Vast Ecosystem deep in the Earth

[Venusian Broon]

Scientists identify vast underground ecosystem containing billions of micro-organisms

Looks like an absolutely fascinating report!

It was only obliquely mentioned right at the end but if we are getting so much life in a biome like this in such bizarre and extreme conditions, if, say, Mars did have life, perhaps it too has a similar layer of life to this day, deep within it. Of course actually being able to drill 5 km below the surface of Mars is a whole other kettle of fish.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Eventually people will arrive at the understanding that micro life is the predominant life form on this planet. People have known for years there is micro life in undersea hot water vents that uses chemosynthesis to convert minerals and get light from emissions of light particles from radioactive elements produce and compounds like hydrogen that is not good for most surface life. But we continue to stick our heads in the sand, first line in article says Earth is far more alive than previously thought. How about erroneously thought seeing as how we already know about this stuff and yet still insist it is life living under extreme conditions and call it extremophiles. Life that can live under a wide range of conditions is not extreme, that is the norm for life in this universe. Life that can only live under very narrow circumstances, stuff like human beings is extreme. Even ordinary mammals can live under "extreme" conditions compared to what we can tolerate. We're the extreme form of life, almost specialized out of existence.

Mars, the Moon, Venus, all have the capability of supporting some kind of life we could recognize. We just have to stop using our experience as the goal post, experience was also used in the article to explain our lack of understanding, and start thinking about how life really works, making the best of a situation instead of sitting in the lap of luxury and thinking that's how easy it is. I guess we are in the low pressure zone. I have no idea what life could look like on the the frozen gas giants where the temperatures are extremely cold with unimaginable pressures regulating everything the same way sunlight regulates our life here, but it's probably there.

 

[Brian G Turner]

And more coverage on this at the BBC: The vast scale of life beneath our feet

 

[RJM Corbet]

Eventually people will arrive at the understanding that micro life is the predominant life form on this planet. People have known for years there is micro life in undersea hot water vents that uses chemosynthesis to convert minerals and get light from emissions of light particles from radioactive elements produce and compounds like hydrogen that is not good for most surface life. But we continue to stick our heads in the sand, first line in article says Earth is far more alive than previously thought. How about erroneously thought seeing as how we already know about this stuff and yet still insist it is life living under extreme conditions and call it extremophiles. Life that can live under a wide range of conditions is not extreme, that is the norm for life in this universe. Life that can only live under very narrow circumstances, stuff like human beings is extreme. Even ordinary mammals can live under "extreme" conditions compared to what we can tolerate. We're the extreme form of life, almost specialized out of existence.

Mars, the Moon, Venus, all have the capability of supporting some kind of life we could recognize. We just have to stop using our experience as the goal post, experience was also used in the article to explain our lack of understanding, and start thinking about how life really works, making the best of a situation instead of sitting in the lap of luxury and thinking that's how easy it is. I guess we are in the low pressure zone. I have no idea what life could look like on the the frozen gas giants where the temperatures are extremely cold with unimaginable pressures regulating everything the same way sunlight regulates our life here, but it's probably there.

Ummm ... we're back to the dichotomy of the origination of life against millions of odds in extremely fragile 'goldilocks' environments to the incredible tenacity of life, once originated, to survive and even prosper in the most extreme and unlikely circumstances? Imo

 

[Robert Zwilling]

The food thing is not just based on outdated labels and restaurant serving sizes. Quite a bit of it rots in warehouses around the world because of poor storage facilities or just because it was never sold.

I like to think the humans are the extremely fragile goldilocks. The micro world is prospering quite adequately under all circumstances. As far as the odds go, we have no data as to how many planets have micro life on them so figuring out the odds becomes a case of what we believe and not based on what the true situation is. As humans we often use our wants to create the reality we see instead of showing us what is actually happening. It is quite a complex process which uses everything from science to religion to verify the results. I would say the chances of any kind of simple life appearing under a wide variety of circumstances and conditions throughout the universe is quite common. The exact duplication of complex organisms like humans might be extremely rare but not the creation of complex organisms in itself. The question is how much of the complex organism's structure is built in to the micro genetics stuff it grew out of versus how much does the materialistic/energy world surrounding the micro creatures shape their evolution into complex creatures. I would imagine the time scale is billions of years. This could of been planet of the talking dinosaurs. The asteroids, comets, black holes, super novas, runaway stars all do their best to level the playing field in a very unfair fashion. The ultimate cosmic kilroy joke would be a huge asteroid with the license plate carved into by some enterprising space explorers, Times Up!

 

[Venusian Broon]

Ummm ... we're back to the dichotomy of the origination of life against millions of odds in extremely fragile 'goldilocks' environments to the incredible tenacity of life, once originated, to survive and even prosper in the most extreme and unlikely circumstances? Imo

No, we are learning and proving all the time how Terran life can adapt to environments that we thought previously we would have thought to have been unlikely to harbour life. This, obviously, has interesting knock-on effects for where we could be searching for actual alien life - even on worlds that appear on their surface, such as Mars, lifeless.

And, again, we have no idea what the probabilities of successful abiogenesis are, what environments would be most beneficial to successfully incubate life and how widespread such environments are, both in time and space. So making a glib statement that the origin of life succeeded against 'millions of odds' is currently pure supposition. How on earth do you know? What are the millions of odds? (I know you are going to say something like 'why hasn't a lab somewhere done it then?' but, hey, we think we're on firmer ground on how stars work, but we haven't been able to make a star in a lab either.)

Oh, and goldilocks regions are definitely not 'fragile'. They merely related to areas of space where it's not too hot, nor too cold. Just right for water to exist as a liquid. Every star has such a region. As we've yet to discover life that does not depend on water for it's existence, highlighting such areas seems prudent, for the moment, when it comes to contemplating astrobiology.

The last estimate, extrapolated from the Kepler space mission data, suggests that there could be 40 billion Earth-like planets in Goldilocks regions, just in the Milky Way alone. And we're not including other possible habitats, such as moons that are tidally warmed by their orbit of larger bodies. That's a pretty big area and volume for natural abiogenesis to occur.

 

[RJM Corbet]

I know all that. But the supposition that life is just bound to pop-up is one thing, the fact that it can survive in extreme conditions is another. Finding terrestrial life in extreme conditions isn't the same as expecting life to commonly originate everywhere.

Anti-entropic life is not likely to originate. A tossed coin is not likely to come up heads a million times in a row. The fact you can simultaneously toss a zillion coins a second in a ziliion places simultaneously and continuously for a zillion years may make it more likely. But it's still a hugely remote chance event.

However, we'll have to wait until extraterrestrial life is detected. Until then it's going to be supposition.

(post edited)

 

[Karn's Return]

It's really not surprising. There's been numerous times when it's been shown and proven that life has been able to thrive in not only temperature-extreme conditions, but also in oxygen-poor conditions. Deep undersea, in magma vents, deep underground caverns, etc. I've always been of the mind that we just need to rethink of how we not only view life, but also how we view of where life is possible. I might be a little too imaginative, but who's to say there's not, say, some form of life that evolved on Triton or other such similar environments where we more complex lifeforms wouldn't last a single minute without Star Trek style technology?

 

[sunspoke]

“The strangest thing for me is that some organisms can exist for millennia. They are metabolically active but in stasis, with less energy than we thought possible of supporting life.”

"...the timescales of subterranean life were completely different. Some microorganisms have been alive for thousands of years, barely moving except with shifts in the tectonic plates, earthquakes or eruptions."

“We humans orientate towards relatively rapid processes – diurnal cycles based on the sun, or lunar cycles based on the moon – but these organisms are part of slow, persistent cycles on geological timescales.”

 

[Robert Zwilling]

"...the timescales of subterranean life were completely different. Some microorganisms have been alive for thousands of years, barely moving except with shifts in the tectonic plates, earthquakes or eruptions."

Since we are looking at time scales of billions of years, perhaps the stuff buzzing around in the blink of an eye might only be flashes in the pan of the long term hierarchy that keeps everything running over the long term. It is hard to sense the internal framework because it is moving extremely slowly and only bleeds out to the surface in what seems to be a highly erratic time line to the fast moving life.