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'Worms From Hell' Unearth Possibilities For Extraterrestrial Life
An anonymously submitted article says, "For the first time, scientists have found complex,
multi-celled creatures living a mile and more below the planet’s surface, raising new possibilities about the spread of life on Earth and potential subsurface life on other planets and moons (abstract). ... The research is likely to trigger scientific challenges and cause some controversy because it places far more complex life in an environment where researchers have generally held it should not, or even cannot, exist."
the link doesn't work
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As a Wikipedia frequenter, I take the broken link as proof that there is no evidence.
It's not such a big deal. It's only a mile's commute to the nearest Starbucks.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Here it is
Multicellular life deep in the earth is interesting but I'd like to find sentient slashdot editors.
Here is at least some information for it at Nature. Wherever there is some usable energy, some kind of life seems to attach to it. Fascinating.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Try this.
I wouldn't say that we generally assume conditions to be necessarily earth-like for life to arise. However, there are hard constraints on conditions that allow complex chemistry to happen - and those limit the habitable range. Basically, the only reasonably complex chemistry happens with carbon - so you are automatically limited to conditions where carbon compounds are stable. That sets an upper bound for temperatures, for example. On the other hand, you want some reactivity - life has to be dynamic, after all. That gives you a lower bound for temperatures. Earth happens to be in the middle there, but there are quite some deviations from earth-like conditions where life would be possible, biochemically.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
They were found at depths ranging from 900m down to 3.6km (3000ft-2mi). Carbon dating their environment showed they'd been there for at least 3000 years. (The team that found this also found radiation eating bacteria at similar depths five years ago, they been through the standard objections before.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
The potentially arsenic-"based" bacteria are still carbon based. Only the phosphate links in the sugar-phosphate backbone of their DNA are possible replaced by arsenate links, possible the phosphates in their ATP or GTP, too. This is interesting, but not too surprising, as arsenic is chemically quite close to phosphorus.
I am not arguing that earth-like conditions are a necessity, but that there are hard limits on conditions. If you want to have life you need a chemistry that is sufficiently complex to store information and to build structures. With that, you are down to carbon. Nothing else (with the very, very low possibility of silicon being an exception) makes a sufficiently complex chemistry. You need metabolism, so you need some kind of energy gradient and therefor chemical dynamics on a timescale that makes exploiting that gradient possible. Another hard limit. Those limits are not given by taking earth as a standard, this is basic thermodynamics, in the end.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
My question is this: just because you find life in extreme conditions, does not mean it can develop in those conditions. It seems more likely to me that life develops in more ideal conditions, then migrates to areas where conditions are more harsh. Am I being too skeptical or pessimistic?
Proverbs 21:19