How Flexible is Life?

begin quote from October 2011 Popular Science article regarding arsenic based bacteria from Mono Lake in California:

"Wolf Simon started boosting the arsenic (to some of the bacteria samples from Mono Lake in California), wondering how much the bacteria could tolerate. As she steadily brought the level up, ultimately to 500,000 times the EPA regulated level for safe drinking water, she began wearing a second pair of gloves. She says that every day she entered the lab she expected to find the bacteria dead. But it continued to grow.

Thinking that the results might be an error, the team repeated the experiment multiple times. 'We were pretty self critical the entire time,' she says. But after six trials, GFAJ-1 seemed clearly able to survive and reproduce using arsenic instead of phosphorus. The question was: how? " end quote from Popular Science Magazine page 51 October 2011.

The implications of this experiment being replicated 6 times with the same results here on earth are really amazing. This makes one wonder what other bacteria or forms of life exist in extreme places here on earth in very cold or very warm drier places, in otherwords "What kinds of life exists here that we have simply not noticed yet here on earth for one reason or another. So, when scientists try to bury experiments like these it is like trying to bury neutrinos who travel faster than light. I personally have no doubt that science as we know it is still in its infancy in multiple directions both regarding life here on earth and beyond. It is important to not be so close minded that one cannot see how small our knowledge at present here on earth is. There was a Clint Eastwood saying that addresses this as Dirty Harry, "A Man's got to know his limitations".