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Iceland Discovery Promotes Martian Life Hypotheses
nusratt writes "This nature.com article reports research presented at the Bioastronomy 2004 conference in Reykjavik, Iceland. 'Scientists have discovered a community of bacteria living in the lake beneath an Icelandic glacier. The chilly world provides a model of Martian terrain and may boost speculation about the red planet's potential inhabitants. This is the first unequivocal example of life in a subglacial lake. The bacteria were definitely not introduced from above'."
I wonder if they read slashdot too....
This may be an ignorant comment, as I'm not really sure if they *do* make air-tight seals on spacecraft not carrying humans, but it seems as though nothing Nasa could do would be quite as effective as a few month ride through space with no possibility of nutrition followed by a real hot descent into an alien atmosphere with no water.
..... Nasa could do would be quite as effective as a few month ride through space with no possibility of nutrition followed by a real hot descent into an alien atmosphere with no water.....
No nutrition.. Check.
Lack of Air.. Check.
No water.. Check.
Extreme radiation.. Check.
Very high tempatures.. Check.
SOunds like certain eggs(cockroaches) and Botulism could get there. Both, I believe can survive all of those for a respectable amount of time.
Is the summary serious in the suggestion that these creatures are separately evolved from all the other species on Earth? A totally separate ecosystem with its own spontaneous life-forming process which created original strands of basic RNA/DNA/amino acids as occured for our ancestors in the primeval rock pools of Earth?
I somehow doubt it, for this would be a fairly phenominal discovery. In fact, if you RTFA, this isn't what's being suggested at all.
Until we find such an ecosystem, on Earth or elsewhere in the solar system, the probability of life begining on a world with suitable conditions is the most uncertain variable in the Drake equation. This discovery shows that life can survive in such an environment, but it does not show that it can arise.
what's this crap remark doing on it?
Oh.. I finally get to say it: RTFA! (I know, I know, I'm not new here.. but it's such an irresistable acronym) It's an overly dramatic way of saying that the bacteria found did actually exist underneath the glacier, and were not introduced by contamination of the samples. That's all, nothing to see here, move along. And, AFAIK, Lake Vostok has not been sampled yet.
karma capped
The same organism has to survive both the highest of temperatures and the lowest of temps (you don't get alot colder than space, or mars for that matter).
While there are organisms that can thrive in extreme temperatures, usually the same organism can't survive at both extremes.
During the Apollo 12 mission, they recovered material from the Surveyor 3 probe. Examination of one of the recovered pieces showed that microbes had survived for over two years on the moon.
While the moon doesn't have an atmosphere worth mentioning for heating the probe during descent, it does become boiling hot during the lunar day. And, considering that you'll want to protect many instruments from extremes of heat, it may actually stay much cooler than 'boiling' inside the probe during the landing.
You know, there's a diffrence between living in such a hostile
environment and evolving there. I hardly think the life living
under harsh conditions in iceland evolved there. It rather gradually adapted from things living under much 'friendlier' conditions.
Conditions that might never have been present at Mars, allowing life to
start at all.
In fact, the high temperatures on re-entry for meteorites are over-blown. Only the surface of the rock gets hot, the interior can still be very cold. Rock is a pretty good thermal insulator. Think about it. If you put a 5lb rock into a white hot oven - and took it out again 30 seconds later, the middle would still be cold. It doesn't take many seconds for something at 50 times the speed of sound to travel through a few miles of atmosphere.
Also the outer layers of the rock (which DO get hot) tend to boil away, carrying the heat away in just the way that the heat shields on spacecraft (other than the shuttle) are designed to do.
Critters riding (frozen) in the center of the rock might well thaw out quite gently long after they hit the ground.
Hence, a robust space travelling bug would only need to be able to recover from beeing deeply frozen - it wouldn't have to be able to cope with high temperatures at any point in its journey.
www.sjbaker.org
The team used a drill that fires near-boiling water to bore a hole through the glacier.
/. that spoke of the hesitance in probing an Antartic subglacial lake because they could not find a way of _not_ altering the environment and thus casting doubt on any results?
While they claim that the DNA print does not match bacteria from the snow above, is it not possible that the drilling equipment introduced organisms from elsewhere? Or was the drilling equipment (and "bucket") and near-boiling water sterilized prior to use?
And now that the lake has been penetrated, what faith can there be in any future sampling? Bearing in mind that the article is quite "light" on details, this just seemed a very ham-fisted operation. Was there not an earlier article on
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.