Earth is teaming with life — and water makes it all possible. But elsewhere in the cosmos, life might be built from different chemicals that dissolve and assemble in some other liquid: perhaps methane, kerosene, or even chloroform. For now, it’s not feasible for humans to set foot on those worlds and see what’s there, but researchers are exploring some possibilities in labs here on Earth.

The idea of a strange parallel form of life, whose cells do the same basic things as ours using a completely different chemistry, isn’t new to science. Isaac Asimov first broached the subject in his 1962 essay “Not as We Know It: The Chemistry of Life.” And in 2004, the same year the Cassini spacecraft entered Saturn’s orbit, biochemist Steven Benner proposed in a paper in Current Opinion in Biological Chemistry that on a world like Saturn’s moon Titan, life might use liquid hydrocarbons as a solvent (a liquid that can dissolve other substances), the way water is used on Earth.

With new exoplanets joining the roster of known worlds every day, it’s likely that some of them have oceans (or at least warm puddles) of hexane, ethers, chloroform, or other exotic liquids that might serve as the basis for life as we don’t yet know it.

In such alien oceans, the chemistry of life on Earth just wouldn’t work. Water is a polar molecule; its oxygen end has a slight negative charge, while its hydrogen end has a slight positive charge. Those charges affect the kinds of chemical bonds that can happen in water. The structure of molecules like DNA and proteins depends on water’s polar hydrogen bonds.

Most hydrocarbons (compounds made of hydrogen and carbon, such as methane and ethane) are nonpolar — there’s no charge at either end of the molecule. So it’s impossible to form the same kinds of bonds in these chemicals as in water. That’s why if you want to create life in Titan’s methane lakes, you’re going to have use a different set of building blocks altogether.

Chemists and biologists from across the United States — led by organic chemist Paul Bracher at Saint Louis University and funded by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation — have formed a team to explore what the building blocks of truly alien life might be made of. Using computer simulations and hands-on lab work, they’re exploring how molecules bond in liquid hydrocarbons such as hexane, ethers, and chloroform. Their work falls right on the border between sciences, where chemistry becomes biology.

“It’s like trying to build a car in your backyard out of lawn mower parts, versus having the Maserati factory build a supercar. Life as we know it is the supercar, and we are trying to hack together something that looks like it, out of a different set of parts, to see what we can learn about putting it together,” says Chris Butch of the Earth Life Science Institute. Butch, a computational chemist, will use digital simulations to help understand the details of the chemistry his colleagues will observe in the lab.