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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.
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.
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!
Uh, RTFA?
-- 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.
Oh, right. Forgot that no one reads the article anymore...
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
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
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
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.
Humans (which I am one)
You KNOW you're hanging out at the wrong forum when someone has to preface their comment with THAT.
The complete write up is here. The Mariana Trench is a fairly large subduction feature; the Challenger Deep being the deepest point.
BTW, 35,813 / 5,280 = 6.7827 miles (which would be somewhat shy of 24).
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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.
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
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.
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.