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Life Confirmed At Extreme Depths
SEWilco writes "A few years ago the life forms around deep-ocean thermal vents were a surprise. Now ancient bacteria alive in rock 2 miles down have been found. The story is in the San Francisco Chronicle. It is also at Nature.Com, but that server is already rejecting connects. Other bacteria survived frozen in the pressures of an ocean 100 miles deep. This increases the known limits of where life can exist on any planet. Thomas Gold undoubtedly is not surprised at hot, deep bacteria living on hydrogen."
It is also at Nature.Com, but that server is already rejecting connects.
Life always finds a way to survive. Now, evolution has provided us with a website that can anticipate and avoid the slashdot effect.
"Other bacteria survived frozen in the pressures of an ocean 100 miles deep. "
Where on earth is there a 100 mile deep ocean? Is our atmosphere even 100 miles deep?
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
OK, before we all jump on that "ocean 100 miles deep" claim (as I was about to do), here's the actual quote from the article:
Other bacteria, frozen into chunks of ice in a Washington laboratory, have thrived inside a high-pressure container and went right on reproducing after they were exposed to pressures equivalent to life at the bottom of an ocean 100 miles deep.
So they aren't really claiming to have found oceans 100 miles deep.
OK, let me get this out right now: OK, we have life way way down in our earth. That only proves that life as we know it can exist in that extreme of an environment. Comparing that to other planet's life forms or using that as evidence to further any point of extra terrestrial life is very much redundant; life elsewhere could be (and probably is) completely different from ours. Maybe no DNA. maybe no amino acids. Maybe their amino acids are left handed, who knows. But point being: this proves nothing that wasn't proven to any thinking person before.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
No ocean is that deep! The deepest point is 11km.
"Life Confirmed At Extreme Depths"
For some reason I thought this story was going to be about Slashdot.
It's amazing how basic lifeforms can adapt and evolve to thier surroundings. There is also a small cave in the area around the arctic that scientists found that was esentially a bubble inside solid rock, it was found by accident.
It had inside it a small ecosystem with insect life that had evolved completely isolated from the outside world. None of the species had eyes because of the pitch black inside the bubble. Nor did they have any coloring at all, they were all translucent. Unfortunatly I only saw this on a documentry, but the transcript is online.
Link is hereBe you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Other bacteria survived frozen in the pressures of an ocean 100 miles deep
I was under the impression that the deepest part of the ocean, the Marianas trench in the Pacific ocean was 'only' 11033 metres below sea level; rougly 6-7 miles deep..Nowhere near the 100 miles in this writeup. Was this explained better in the nature.com article?
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
now maybe they'll find life on uranus...
ok, not funny, but it had to be said.
truly amazing. next thing you know, they will discover a silicon based life form (besides pamala anderson), and call in mulder and scully...wait...i already saw that episode...
-frozen
I'm not always the brightest pixel in the stream
This means that life as we know it has an even greater potential to be living in some of the extreme enviornments found on nearby planets. Not so much a tie-in or comparison to possible life elsewhere in the universe as it is a statement that Earth life and life like it is proven to be this much more resilient.
No this isn't flamebait...
Humans (which I am one) tend to view the world through a very narrow perspective. We see things on the terms which we live within. Our existance is within a small thin band of possible environments.
I mean does anyone seriously think that all that oil in the ground came from prehistoric vegetation?? This rock we call home is literally infested with life to the core (well to the mantle atleast).
With this new realization, is there any doubt that there exists life on other planets?
--
But honestly... Why does anyone really care?
I am alive in the piles miles and miles deep of dirty clothes and dishes in my room...
Was talking about life being found at /.
Then I realized they weren't talking about depths of depravity...oh well.
As alluded to in Thomas Gold's report from 1992, bacteria are very commonly found at extreme depths in the earth, by oil drilling operations. As has been the case for several years.
I think the most news worth portion of this article is the fact that this guy has acquired a multimillion dollar NASA grant, not that he has found anything new.
Who's the guy that had the theory that oil in the ground is NOT old dinosaurs, but actually bacteria in the hot ground? And that we will never run out of oil because it will replenish itself?
I would imagine that theory gets some boosting from this.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Reminds me of Arthur J. Clarke's "2010", where he introduces life forms, by far more complex than bacteria, living far below the eternal ice of Jupiter's moon Europa. These creatures thrive near volcanic fissures that provide the necessary warmth. And their metabolism is sulfur-based, if I recall correctly. Which leads me to a question for the microbiologists here: does sulfur-based life exist on earth? Do these deep-sea bacteria have a sulfur-based metabolism, or an oxigen-based one like us?
American Geophysical Union Meeting,
San Francisco, December, 2002
Goldmine yields clues for life on Mars
Radioactive bacteria live deep in the Earth - and maybe elsewhere.
9 December 2002
TOM CLARKE
Mine dwelling bacteria may be similar to the first life on Earth
© GettyImages
There are tiny creatures living off radiation in ancient pockets of water several kilometres beneath the Earth's surface, say researchers.
The microbes seem to have been isolated for hundreds of millions of years. Similar conditions might exist beneath the surface of Mars.
"Anywhere you have a crust with uranium and water in it, you have the potential for life," microbiologist Tullis Onstott, of Princeton University, New Jersey, told this week's American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
As you go deeper, the chemicals essential for normal life - organic matter and oxygen - disappear. And you get crushed and cooked, as temperature and pressure rise.
Microbes have been found a kilometre or so beneath the Earth's surface before. But cost and contamination with shallower bugs have hindered scientists looking deeper for life.
Working with miners in the world's deepest holes - 3.5 kilometre-deep South African goldmines - Onstott and his colleagues found hot water rich in bacteria.
The water is loaded with dissolved hydrogen gas, at a concentration up to a hundred million times higher than normal. Radioactive isotopes in the water show that the gas could only have formed by radioactive energy from surrounding uranium deposits splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen, argues Onstott.
Researchers had speculated that bacteria might make hydrogen in this way, but it has never been seen before. "It's a completely novel system for supporting life," says John Baross, who studies deep-sea bacteria at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The mine-dwelling bacteria are hard to grow in the lab. Genetic evidence suggests that some of the microbes are related to a species called Pyrococcus abyssi, which lives in hot, deep-sea vents.
These bacteria are thought to be similar to the first life on Earth. They use hydrogen and sulphur to survive without oxygen.
Other genetic sequences of microbes in the mine water are unlike those of any other species. Onstott says that he would not be surprised if the mine contained new species with new types of metabolism.
Radioactive dating by Onstott's colleagues suggests that some pockets of mine water have been isolated for several hundred million years. "The dinosaurs came and went while this water has been down there," he says.
If the microbes can be grown and their workings probed, they should provide new insights into primitive life, Baross adds.
Missions to Mars could look for life by sniffing for hydrogen seeping up from deep in the planet's crust, says Onstott. Mars has some water and uranium, although less than Earth.
© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002
What's really important about this discover is that it extends the boundaries in which we know life can exist, not just on Earth, but throughout the universe. If a microbe can live in boiling hot temperatures in complete darkness with nothing to eat but sulphur, then all of a sudden life on Mars or Europa seems all the more plausible.
Didn't they make a movie (or ten, plus a few X-Files episodes) about this:
The food supply is so sparse that the bugs reproduce maybe only once in a thousand, or perhaps even a million years. That means organisms the scientists are seeing today have had little opportunity to change since the earliest history of life on earth.
Allow me to be the first to put a paranoid spin on the whole issue... where a microbe has lain nearly dormant for 65 million years, living on the odd hydrogen atom, patiently waiting for its chance to do for humankind what it did for the dinosaurs. Nobody is safe this time!
Ok, now that I've exercised my paranoia... I'll calm myself with the knowledge that any bug that has evolved to metabolize the odd hydrogen atom would probably burn up (metabolically speaking) in a highly corrosive atmosphere, such as one containing a whopping 20% oxygen.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Could this be a landmark case of quantum theory manifesting itself in our macroscopic world? No, I'm not talking about the bacteria, let me quote from above:
> It is also at Nature.Com, but that server is already rejecting connects.
Effect preceeding Cause -- a server going down just *before* being Slashdotted. What's next, "first posts" before the topic is up? Stories repeated before they're posted in the first place? Dogs and cats living together?!
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
One species was the common Escherichia coli , well known as an inhabitant of the human gut
So these miners belch and then there was life.
vast quantities of salt water circulate through them at temperatures of about 135 degrees Fahrenheit. Since good old water is abundant, and in liquid form at that, this doesn't seem to apply to extraterrestrial life so much.
Frankly I'm not suprised that life exists down there, if bacteria can survive the cold, radioactive vacum of space for a bit it doesn't seem too much a stretch for them to live so deep in the earth; especially with good old water about.
but hey, if I discovered it I would be pretty excited. Also, a little bit disapointed that the bacteria was nothing more exotic than that one might find in the stomache of any one of us: something of a letdown.
All these years we've been on Earth, and still we humans don't quite understand all the details of marine life.
;-D
The articles featured by this Slashdot story focus on recent research that proves life exists many miles beneath the surface of the ocean.
Also, I just read an article over at CNN about how typhoons, while dangerous, are absolutely necessary to sustain marine life for undersea creatures.
The ocean truly is a beautiful work of science/art, even more so after each new discovery is uncovered.
Kudos to the marine biologists that every 7th grade student wants to be!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
10 goto school
20 learn something
Jules Verne wrote of life way beneath the surface of the Earth!!
Geez... some news flash... it's only 131 years late!
Great Breakdown of Chemosynthesis.
Quick image summary of chemosynthesis for the bored.
This reminds me of geeky factiod. Jules Verne wrote "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" but a league is about 3.45 miles, making the setting 69,000 nautical miles under the sea! "League" is inappropriate anyways, because ocean depth is measured differently than nautical distance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
Deadly microbe found in a ocean vent; said microbe that assimilates sulfur more rapidly than most things, screwing with human metabolism and killing the host. Humans attempt to nuke the vent. Chaos ensues.
Two fun books, really well written. Here's a link to an annoying, sound filled, book-specific site if you're really interested. Maelstrom to me is much more interesting...
These bacteria were actually found when they did the final commits for FreeBSD 5.0
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
While this is certainly interesting news, what practical applications could come of this? Why would it be beneficial to humans? What use, if any, can be found in the discovery of these critters??
-- George W. Bush: 1000x better than Clinton the Ass Clown.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Thomas Gold is my Step Grandfather...How cool for him to be mentioned here. He is one smart guy.
This work was done a couple of years ago - the Nature article is merely reporting on a meeting.
Don't believe the nonsense, unless you hear it from me directly.
Even if the oil is being created and is not a classic finite source, it is not being utilized in a proportion that any bacteria would be able to compete with.
In 1900, the world consumed less than a half million barrels of oil per day (each barrel contains 42 gallons), 80 percent supplied by the United States. By 2000, the world was consuming 67 million barrels per day, and the U.S. was producing only about one-tenth of the total -- less than half its own requirements.
Can you really expect that the consumption would ever be realistically matched by production? I would propose that even if this assumption of bacterial production is true, the rate of consumption is reckless.
Microbes thrive in the harshest environments Research findings give scientists hope of discovering life on planets
Scientists pondering the possibility of life on distant planets have discovered colonies of earthly microbes thriving in more extreme environments than any they have found before.
-- Bacteria are busily reproducing in the total darkness of water- bearing rocks 2 1/2 miles deep inside a South African gold mine, where the rocks themselves have apparently been isolated from the outside atmosphere for about 400 million years.
-- Other bacteria, frozen into chunks of ice in a Washington laboratory, have thrived inside a high-pressure container and went right on reproducing after they were exposed to pressures equivalent to life at the bottom of an ocean 100 miles deep.
The search for these hardy microbes on Earth -- known to science as "extremophiles" -- has been a high-priority project for NASA space planners, whose unmanned planetary probes have already been seeking evidence of life on Mars as well as Europa and other ice-covered moons of Jupiter.
DEEP PROBE
And the NASA spacecraft called Cassini, now on its way to explore the ringed planet Saturn, will be sending a probe deep beneath the thick atmosphere of Titan, one of Saturn's major satellites, to learn whether some form of life -- or at least life's essential chemicals -- might lie on that mystery moon's surface.
Scientists have long been wondering just what kind of life they might expect and what kind of unearthly conditions such living organisms might be able to withstand.
Until now, researchers in NASA's Astrobiology Institute, whose headquarters are at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, and also at the nearby independent SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute have speculated, theorized and experimented with various concepts for life in extreme environments.
Other scientists have already found microbes thriving in deep mines, in the boiling waters of Yellowstone's geysers, in the sub-zero dry valleys of Antarctica, in the saltiest of brines and the driest of deserts far from any water at all.
At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week, where nearly 10,000 scientists have gathered to report research in every discipline from space physics to seismology to oceanography, some of the scientists were reporting on the possible conditions for life in outer space.
BACTERIA IN DEEPEST MINES
Tullis C. Onstott , a Princeton University geologist reported on the international team that found the bacteria living in the bottom of the deepest gold mines in South Africa.
The mines' rock formations, Onstott said, are about 2.7 million years old, and vast quantities of salt water circulate through them at temperatures of about 135 degrees Fahrenheit.
The scientists drilled boreholes into the blackness of fracture zones in the rocks at the bottom of those mines to obtain more than 100 samples of water and gas, and they found bacteria there thriving on enormous concentrations of hydrogen that provided them with energy for growth, Onstott said.
In another report from the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, Anurag Sharma described the "interesting effects on cellular physiology" that he and his colleagues at the institute observed during their experiments with two species of bacteria under high pressure.
INHABITANT OF HUMAN GUT
One species was the common Escherichia coli , well known as an inhabitant of the human gut, and the other was Shewanella oneidensis, which the Department of Energy hopes to use in its efforts to clean up uranium from contaminated wastes at the old World War II Hanford reactor sites in Washington state.
Both species, Sharma said, were exposed to extremely high pressures inside the water cores of ice blocks and continued healthily reproducing after the ice was thawed and the pressure was reduced to normal.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
Iron sulfate? if so then mabye that scientist was right about the origin of life.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
...and researchers for the Bush White House have determined that in such an event, the American economy will be able to withstand and recover from such an event ; ) . There has actually been "serious" research on how the American economy will react to climate changes predicted by some models of "Global Warming" So buy some sunscreen and smile, America!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
Yes, there is still plenty of doubt. Nothing about this suggests an extraterestrial origin of any life that has been found. We just don't know if there was some unique accident that started it all, or if the earth was infected from an outside source.
It is an interesting data point, and it certainly is suggestive, particularly if we don't find any variety of simple life forms in any of the "extreme" environments in the solar system. Logically, the emergence of life is a pretty amazing thing, and I wouldn't believe it was even possible if we, ourselves, were not an existence proof.
On the level of pure speculation, it seems awefully strange for the origin of life to be a unique event in the universe, so either we are not alone, or there is some sort of multi-worlds thing going on and we are in one of the lucky worlds where life got started.
Of course, the other problem in trying to meet the neighbors is that they might be so out of scale with us that we wouldn't know they exist even of we overlapped in physical range.
It's worth remembering that most of Earth's life mass lives below its surface, not on top of it surface like trees, birds, fish, and people -- all of it in the cracks of rocks.
Think about that...
Remember, we made a movie about them called "Abyss" Will they come up and glow for us after trying to wash us off the face of the Earth?
.sig: It's what's for dinner.
Very nicely done -- a Soviet Russia troll AND a goatse link in the same post! I congratulate you, sir.
At this point, it seems pretty clear that life is a pretty common phenomenon. The only ingredients that are seemingly necessary are water, and carbon. These are ingredients that are spread throughout the universe in vast quantities.
Some day soon, they will finally find bacteria on someplace like europa and we can put to rest any question that there is life out there. The conditions needed to support basic life are pretty minimal. The basic requirements for intellgient life are an entirely different matter. Can a civilization be built around hot thermal vents or two miles deep in ice?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Human beings seem to be hung on the idea that living in high pressure environments is an amazing thing simply because we can not do it.
Human life depends heavily on gaseous exchanges, which behave differently at different pressures. Since liquids and solids are hardly compressible, it seems like a no-brainer that organisms that do not rely on gaseous exchanges can reamin intact perfectly well in extremely high pressures.
I would have been more surprised if they had been destroyed.
Anybody remember reading about a theory that our oil is actually being produced by deep bacterica instead of the traditional theory about it being the result of decayed organic matter from the jurassic?
I think the main point is that life in general isn't as inherantly fragile as we may have thought.
But off the subject, it's entirely possible and IMHO relatively likely for there to exist somewhere a very basic alien life form which is quite similar to our basic life forms. All of the chemicals found on earth are found elsewhere, and could quite possibly come together in a similar way. Especially when you consider the incredible variety of life, even single celled organisms. And if you add in things like viri, and even simpler things like Mad Cow Disease, the number of different types of simple life forms found here on earth is pretty big.
But I honestly think it probably is more likely that any life we discover out there is probably radically different from the life found on Earth, to the point where we may not even recognize it as life.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Ok, that was bad.
The oil they're pushing up at us is part of a deliberate plot.
With an infinite supply of oil, we'll soon burn out way into a cataclysmic Greenhouse Effect that will turn the Earth into a moist version of Venus, allowing them to colonize the surface.
You've been warned!
Stefan
Oil is basicly hydrogen and carbon combined (hydrocarbons). They would need a supply of carbon, and the abillity to make it. If this is possible, then we could use them to MAKE OIL (and have a revoloution in fuel technology)
[i]by bpd1069 (57573) on Monday December 09, @06:13PM (#4848320)
No this isn't flamebait...
Humans (which I am one) tend to view the world through a very narrow perspective. We see things on the terms which we live within. Our existance is within a small thin band of possible environments.[/i]
The people who "tend" to view the world through a very narrow perspective are the ones who are in charge of our research programs and educational facilites. The kind of people who impose restrictions[add your own word] on other researchers discount these peoples theories on a whim or simply because they don't beleive or have any faith/foresight.
I have an outlook on life where anything is possible including stupid discounted things like time travel or fucking warp speed. If we were to start discouting anything without proof or because of absence of proof then we would therefore be cutting off our own avenues of research and knowledge.
We have barely begun to explore and research this planet yet the people at the top stop non mainstream forms of research because of what they believe. We are but children... but children should never stop learning otherwise they wouldn't grow.
Sorry if i don't make much sense but hopefully somebody understands me and can agree.
In Soviet Russia, funny fifteen years ago stopped being this joke!!!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Whoa there. Yes it was groundbreaking in the 70's. This has been a standard in Oceanographic texts since before I started. Sure its deeper than expected, but the overall picture is an extension of existing theory, not something new. And as far as farming... Hydrogen sulfide is poisonous and the vent temperatures are hot enough to melt the first thermometers used to measure them, so its not as easy as potatoes. And I would have to look at the bacterial production rates again, but I would guess that the entire global vent systems would not support much of a human population, let alone its appetite.
This is probably a result of contamination occurring within the experiment . . . I mean bacteria are everywhere and very resilent, resistent to heat, various poisons, and can even survive 2 miles under the ground . . . oh, wait.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
This is another argument in favor of extra-terrestrial life. IMHO, it is very likely there's life out there. However, it could be so radically different than ours that not only it would be pretty much impossible for "us" to communicate with "them", but also we wouldn't even recognize each other as life!
"Houston, we are landing on big rock number one, as planned... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... contact."
(Days later)
"Ok, Houston, we are ready to depart. Our tests show no signs of life. We are coming back."
(One hundred years later)
"Ouch! Mom, I think something just scratched my back."
(Two hundres years later)
"Hmm, I don't see anything. You've probably just imagined it. Come on dear, it's time for your nap. I'll wake you up in 360 millenia, when dinner is ready."
/* TAANSTAFL */
>I would guess that the entire global vent systems would not support much of a human population, let alone its appetite.
not to mention that food made of processed sulfur-eating bacteria would probably taste like shit.
On the Jerry Springer Show, life was confirmed at extreme shallows.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
The idea of self-regenerating oil fields has a much more easy-to-comprehend parallel: the aquifers in West Texas. Nobody doubts that the Edwards Aquifer is self-regenerating. Unfortunately, its source of recharge is the parched Texas Panhandle, and the rate of recharge is far below the rate of usage.
T. Boone Pickens (yes, the famous oilman, corporate raider, and greenmailer from the '80s) is taking a cue from his fossil fuel days, and is now entering the fossil water business. His plan is to tap the water under the Panhandle for use by big, thirsty Texas cities like Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio. Nobody's buying his water yet... but that's what they probably said 150 years ago when some guys in Pennsylvania figured out how to get that black, gooey stuff out of the ground.
(obligatory on-topic note: there probably used to be some really interesting microbes in the Edwards Aquifer before we started pushing rusty pipes into it...)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Actually, there are a lot of microbes that EAT oil. This is a real problem for diesels and other heavy fuel engines. Most truck stops sell microbicide fuel additives.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Now if I could just patent a strain of bacteria :-)
which could generate methane from carbonate rocks
Pressure effects are not just seen in gaseous exchanges, but with gaseous cavities. Boyles law gives us the volume reduction with pressure of an ideal gas, and that is what makes scuba diving so difficult for humans. Fish use a gas bladder to regulate boyancy, which is why deep species often burst when you catch them and haul them to the surface. Bacteria or any other species (including fish using gaseous exchange) generally don't have problems with deep sea pressures. The problems mostly come with the change in pressure, not the steady application of it over time. That is adapted to.
It seems like people aren't really differentiating between two different lines of research going on here. I was actually at the AGU session where this research was presented, so I know. One involved finding bacteria at extreme depths in SA gold mines, which is being discussed a lot. In the other one, scientists working in a lab squeezed bacteria between two diamonds until the pressure was extremely high--almost three times as high as the pressure needed to turn liquid water into ice. However, in cracks in this ice a significant number of bacteria survived. In my opinion, this is particularly interesting with regards to extraterrestrial life as any environment on Mars, Europa, or Titan (the three likeliest candidates for life in our solar system) where life could be fould would probably be both icy and high-pressure.
The theory referred to in the earlier message probably refers to the Anhydride Theory of C. Warren Hunt (google link). His theory is that there are subterranian bacteria that get their energy by stripping hydrogen off of methane (which is common in the earth's interior). The resulting anhydride is a bacterial waste product that eventually becomes oil. If this theory is valid, then that means all of our oil reserves are probably a renewable resource.
There must be a way of testing this hypothesis. Perhaps isotopically?
And once you have Synthetic Fossil Fuels, you're almost ready to get Air Power, and then you can really kick the other factions' asses.
Bush just gave Military another pay raise. The man putting more money in my pocket certainly doesn't constitute an "evil fuck".
/. please use a pinch of intelligence and a dash of common sense. That is the recipe for success, which you obviously haven't discovered yet.
I can see that you're clearly a miserable little man who has nothing better to do than blame your problems on those above you.
I know this is asking a lot here, but next time you post on
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
i just do -1 nested and search for russia. much funier that way.
I've had something living in my colon since the Johnson administration - and I've had something living in my Johnson since the Colon administration
Human life depends heavily on gaseous exchanges, which behave differently at different pressures. Since liquids and solids are hardly compressible, it seems like a no-brainer that organisms that do not rely on gaseous exchanges can reamin intact perfectly well in extremely high pressures.
I would have been more surprised if they had been destroyed.
Here's a surprise then, gas exchange is not the only process affected. One effect is that the equilibrium states of chemical reactions which alter pressure are affected (A consequence of Le Chatelier's principle). Another is that the solvent properties of water are subtly affected, causing some proteins to denature.
In fact, the effect is pronounced enough that it can be used commercially to perform pasturization (both with and without heat). Here's a link to a company called Avure which offers High Pressure Pasturization equipment.
How did it get there?
Soylent Green is people! It's people! *sobs*
But then I realized they were talking about the ocean instead of the RIAA. :( Figures.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
From http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/Life.html
All of biology is just a device for degrading energy available from chemical sources, and on the surface from the great temperature differential between the hot surface of the Sun and the cold of space. Perhaps biology is just a branch of thermodynamics, and there is no sudden beginning of life, but a gradual systematic development towards more and more efficient ways of degrading energy.
Of course, this implies that humans and our activities are a part of nature--which flys in the face of most modern day "environmentalists"
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
> Bush just gave Military another pay raise. The man putting more money in my pocket certainly doesn't constitute an "evil fuck".
For some reason, this comes to mind:
A government which robs Peter (extortion=taxes=etc) to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
--George Bernard Shaw
That's wonderful if you're military, but how about everybody else? Remember, money doesn't come out of thin air. If Bush gives you money that means that less is available for somebody else.
IMHO it'd be much better if Bush stopped wasting so much money on war and gave all that to education. It seems America seriously lacks people who can see farther than their nose.
This provides evidence that Oil supplies may be able to 'recharge' as per some theories of subterranean life.
In other words, if this turns out to be wide-spread, and some other theories are also proven true, it means we won't run out of Oil. You don't think that's an important question?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Many will argue that even though bacteria are found living at great depths, life had to originate in the shallows of Earth's oceans where chemicals in the ocean could react with the atmosphere.
This theory is being contested, as described in this article, which claims that life may have first arisen in the depths of the ocean, sheltered in a pre-cellular state inside of iron sulphide pockets. Since life can survive beneath the surface, and if it can arise without the need for an atmosphere, then it might indeed exist almost anywhere that liquid water is present.
Relevant quote from the article:
Other bacteria, frozen into chunks of ice in a Washington laboratory...
Are they referring to your cousins?
Haha, what a fucking loser. Can't you see that you got trolled? Hahaha, I can't believe you fell for that! Why only a complete Web Newbie or a moron would respond to something that was so obviously a troll, boy do you suck.
Serioulsy, Get a life, d00d.
I mean look around you, how many people would waste their time responding to an AC post that was so obviously meant to attract incensed responses. Who could possibly be so stupid. Who could possibly not see that... oops.
SEWilco writes:
"...hot, deep bacteria..."
This sounds suspiciously like some of the bizarre porn spam I get...
My
Limekiller
SEWilco writes:
"It is also at Nature.Com, but that server is already rejecting connects."
The Slashdot Effect is several years old now. It's about !@#$ing time they started to learn how to dive for cover!
My
Limekiller
If you think about it, bacteria living outside thermal vents deep under the ocean make perfect sense. While they have 2 strikes against them: The heat and the pressure, they have some obvious advantages: they have a chemical fountain keeping them warm and giving them minerals, and since the water is so dense it is simple to defuse O2 by simple passive transport. So it makes a lot of sense that bacteria would grow here. The thing is the situation on Mars is a lot less agressive than where these little deep bacteria formed, so I'm suprised that life has yet to be discovered there. Oh well, they have yet to investigate the polar ice caps.
Important in what sense?
Firstly, even an ELE wouldn't blot out the sun COMPLETELY. Secondly, it would only do so for a relatively short period of time - after a century at most, photodensity at the equator would be up to 50% of present levels (enough to farm algae.)
Now, it is true that these chemosynthetic bacteria are a sustainable source of calories, and probably convert geothermal energy (which is where the chemicals they eat come from, in an eventual sense) to sugar at a more efficient rate than a geothermal powerplant could. So, if the earth were ripped from the sun, you might be reduced to this as an option.
However, the industrial costs to recover the buggers would be fucking immense! The technology required simply to break even on drilling up all that rock - I don't want to go there. The geysers at yellowstone don't produce surplus calories to feed very many people.
We'd be better off stockpiling glucose, or making it chemically from energy produced by nuclear / petrochemical reactors.
Secondly, in either event, write off 99.95% of the human race. Waive, chilren.
In the event of an ELE, the remnant of the human race can live on stored food, or on truly synthetic nutrients (eating electricity is what this amounts too) until the particulate level drops enough to begin farming again, less than a century if you're willing to live on strained algae.
In the event of a nuclear winter, same story except your "farms" have to be enclosed to prevent the crops from being irradiated, and they have to be on land. If the rest of the world is tenderly merciful with Australia you might be able to grow food outdoors pretty quickly, mate.
Sundry #1)
Most of these bacteria are archaebacteria. They come from the SAME great lineage of life (there are two - archaea and eubacteria) as we do, or at least as our cellular DNA. These deep dwelling bacteria are more closely related to you or I than they are to the bacteria with which most of us are familiar in our day to day lives. That's not very close - still about a billion years, give or take.
Sundry #2)
This means that although these bacteria dwell deep beneath the earth, and may very well out-mass all terrestrial life, they are DESCENDED from shallow-water dwelling organisms, just like we are. Life could adapt and survive beneath the crust of IO, but that does NOT mean that it could ARISE there.
Sundry #3)
The pressure-survivability of bacteria is a cute trick that should surprise no-one. Bacteria are just soap bubbles full of protein. Extremely TINY soap bubbles. There are three ways to kill them:
1) Pop the soap bubble. Heat can do this, or sound waves, but not pressure the likes of which can be found on earth; the soap bubble is elastic. This doesn't mean the bacteria can BREED under very high pressures (though some can) merely that high pressure won't kill them.
2) Crunch up the protein. Proteins are just chemicals, so again, heat can destroy them, but pressure can't; extremely high pressure might cause lethal aggregation of proteins but evidently it doesn't. Enough TIME will ruin the proteins.
3) Crunch up the DNA. Heat, not pressure! Vibration can do this as well. Mostly, time can be a culprit here.
So, a bacteria might survive the high pressures of being embedded inside a piece of precambrian rock, unable to reproduce. However, TIME, by way of random chemical events, would destroy the DNA inside the bacteria.
The DNA inside of any bacteria able to reproduce is maintained by evolution - but that which maintains it also changes it.
The upshot - it is impossible to recover DNA from an organism that lived millions of years ago. Sorry.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Bush just gave Military another pay raise. The man putting more money in my pocket certainly doesn't constitute an "evil fuck".
I'm sure hitler gave the military lots of pay rases. But he was still an evil fuck.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
100 miles? how much is that in meters?
And if we want more aerobic-breathing bacteria ... just pump air as far down as we can and let it trickle up. There's A LOT of volume between the surface and "2 miles down". But we'll add another mile to the surface with the environmental impact statement.
(Do we cook something that lives in hot water, or make chilled dishes?)
Does the chip in your head hurt when you talk?
to where on earth that 500,000 foot deep part of the ocean can be found? I know that there are scads of cartographers and oceanologists who would be interested.
... it's *your* tax dollars paying for the research, after all!
Let's see, life that never sees the sun, never takes a shower, exists without any contact with the surface world...
/.
I'll bet you 2:1 that it's probably already maxed out it's karma on
(Probably has more accepted posts than me, too.)
-Styopa
Does your head echo inside when you talk? It should.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I suppose you also think GWB killed off the dinosaurs and is responsible for global warming and floods and famines.
Thank you for posting! You've just demonstrated what a moron you are! Congrats!
BTW, you may wish to learn to spell simple english words before you post. Oops... sorry... I forgot that you are a moron.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Arthur C. Clarke has been writing about these for about 30 years now.....
Karma: Bad (but who really cares anyway?)
Anyone who thinks that there isn't life elsewhere in this solr system certainly has their head up their ass.
Why must see these boring scientific studies, 100 miles deep of water pressure isn't exactly a harsh or hostile environment.
Let's look for life in much more hostile environments, like what's left of Michael "King Of Pop" Jackson's nose, Dr. Phil's talk show, or even in the craggy depths of George W. Bush's skull.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Oliver North in the basement of the White House. QED.
You mean, as in recharge over thousdand, say , millions of year ? Surely. Recharge over 10 years [economic lifetime interrest] ? Seeing the process and quantity involved , I think you better fund such a claim.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They're called lawyers :-)
I've never heard of Thomas Gold, but I dig the retro HTML aesthetics. Very nice, very easy to read.
That comment would be less (more?) funny if it weren't for the fact that almost complete reversals and alterations of atmospheric content have taken place before ;-)
We can only survive now because photosynthesis so polluted the air with oxygen hundreds of millions of years ago, undoubtedly slaughtering countless species of slow-growing chemosynthetic critters.
finding bacteria in your beowulf ...
sorry
Ken Macleod's excellent 'Engines of Light' series actually has a role for crustal bacteria as a living organism - Gaia if you will. Excellent books - the last in the trilogy has just come out in hardback. The hero's are deepest red communists though so might be a bit challenging to those of you in the colonies.
0 67 9/qid=1039511654/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3_3/026-5377380-4 269214
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/184149
Reminds me of a short story by Roger Zelazny (RIP)...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Why the obsession with outer space and the masses of energy expended to get there...
When there's massive amounts of extreme environments unexplorer on our own planet which can turn out such wonders as our potential origins...
A map 100 years ago had vast regions not filled in because they had been unexplored. They are still largely unexplored, but now we have pictures of them from space, and I guess thats enough for the human being, so see them, rather than to have visited them...
I'm not just talking deepest africa, deepest oceanic crevices too. We're setting up permanent residence in a vacuum, why not in high pressure?
I'm only pointing out that putting more money in your pocket is not evidence of not being evil.
you may wish to learn to spell simple english words before you post
I really don't wish to. One thing you might wish to do is learn how to make a coherent logical argument, and avoid ad-hominm attacks. Calling someone a moron because they disagree with you is not an effective way to change peoples minds, and in general makes other people take your words in lower regard.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Another area for scientists to poke, prod, and pummel, extract lifeforms, genetically alter them, mix them with our DNA, mix them with mice and human DNA, clone them, bake them in bread, and add their distinct likeness to our own.
Sounds reasonable: all of ours but one are. That one was either right-handed or achiral, I can't remember which.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I just finished reading a book called _Starfish_ by Peter Watts, and for those interested, it's about a group of cybernetically modified folks who live at these depths tending to generating equipment that harvests energy from the thermal vents. (OK, it's more exciting than I make it out, but that's why I read instead of write, right?)
I'm now reading the sequel _Maelstrom_. I recommend both these books (tho I'm not quite through with the 2d yet).
In any event, the science in these books is very interesting and accurate AFAIK. A bit cyberpunk, a bit Jules Verne, all in all worth the read, IMHO.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
...Madonna Diagnosed With Yeast Infection
(Ah, well, I figured she was a pap star at best.)
At least ten years old. The earth is full of life. Life helps makes the rocks: limestone, iron deposits, most ore deposits, petroleum deposits.
I found the article to be more interesting by skimming it and taking parts out of context... the result I have entitled "My First Time":
Deep and dark and hot
Onstott has been researching deep subsurface microbes for the past six years...focusing on...drilling operations.
"It was one day, in and out," Onstott recalls. "I flew in and went down a hole. It was 'Don't step there, don't touch that.' All I knew was that it was deep and dark and hot."
On the plane home that night, Onstott didn't think about the discomfort or the danger. He worried about getting his sample to a lab quickly enough to find something useful. And he did: "a very interesting organism"
A healthy fear
"There was fear--a healthy fear--that was with me all the time." The temperature of the virgin rock is 140F. The tunnels stretch for miles from the main shaft.
"With this first round of samples," says Moser, "we learned a lot. But the next time we can do it better. It's a great adventure."
Yup. Look at one of Thomas Gold's articles, linked to in the Slashdot story, go to the bottom for a link up to his page with several of his papers. Several papers there show such tests.
In SoVIet RuSSia...
...words mispell you!
foe me, freak me.
You're right. I re-read the article and I missed the part of no oxigen. I assumed that the O2 was still part of the equation, and that the H2 was the energy source not the catalyst.
thanks.
But the comment I was referring to:
that the subterranean bacteria in question derive energy from chemicals (chemosynthesis) rather than from sunglight (photosynthesis). This discovery in itself was breathtaking
was worded incorectly. I was commenting more on the comparison of Chemo vs. Photo than the article.