Haha, not even close. Besides the obvious low pressure issues with surviving in a vacuum that cause the membrane to become permeable, "electricity" doesn't replace all metabolism for these organisms.
They still need a source of the common and rare elements required for life (CNOP + several metal cations), a pool of hydrogen, carbon electron donors, and water. Basically on par with stuff that most microbes are going to use.
They use electricity as their energy source, but they still need a source of matter from which to synthesize their biomass. Just like plants derive energy from light, but they still need to take up water and CO2 to synthesize glucose with that energy.
Separating the concept of an energy source from a source of biomass is difficult for us humans because everything we eat supplies both in roughly equal measure, but there are many examples of organisms that use different sources for their energy and their biomass.
That seems an unreasonably high bar though. I mean, photosynthesizing life "lives off the sun", but nobody challenges it by putting a tomato plant into a vacuum :p
> Thus far, whenever scientists search for these electron eaters in the right locations — places that have lots of minerals but not a lot of oxygen — they find them.
Sounds like they expect them to need some oxygen or other gasses.
Well your red blood cells, some retina and renal cells, and most cancerous cells also either thrive (or at least do much better) on fermentation aka non-respiration..
Imagine if we created an organism that could live in the vacuum of space as comfortable as being on the surface of a planet. It would revolutionize our ideas of space exploration and colonization.
Also, I imagine there's some skepticism here. If they lived in a vacuum that means there was nothing else they could live off and they truly are eating electricity. We also live in the age of "viral scholarship" where a lot of shoddy science gets paraded around for status seeking universities and researchers. Remember how skeptics of the FTL claim from those Italians were shot down on these forums and reddit? Skeptics shouldn't be automatically punished. If anything, we need skepticism more than ever.
