Is there any plausible way for dry-vacuum based biology to evolve?

Question

Basically instead of being what we would call wet nanotechnology which is what our biology could be described as, imagine if you will, organisms that evolved from 'dry nanotechnology' who are native to the void of space.

My idea being they evolved in an environment similar to Earth's moon.

The reasons why life evolved from water makes sense. Water is an amazing solvent and a medium by which elements are brewed and mixed together in a soup. Ammonia is also apparently another candidate, though it may have its issues.

However I wanted to know specifically if there's anyway such a form of life could evolve and maintain itself naturally with minimum intervention.

Answer 1

Unlikely, But

Dry nanotechnology needs to be highly complex right away to do anything useful, you essentially need mechanical fabrication at the atomic scale. Wet nanotechnology makes the whole bootstrapping process much easier by offering simple, useful ways to chemistry to happen and molecules to copy themselves so they can build up complexity. Overall it would seem unlikely to me.

However, there is an option for vacuum life. Let's say life evolved in the clouds of a gas giant. Big, flying whales, eating the gasses for sustenance. A species of those sky whales could evolve to go higher in the thinner regions of the atmosphere to avoid predators, which would eventually involve a lot of similar adaptations to survival in vacuum - the ability to retain moisture and prevent it from evaporating, the ability to not explode in low pressure, etc. They would also need to evolve jet propulsion to be able to fly high that high.

One such species might even evolve to briefly entirely jump out of the atmosphere to escape pursuit, completing the vacuum adaptation process. And it might also develop their former jet propulsion into rocket propulsion.

At that point, one such species of now space whales might eventually reach orbit and begin eating the various small asteroids and dust around their home planet.

Answer 2

How set are you on an environment that not only lacks free liquids, but is airless as well?

You might conceivably have life that arises in the absence of liquids by making use of chemical reactions on the surface of particles being transported by wind, but you've eliminated even that mechanism by asking for a moon-like vacuum environment. Your "vacuum life" would need to be sophisticated enough to move around under its own power to seek out energy and nutrients, meaning a very high degree of sophistication from the very start.

Apart from some initial weathering processes and the occasional impact or curious ape, the lunar soils stay basically static and unchanged for billions of years. There's no mechanism for transport of nutrients or spreading microscopic lifeforms to new environments, or really for any other sort of complex chemical activity that would lead to life.

In short, anything that might be called life that arises in that environment would be even less "as we know it" than dry mineral microbes...self-replicating patterns of electric charge or something that similarly doesn't even rely on collecting chemical nutrients.

Answer 3

Can it evolve?

Yes.

The problem is abiogenesis. It seems implausible that such life would arise spontaneously. But once it exists at all, it could absolutely evolve.

You just need some way to get it started. Consider the situation in Code of the Lifemaker: an alien von Neumann probe crashes and begins trying to replicate itself, but fails to reproduce accurately because it was damaged in the crash. A few million years later, you have a whole machine ecosystem of different types of machines that construct imperfect copies of themselves.

In your case, you just start with a smaller seed: not a macroscale von Neumann probe, but a stray nanomachine or population of nanomachines produced by some ancient alien civilization, which can then evolve just like primitive natural cells did to produce something that looks more like biology to us than the macroscopic machine ecosystem of Code of the Lifemaker does.