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Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020
An anonymous reader writes "A half-century after the first attempt to drill through the ocean crust into the Earth's mantle, a new campaign armed with improved technology is underway that could reach the mantle by the end of the decade, researchers say."
They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.
In all seriousness, that would be a pretty significant discovery if we found life living close to the mantle.
Actually, few biologists would be surprised. One of the more interesting things about previous deep-drilling projects is that they've turned up micro-organisms all the way down. Projecting the microbe count from these holes has produced the estimate that there is more biomass inside the planet than on its surface and in the oceans. Of course, this is based on a very small sample, so nobody takes it too seriously.
But still, the fact that we've found living things everywhere we've drilled means that the default assumption should be that we'll keep finding them. Presumably it'll get too hot for life at some depth, but so far we have no clue at all what this depth might be. The really significant thing would be if we found no decrease in the density of microbes at any depth.
And I don't think the critters down there qualify as "alien". From the few samples that've been studied, they are very similar to the things living inside rocks near the surface. We might have to go to other planets to find something truly alien. And maybe the things living inside the other planets will turn out to be relatives of the things living here.
For further information, ask google about "deep-rock microorganisms" (without the quotes). There's quite a bit of information on the subject online.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.