Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Are humans considered carbon-based matter?

Yes--even the Borg are organic, and organic refers to carbon-based life forms.
The replicators are not carbon-based. They are sort of sentient machines that can duplicate themselves using the metal that they recover from various sources.

Why do you ask? There may be sentient life forms that have a different molecular composition such as silicon, but we haven't seen them yet. I am betting on panspermia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) in which organic matter [i.e., carbon compounds] originated on some other planet, became incorporated into cells and arrived here via a comet to seed our planet with primitive bacteria.

Sybee