Carbon chauvinism

[2] Furthermore, the term is used by transhumanists to object to the commonly held view that life has an inherently higher moral value than hypothetical artificial consciousness.

[5] Like carbon, silicon can form four stable bonds with itself and other elements, and long chemical chains known as silane polymers, which are very similar to the hydrocarbons essential to life on Earth.

Silicon lacks an important property of carbon: single, double, and triple carbon-carbon bonds are all relatively stable.

Hydrocarbons and organic compounds are abundant in meteorites, comets, and interstellar clouds, while their silicon analogs have never been observed in nature.

They are both stable and abundant under terrestrial conditions, and have been proposed as a basis for a pre-organic form of evolution on Earth (see clay hypothesis).