I mean, there are earthworms in my backyard, so we've technically known that life exists in the crust for approximately forever.
There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#42>If the subsurface were like an inert container, we could just pump that gas down there, sit back and watch the global temperature stabilize and the glaciers creep back to where they’re supposed to be. I find it fascinating how some scientists seem so sure about how things are 'supposed to be'. The Earth's climate has never been static. Almost everything present today (temperature, pressure, percentage of each gas in…
Some comics [0] [1] might be able to get the point across in a way that words seldom do when arguing on the interblags. You're right to call out that we don't know the "ideal" state of anything. I, for one, am excited about higher mean rainfall, more exotic weather patterns, and the changes in flora and fauna we expect to see as a result. Many species we currently know and love (e.g., basically everything interesting…
You state a great number of very alarming things with all the certainty you can muster, without mentioning that neither you or anyone else actually knows if any of these will come to pass or at least to anything like the degree you mention.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#43A fascinating thing about complex life in the deep crust lies how said life allows the earth to regenerate ecosystems even under the most extreme hypothetical conditions, and has probably done so in the past:
For example, if a super-asteroid the size of a minor planet were to hit the Earth, it's believed that it would essentially boil away all the oceans and cook the whole of the planet's atmosphere. Studies have also shown that it would likely super-heat the crust down to a depth of hundreds of meters, even in parts far from the immense and totally liquefied impact site itself.
But, in those more distant parts of the crust, far down in the dark beyond the reach of post-impact heating, below a depth of several hundred meters, microbes of all kinds would continue to live, hidden in so many tiny, watery cracks. As thousands of years pass after such a colossal impact, as the atmosphere reforms, as the earth's water re-condenses, and falls back to the surface in gigantic ocean-filling torrential rain storms, those hidden microbes, which had found their refuge in the deep rocks, would eventually creep upwards.
They'd slowly find their way back into these reformed oceans, lakes and rivers, back into the again cooled atmosphere, back into the sunlight, and the evolutionary process would kick into gear all over again.
It's speculated that our planet has survived at as many as several completely surface destroying impacts by minor planets or asteroids several hundred kilometers across, impacts that make the dinosaur impactor seem like a children's party firecracker in comparison, and this is how life regenerated from these cataclysms.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#44>If the subsurface were like an inert container, we could just pump that gas down there, sit back and watch the global temperature stabilize and the glaciers creep back to where they’re supposed to be. I find it fascinating how some scientists seem so sure about how things are 'supposed to be'. The Earth's climate has never been static. Almost everything present today (temperature, pressure, percentage of each gas in…
Some comics [0] [1] might be able to get the point across in a way that words seldom do when arguing on the interblags. You're right to call out that we don't know the "ideal" state of anything. I, for one, am excited about higher mean rainfall, more exotic weather patterns, and the changes in flora and fauna we expect to see as a result. Many species we currently know and love (e.g., basically everything interesting…
All I know is that if the industrial revolution had occurred 20,000 years ago when they estimate that the Boston area was underneath a mile high glacier; the same climate alarmists would have predicted a total catastrophe if the ice age came to an end.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some comics [0] [1] might be able to get the point across in a way that words seldom do when arguing on the interblags. You're right to call out that we don't know the "ideal" state of anything. I, for one, am excited about higher mean rainfall, more exotic weather patterns, and the changes in flora and fauna we expect to see as a result. Many species we currently know and love (e.g., basically everything interesting…
You state a great number of very alarming things with all the certainty you can muster, without mentioning that neither you or anyone else actually knows if any of these will come to pass or at least to anything like the degree you mention.
In the nicest way possible, do you have anything to add other than just saying that I and the rest of the world are wrong and insinuating that I made a claim I believe to be false?
There's a lot of uncertainty in the world, but the core claims here aren't particularly hard to understand, and it's not useful to behave otherwise. The effects of the Earth warming are already visible to exactly the degree you would expect from the current level of warming, including wet bulb events, and there's no reason to believe that of all things we don't understand how heat and water work at a macroscopic level and won't see the predicted problems.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can pretty clearly delineate how much of warming and CO2 concentration is human-caused. That's clearly what they mean by "how its supposed to be". Yes there's no true "how it's supposed to be" but there's no use in being pedantic when we all clearly understand what they're talking about.
I think you're hesitating over saying "it's supposed to be nice for people". But that is what most of us tacitly suppose. Ultimately the world's a park.
That's not what I'm saying at all. The typical approach is to compare co2 concentration and/or temperatures to pre-industrial levels
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're hesitating over saying "it's supposed to be nice for people". But that is what most of us tacitly suppose. Ultimately the world's a park.
That's not what I'm saying at all. The typical approach is to compare co2 concentration and/or temperatures to pre-industrial levels
Why not say it, though? There's only us here capable of doing any supposing. Why would we say "it's supposed to be nice for cyanobacteria"? Which of course isn't even an option under consideration, only the pre-industrial levels thing is considered, never pre-photosynthesis levels. (Won't somebody think of the archaea?) Why this bias? Because humans like a certain kind of environment with trees and megafauna, that's why. It's a park.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#48Perhaps. 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.
Seems a lot more productive and straightforward to sample rather than speculate.
Hmm, but speculation is so easy and sampling is anything but. Some of Einstein's speculations were pretty damn productive. The later experiments aka samplings (Einstein proved right again!) were in my view not particularly productive.
Re: There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what I'm saying at all. The typical approach is to compare co2 concentration and/or temperatures to pre-industrial levels
Why not say it, though? There's only us here capable of doing any supposing. Why would we say "it's supposed to be nice for cyanobacteria"? Which of course isn't even an option under consideration, only the pre-industrial levels thing is considered, never pre-photosynthesis levels. (Won't somebody think of the archaea?) Why this bias? Because humans like a certain kind of environment with trees and megafauna, that's…
What's your point? This point is completely off topic
The original comment made it seem like it was a completely arbitrary point of comparison for what "humans like". Instead, the benchmark that is used is what the environment would be like if we took out the massive contributions to global warming and CO2 concentration caused by industrialism
Are pre-industrial levels "more comfortable" for humans? Sure, maybe I guess. It's probably "more comfortable" for the vast majority of species that are currently adapted for that biosphere. Why does that matter? The point is we're rapidly changing the global temperature levels as well as the co2 concentration rates (and many other environmental "abiotic" factors) at a rate that threatens most of life on earth. Shooting for "pre-industrial levels" as a benchmark is an obvious and easy, if a bit lazy, way to work towards an environment that most of life on earth is already adapted for