given what an enormous advantage it would provide. I don't know how, I don't know how the science works, but I know life is PERSISTENT and CREATIVE and is constantly doing things we don't immediately understand, so I leave it in God's hands.

Someone call an ambulance, Gramps is having another stroke

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microscopic and non-sentient.

If it's even multicellular, probably a kind of plant that just hovers near a star until it dies.

It gets turned to Swiss cheese by space rocks flinging through it's body.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

The fuck is going to be out there for this creature to eat with that mouth? Nothing that's not dust traveling at Mach 20 at least.

"What's with the space whale threads this week? This isn't a topic I'd think would show up twice so close together. Was there a space whale in something recently?"

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Fuck off memescience retard

So whats that an INT or WIS roll you successfully passed to read that gibberish?

You shouldn't type with your toes man. Unhealthy habit.

>Gives a legit answer
>(You) REEEEEEEEEEE

Fucking cancer

Not a legit answer

water bears are real

Shit posting troll detected

If a creature could survive and replicate given only periodic collisions with hydrogen molecules it could probably survive and thrive in space.

If such a thing were to exist it would probably look very much like a plant with broad "leaves" for collecting hydrogen and radiation. It would demand an extremely long (billions of years) life cycle to collect enough carbon and other heavier elements to grow and reproduce.

They don't spend their entire lives in the vacuum of space.

That thing looks like it has a gun barrel for a face.

Check out the Siege Dragon, user. Very sex. Much boom.

It's outside layer would have to be resistant to cold, heat, air tight, and most likely crystalline (or able to become so) in order to avoid desiccation
It might need to be able to produce it's own food energy simply due to a lack of organic matter in space.

The issue with your mention of energy resources is you're not considering the spatial density of those things.

Given the absence of matter to repair and replace parts of itself, you're looking at proteins which have to exist in an incredible thermodynamic well, essentially undenaturable. In addition, radiation damage and mechanical damage like mentions need to be averted, so likely a phosphate or silicate basis to body components rather than our carbon basis.

So probably such a creature would require a metabolism that functions on a time scale more closely resembling geological time than our version of biological time, internal resource transport driven by capillary action and temperature gradients of perhaps only 0.1 K with the body at an average temperature of like 2 K.

Geniune Kek

They have multiple properties that make them able to survive nearly indefinitely in space albeit in a dormant form.

It's true a space them slower than some other organisms. It's still a dumb memescience answer. They can't eat or reproduce.

Yet they survive between your ears regardless.

OP wanted to know what a creature that could live in space MIGHT be like

Space has many different environmental factors antithetical to life

Tardigrades are the only known species to survive nearly any environment

They provide the only real life example we currently have even if they can't actually thrive in space

Connect the fucking dots, extrapolate from what information is provided like a functional adult

You know he's just gonna herp-a-derp about "reddit spacing", right?

Not sure if autism or bait

Waterbears are fucking meme tier trash.
youtube.com/watch?v=aMUvNWuSq6I

They'd have to eat or be resistant to radiation and other deadly space shit. They could eat dark matter if you want and have the equivalent of star trek shields tech but natural so they could look likle whatever you want them too. They could also have crystal solar paneltype wings to collect energy from stars with internal "batteries" that take a while to charge up but last a long time.

>callin someone else a retard while riding the short bus

Pointing out that tardigrades don't cover the criteria for the question isn't bait or autism, it's making good discussion.

This. Meme replies be damned.

>so likely a phosphate or silicate basis to body components rather than our carbon basis.
>So probably such a creature would require a metabolism that functions on a time scale more closely resembling geological time than our version of biological time, internal resource transport driven by capillary action and temperature gradients of perhaps only 0.1 K with the body at an average temperature of like 2 K.
When you get into that, you're basically saying planets are living. Wait? Would our planet be considered a living being? And we're just parasites living in it.

Zanza pls

>Would our planet be considered a living being? And we're just parasites living in it.

Yes. Absolutely.

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Tardigrades are not extremophiles and they cannot survive in space. They can persist in ridiculously harsh environments but they can't live them. They get launched into space they're still gonna die, it's just gonna take a really long time upwards of a decade potentially. A truly vacuum adapted lifeform would either be some form of well adapted single cell organism or something entirely alien to our understanding of life on Earth like silicon-based life.

What kind of mad fever dream birthed this?

It's almost magical, how much thought went into it.

>What kind of mad fever dream birthed this?
>It's almost magical, how much thought went into it.

You might be surprised to find out that the arguably most creative people are often wracked with mild to wild mental issues.

Insanity goes hand in hand with any meaningful depth of creativity.

The earth is a rock. It's not alive the things that live on it are though.

How is this Veeky Forums related?

Do you smell toast?

hmmmmmm tasty nothingness

How fucking isn't it, newfag? Did you only come here after 2009?

Laughing at the tier zoo fanbase itt
Think you're all so cool and hipster following a channel with 150k subs?
You know /an/ is going to start hating him now he's popular like they did to other /an/on youtube channels like trey

I seem to recall hearing about fungus growing on the outside of the Mir space station.

Not like any form of life as we currently know it.

>actually, the "vaccum" of space is filled with a thin gas of hydrogen, not to mention dust near star systems.

>filled

Yes, that still means that the vast majority of space is literally nothing.

actually, what isnt matter is dark matter and dark energy.

>shitposting written as two words
Get the fuck out, newfag. Jesus, lurk before posting.

That sounds interesting. Got any material for it?

And we can't interact with it.

lmgtfy.com/?q=fungus growing on the outside of the Mir space station

yeah, but maybe a lifeform that spends its entire life in the vacuum of space can which is the fucking point of this thread.

It would have to be entirely made out of it in order to interact with it.

I couldn't find anything saying that the mold was growing on the outside of the station. Most of the fungus was growing behind panels and secreting things like acetic acid that were messing up the structural integrity of the station and its electrical systems. I found the fact that there was a strong "mushroomey" odor sort of funny. Never knew that mold was that bad of a problem in space.

Looking for it seem it was in a rarely-accessed service panel not outside. science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/11may_locad3/ Sorry about that

We aren't talking about hard science in this thread and there is no proof that just because we can't interact with something right now doesn't mean we can't in the future. a hundred years ago, we couldn't fly, we went to the moon 50 years later. in a thousand years we might not be human.

It was growing everywhere. They first noticed it growing over a window according to rense.com/general8/mir.htm

It has rocks on it, but it definitely is not a rock. Entire planet is not lithosphere.

I'd just use unironic space whales, space shrimp, space squids and even small schools of space fish.

Hard sci-fi is fucking lame. Space whalers for life.

AH le good old redditourette epicness.
*tips his fedora*

We can pretty much make up whatever we wan't can't we?

I say it's a sassy colony of crystalline individuals, with a fetishistic interest in Earth's radio bubble.

We could fly a hundred years ago. We even used it to kill each other. That was 1917, user.

Perception

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
Why does everyone forget the interstellar and warm-hot intergalactic media exist?

I think it would be sponge-like

>all these anons trying to stroke their egos by being cynical """"""""skeptics"""""""" because that is what they think science is about

Listen up.

These creatures don't exist in a god damn metaphorical vacuum. If there is such a creature in your setting, then it means that there should be billions of species all of whom originate from its genesis event - be it natural accident, a science experiment, an attempt at breeding space-born beasts of burden. This means that there are space creatures suited for filling every imaginable kind of niche.

90% of them would probably have little or no brains who serve a similar function that plankton and plants serve on Earth. These space plankton would be living on asteroids, orbiting close to the sun, floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter and shit like that. They would be the ones who do the heavy work of turning useless space substances into useful things. Then the rest of the 10% would be the ones who can actually move and eat this space plankton to digest the plankton to get the delicious useful compounds out of them. They are essentially the Earth analogue of herbivores. Then maybe, if the population of natural flora&fauna is dense enough, there would be predator species who prey on these space herbivores.

>hurr what do they eat
durr how on earth do humans survive - they cannot eat nor digest any rock that is found on earth. Humans are clearly unrealistic brain farts of some weeb.

...

Sorry, this is a bit off topic, but humans are pretty fuckin' unrealistic.

>made by magic man in the sky
>evolved frontal lobe from apes
What is this fucking fanfic lore?

A wide majority of all members of this species will never have an original thought, they are classified as 'borderline sentient' as there are many documented cases of intelligence, but it seems the exception rather than the rule.

And yet they are potrayed as some sort of mary sue species. What is this bullshit?