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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."
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.
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!
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?
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It's important to note btw, for those who haven't caught this detail, that the subterranean bacteria in question derive energy from chemicals (chemosynthesis) rather than from sunglight (photosynthesis). This discovery in itself was breathtaking, as it means that we might have a way of "farming" even if the sky is blotted out for years, i.e. nuclear winter or ELE (extinction event like comet impact).
Someone named an OS for me.
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.
the 20,000 leagues in the title refers to the HORIZONTAL distance travelled by the submarine while it was submerged. not the depth that the vessel was submerged to.
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.
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.
Does someone have a better understanding of this?
The image on bigelow.com calls C6H12O6 (glucose, dextrose, and fructose all have this composition) a carbohydrate for photosynthesis, but on the chemosynthesis side it calls CH2O (aka formaldehyde) a carbohydrate. Last I checked formaldehyde and glucose had very different effects on most life forms.
In a previous article, they said microorganisms could last up to a million years deep inside an asteroid.
Is it so hard to believe there's life at the bottom of the sea?