Water Isolated for Over a Billion Years Found Under Ontario

ananyo writes "Scientists working 2.4 kilometers below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life. Micrometer-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals' formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth's crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years (paper abstract)."

Comments

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Oh, sure, it can interact with us. It can interact with us just like tree pollen does: it can bounce off, it can get washed away in a pool of mucus, it can get embedded in earwax, it can get clobbered by a macrophage and digested in a lysosome... those are all forms of interaction!

1.5 billion years ago is 1.5 billion years behind in an arms race—an arms race that is comprised entirely of exploiting vulnerabilities in a hardened enemy. This organism is not used to human physiological conditions. It is not used to the human immune system. Hell, it may even pre-date the concept of complex multicellular life. The idea that the systems could be compatible is, statistically, laughable. It is less than a rounding error.

Biology is not a horror movie, and it is not a computer. Fiction has lied to you.

Personally, I'm a fan of panspermia, but the fossil record goes back so far that what arrived on Earth would necessarily have to be extremely simple; possibly just a handful of nucleic acids (or analogous) with no envelope. Such organisms would be ridiculously delicate, and most likely destroyed instantly by RNases if they were exposed to the modern atmosphere on Earth.