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Microbial Life Found In Trinidadian Hydrocarbon Lake
KentuckyFC writes "Pitch Lake is a poisonous, foul-smelling hell hole on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. It is filled with hot asphalt and bubbling with noxious hydrocarbon gases and carbon dioxide. Various scientists have suggested that it is the closest thing on Earth to the kind of hydrocarbon lakes they can see on Saturn's moon Titan. Now a group of researchers has discovered that the lake is teeming with microbial life which is thriving in the oxygen-free environment with very little water, eating hydrocarbons and respiring with metals. Gene sequence analysis indicates that these bugs are single-celled organisms such as archea and bacteria. The researchers say the discovery has exciting implications for the possibility of life on Titan. There is a growing sense that Titan has all the ingredients for life: thermodynamic disequilibrium, abundant carbon-containing molecules, and a fluid environment. There is also evidence that liquid water may not be as important for life as everybody has assumed, since some microorganisms can make their own water by chewing on various hydrocarbons. That may make Titan an even better place to look for life than previously thought."
they found life even there?? what's next, finding living organisms on C-SPAN?
weinersmith
More like a poisonous, foul smelling sea of organisms with some asphalt sprinkled on top.
This has a life density comparable to seawater.
To the best of my knowledge all life on earth (at least all life that has been investigated at the DNA/RNA level) seems to have considerable similarities, which implies a relationship, perhaps a common origin point.
I wonder. Will this life, which on the surface seems to be fairly different from most of what we know/understand as life will also have such similarities with life as we know it?
If it does, it seems to show a remarkable level of flexibility, beyond what many may have imagined. If not, that may even be more exciting as it may provide support for the idea that the creation of life may not be an exceedingly rare event.
"since some microorganisms can make their own water by chewing on various hydrocarbons"
It's a chicken-and-egg issue. Why should something evolve that can create something that it needs to exist in the first place? It doesn't seem to be very likely that something organism evolves out an environment without water, that later needs water. But, it may evolve from a wet environment to a state where it later no longer depends on pre-supplied water.
My mother-in-law is from Trinidad, this explains everything. I always thought there was something a little odd about the way she spent so much time filling up the petrol in the car. I thought that odd sulphurous smell was the cream she used for a skin condition.
And all along, she was just a hydrocarbon sucking pitch lake alien!
Wait wait wait. Just wait a second. Are you saying that Hell is in Trinidad and Tobago? I know of worse places that that.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
... why do you have to base it from whats abundantly around you in your tiny micro speckle of the universe and project it on everything?
You don't. However, if you're going to theorize life without this chemical that plays a crucial role in so many chemical processes that are used by life as we know it, and expect to be taken seriously, you need to find replacements that are likely to exist instead of water in there alien environments and will be able to serve in its stead, or you need to come up with replacement life processes.
Presumably, you've done neither... which would make your speculation on life without water about as scientific as speculating life based on fairy-dust.
Get back to us when you've worked out this possible alien biochemistry, then we can start seeing how viable it would be given the alien environments we might fight the building blocks for it, and how well it operates compared to the processes we know.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The whole problem about comparing this place to Titan is that Titan is extremely cold. Titan's got the materials (except for Nitrogen maybe?), for sure, but, it doesn't have the heat. Life is more of an energy problem than a materials problem. You need energy to roil things, to drive all those chemical reactions and to keep stirring the pot so evolution can take place. I would be more than willing to bet that you would find single cell life on Venus more than on Titan just because Venus has plenty of heat.
This is my sig.
it has everything to do with water's unquie properties. it's non corrosive, non reactive, is liquid at reasonible temperatues and is able to transport other elements without contamination.
life isn't going to exist at 1000c or -200c, and the mechanics of life ie. a fluid transport mechanism, won't work with solids.
if you can offer a viable alternative i'm all ears
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is a quote from a tourist some time before the article:
"Unlike a sterile and lifeless parking lot, you soon get a sense here that this lake is somehow alive. Roy said that a forty foot by forty foot hole completely fills itself in within 3 days."
"The lake is constantly pulling things into itself, almost like a slow motion black hole. It's supposed to have "feelers" stretching outward for several miles, additional veins of pitch which stretch out from the main lake."
"this photo of him peeling back the hardened skin of the lake."
"The lake seemed to me more than anything to be like a large creature with no face, only arms and guts in which it slowly swallowed everything around it."
"If it swallows some things, then it also spits others out"
"Here is some leaf litter from part of the forest floor which the lake swallowed, chewed around for a few years and then spat out as indigestible. These leaves were in perfect condition, but as dry as it's possible to imagine."
So it seems to be a living entity, demonstrably fussy, finding it a hard time getting a decent meal and likely depressed.
http://www.richard-seaman.com/Travel/TrinidadAndTobago/Trinidad/PitchLake/
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It still should be possible for life to emerge in a more "emergence-compatible" place like Earth (or some even suggest some comets, under specific circumstances), and then be carried to other planets by meteorites impacts, etc.
Imagine a meteorite hitting Earth and ejecting a small amount of tar-growing Titan-compatible bacteria : with an enormous amount of luck, a few surviving spores could end up landing mostly intact on a Titan-like planet.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
... as currently assumed by man. Why can't there exist something with simular properties?
There IS a projection though, regularly they find life in a place they did not anticipate. Sulfarlake caves without any sunlight or water? Yep, there's an abundance of life there too.
All the reasoning from on our little sphere and feable concepts mostly very limited to personal understanding and ability to absorb and conceptualize.
The thing which strikes me the most though it the common beginning, the "spark" to light it all up... For all I know or have been told or have read or have been taught, space around us is non-organic. Just a brude collection of basic elements in such a disposition they don't really interact all too much and it's sortof a boring thing, unless you have these massive forces working on eachother.
They've explored planets in our solarsystem, yet it's crudely sterile. Yet, on earth, there's this explosion of life which recurses to both ends (very tiny up to organized configurations building a greater organism) and with each interaction, we shed off some of this life (sweat, skin, hair, we drag around organic matter on our clothes, shoes, leave greasy spots with everything we touch [eg fingerprints], virusses, bacteria, spit, food, ... ).
Yet, when we shoot ourselves up in the sky a bit, sterile to such an extend we could infect it with our organic amusementparks we lug around discharging more organic life, jumping, falling and flying off of us just by literally being there, standing around.
To me, humanity or life isn't just a freak occurence, but maybe we're so poorly equipped and are standing like a mole who crawls up in the upper world and figure "wow, this fast empty vacuum isn't giving me any vibrations I can interprete, this must be the emptyness of space where all life stops to exist.", while if he would have eyes to see and brain to conceptualize, he'll think "fuck, this is awesome! WHAT IS ALL THIS STUFF!"
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Our (very) distant ancestors evolved and thrived in an enviroment without significant amounts of oxygen; heck, it was most likely a poison to them. But then a group dumping it in large amounts showed up, and the rest is history...
Now, it even seems it's quite possible that, what was once a dangerous byproduct, enabled explosion of life later on.
One that hath name thou can not otter
It is actually a tourist attraction.
Countries such as Germany mandate that their roads, the famous Autobahn, must constitute a certain percentage of pitch from Trinidad. The Asphalt from the pitch lake is internationally acclaimed for its high percentage of asphalt resins and world renowned for its quality.It is also the world's largest and most consistent deposit of natural asphalt.
It is used in New York's Kennedy and La Guardia airports,to line the George Washington Bridge,and as previously stated in the German Autobahn system to name a few.
In the face of all this the cavalier and in some sense derogatory terminology used by the poster is both unfortunate and inaccurate. One suspects the author has never actually visited the Pitch Lake in Trinidad. It doesn't smell, it is not filled with noxious fumes. The area is quite pleasant and forested.
The pitch lake represents a little understood and fascinating eco-system, and it's great that it is finally being researched. It is incredible when one imagines how much of our past can be found in its depths,claimed from the earth tens of thousands of years ago, resting somewhere within it.
-Gel214th
Wait wait wait. Just wait a second. Are you saying that Hell is in Trinidad and Tobago? I know of worse places that that.
You must work at the same place I do? Is that you Bob?
"Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago" There are two islands. Trinidad. and Tobago. And the country is Trinidad and Tobago. But its not just one island.
They don't drink but they do ingest water as a constituent of the solid foods they eat. Dessication works as a form of preservation or mummification precisely because practically nothing in nature will eat anything devoid of water.
Going back to the point, water-based life can only evolve in the presence of water. Water-based life faced with an scarcity of water may evolve the ability to synthesise its own water. It could then slowly adapt to survive in a complete absence of water. (Compare with trees, which produce oxygen from carbon-dioxide, but would die in an environment that was initially oxygen.)
If a lifeform evolved to exist on hydrocarbons alone, in the absence of water, then it would have developed an efficient way to do so at a primitive level. It is extremely unlike that a two-step process of creating water would be more efficient. In the long-term, yes, as it would allow Earth-like evolution, but the immediate-term disadvantage would lead to any such strains extinguishing themselves and not getting the chance to go beyond the single cell.
Unlike hot-vent extremophiles, it's hard to argue that these bacteria could be the source of life as they live in hydrocarbons, which are the result of a not-yet-fully-understood process involving dead organic matter.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Larry? You read slashdot?!?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I don't know what's more amazing - that you can post something that is so wrong, or the fact that someone modded you up.
the reason for us assuming the need for water has nothing to do with projecting our requirements on the rest of the universe.
This is hilarious - you say that projection has nothing to do with it, then you proceed to try to prove this point by projecting human requirements.
it's non corrosive, non reactive
BZZT. Water is very corrosive and reactive. It is known as "the universal solvent" for a reason.
is liquid at reasonible temperatues
How does one define "reasonible"[sp]? Oh yeah - by projecting our own requirements.
life isn't going to exist at 1000c or -200c
More projecting.
the mechanics of life ie. a fluid transport mechanism, won't work with solids.
Aside from the fact that this is just still more projecting, why exactly is water the only substance that fits this bill? Why could another compound not fill the same purpose?