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Microbe Mat the Size of Greece Discovered In the Sea
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A mat of microbes the size of Greece has been discovered on the sea floor off the Pacific coast of South America. 'These tiny creatures can join together to create some of the largest masses of life on the planet... A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms...'"
It's not a bug, it's a fixture!
The structure that looks surprisingly like a gigantic neural network is not, repeat not, the repository of a vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps.
Please carry on with your regularly scheduled consumption.
Hmmm???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
can I eat it?
Liar. Your user name implies you may be the avatar of this very consciousness!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
does this mean we will need to bail them out as well?
has anyone seen a map of Greece with all it's crazy islands and jagged coasts? How can you compare the size of anything to that country
Next time, compare vs something with a somewhat reasonable shape.
like Saskatchewan damnit!
More importantly there are plenty of unexplored function libraries in the 1 billion marine microbial species waiting to activate.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Was there any doubt that microbes own our planet and merely tolerate us? (heck, more bacterial DNA in your body than human one...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
... a fungus among us.
Have gnu, will travel.
Greg Egan had a nice extrapolation (spoilers) in his Wang's Carpets short (later expanded in the novel Diaspora) that on top of such a large biomass, or rather inside it, a completely virtual world is computed. I.e. the computation substrate is not silicon but biomass following certain rules. This computed universe did not interact with the outside world (and that world lacking predators, it didn't have to) but just created a virtual self contained world.
What's this? A science story from NewYorkCountyLawyer?.....
Actually there is a bit of evidence, not publicly available, which would support your theory that I may have been a little bit out of my element with this story:
This was the first of my 232 stories that was actually improved by the Slashdot editor.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Interesting. Such giant microbial mats used to be the dominant biological communities in the Precambrian, often forming structures called stromatolites, but most of them were believed to have met their demise during the Cambrian, when lots of new large multicellular critters could literally munch or burrow their way through them. Stromatolites are still present today in a few places, generally in environments too harsh for multicellular organisms to live in, like Shark Bay in Western Australia. But this discovery would indicate that large microbial mat communities proved more evolutionarily durable than previously thought.
Who thought it read Microsoft map the size of greece
Only you...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You probably picked this article to submit because of your daily dealings with other types of slime molds.
Yang is building a planetbuster, we much achieve transcendence with planet before its too late! Move a foil ship to that microbe hex stat!
will it blend?
Hasn't that been the general biological consensus recently?
Archaeo-lifeforms, being far less specialized seem to be able to both spread widely and cope with marginal or rapidly-changing conditions. Witness jellyfish, etc. When a biome's conditions are very stable over a long period of time, specialist organisms develop that are more efficient (at everything, really) and quickly outcompete the generalist, simpler older forms. As long as the older forms aren't completely extinguished (which logically I'd have to say is relatively unlikely, given their ability to occupy LOTS of niches simultaneously), when the environment again starts changing more rapidly, the specialist forms start to fail and the older generalists come again to the fore.
My guess would be that the location of this mat is otherwise fairly UNfriendly for more-developed forms, leaving it to happily churn away these millions of years without something discovering that it's tasty and nutritious (at least, not enough predators to outpace its reproductive rate).
-Styopa