There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
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There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#2Stapledon, The Flames: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flames:_A_Fantasy
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#3Perhaps. If it does, it probably couldn't be past a certain depth. The deepest man-made hole was about 12km, and reached roughly 180C at that depth. That's well beyond what even the most durable hyperthermophile organisms can withstand, to speak nothing of what the pressure would be like at greater depths.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#4If there is life on Mars, it will be deep underground!
Do we know anything about the occasional Methane emissions I heard about on Mars?
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#5From what i read, this post doesnt announce we’ve found some crazy extremophile unicellular microbe. Just that there is evidence to suggest they are there (due to the chemical makeup of soil/boreholes).
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#6From what i read, this post doesnt announce we’ve found some crazy extremophile unicellular microbe. Just that there is evidence to suggest they are there (due to the chemical makeup of soil/boreholes).
1 cross borehole electromagnetic imaging rhubarb
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#7If there is life on Mars, it will be deep underground! Do we know anything about the occasional Methane emissions I heard about on Mars?
There are areas on Mars where we strongly believe brine is right below the surface, so there could be life underground but it may not all be that deep.
Edit: found it:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia10911-ice-on-mars-now-its...
There have been cases where we believe we've seen ice form in rover tracks, hinting at water just below the surface.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#8Perhaps. If it does, it probably couldn't be past a certain depth. The deepest man-made hole was about 12km, and reached roughly 180C at that depth. That's well beyond what even the most durable hyperthermophile organisms can withstand, to speak nothing of what the pressure would be like at greater depths.
Every time we assume a limitation like this we've been wrong. If tardigrades can survive floating through space, I think it's reasonable to guess that there might be life that survives at the other extreme.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#9This reminded me of a Kurzgesagt video from a few months ago on the same topic [0]. I see that the author, Karen Lloyd, was one of the experts they consulted when making that video.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#10Perhaps. If it does, it probably couldn't be past a certain depth. The deepest man-made hole was about 12km, and reached roughly 180C at that depth. That's well beyond what even the most durable hyperthermophile organisms can withstand, to speak nothing of what the pressure would be like at greater depths.
Every time we assume a limitation like this we've been wrong. If tardigrades can survive floating through space, I think it's reasonable to guess that there might be life that survives at the other extreme.
Where do you draw the line for the other "extreme"?
Assuming carbon based life as we know it, 300-400C is the probably a hard limit at which point single carbon bonds begin to break down.
Assuming life on earth as we know it, with ATP universally conserved across the entire evolutionary tree, the limit is really 150C. We've seen incredible survival adaptations like cryptobiosis but no organism exists that doesn't use ATP as its most basic unit of energy storage. That's the theoretical limit, but realistically other highly conserved critical pathways start to break down well before that temperature.