Perhaps you’ve been privy to all the new information about how NASA announced that they’ve discovered a new type of bacteria on the planet we currently inhabit – right over there in Mono Lake, California. This newly discovered form of life swaps out the phosphorus in its DNA for arsenic, “or merely uses the poison in some way.” This discovery is the result of many months work by geomicrobilologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon who says this bacteria’s DNA is completely alien to what our understanding of life is today, and that this is the first form of life we know of to take on a form other than being built of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.

When pressed for an explanation of why they hadn’t “pulled a rabbit out of a hat” at the NASA press conference today revealing “little green men,” one of the researchers spoke up, saying that this discovery was right along the same lines as that, recalling an episode of Star Trek where the fun-lovin crew discovered a new form of life they same way they had. How exciting! Let’s talk about it.

You must be wondering what makes this super amazing beyond the fact that there’s a new way for life to exist: this finding provides a way for us to find life on planets that DO NOT have to be suitable for life in the way that we understand it to be limited to now. Captain Kirk and his intrepid crew found themselves in a similar situation in episode 25 of the original Star Trek teevee series.

The stardate was 3196.1, the episode title: The Devil in the Dark, the mission: investigate the deaths of 50 miners on colony planet Janus VI. Once down on the planet, Kirk, Spock, and whoever else happened to be standing around speak with the mine supervisor, a man who tells them about the terribly mysterious situation at hand. Spock, noticing a gigantic spherical object on the supervisors desk, asks about it, and is told that it’s one of thousands of silicon nodules found in a recently opened level of the mine. Spock, you ol’ devil you, you’ve got the key already and you don’t even know it.

Eventually the crew happen upon a creature, THE creature that’s been causing all of the deaths, a creature that’s alive and yet – what’s this? Is made of a form of silicon and secrets an acid strong enough to allow the creature to move through rock as easily as it would if it were water. Upon eventually moving in close enough to the creature to mind-meld with it, Spock finds that the creature gets more and more curious: it calls itself “Horta” and that every 50,000 years, the entire race of its kind die, leaving only one survivor to guard a cave of eggs which then hatch to recreate the Horta in full.

In this episode, Spock and then Captain Kirk in turn realize the importance of this particular life-form: one they’d never before known, one that broadened their horizons through its makeup alone. It could also basically talk and write letters with its acid secretions, but that’s beside the point.

How does this relate to what NASA announced today? It’s basically completely the same, can’t you see? We are all Kirk and Spock! We’ve discovered a brand new way for life to exist, outside of our known boundaries for what life is classified as, something completely new. Not only does this mean our eyes are open to this new combination of elements, but to the idea that our way of thinking about what life is might be mightily limited.

So you little rod-shaped extremophile bacterium from the family Halomonadaceae, you whose name is GFAJ-1, you, who when starved of phosphorus, is capable of incorporating arsenic into its makeup, you today changed the way we know the chemical makeup of living beings to be. Thank you for that, you, or whatever science fiction author in heaven sent that geomicrobiologist to Felisa Wolfe-Simon to Mono Lake, California, thank you.