Researchers rethink life in a cold climate after Antarctic find | Hacker News Reader

Researchers rethink life in a cold climate after Antarctic find

theguardian.com

93 pointssandebert35 comments

To quote the oft-quoted quote "Life finds a way". As we eventually explore more planets, I am sure we will expand what we consider life.

I’ve been trying to picture what sort of things we could do on Mars to give Life a gentle shove toward finding a way.

I recently heard (here, I think) that turtles are adapted to hypoxia, and started picturing turtles in valleys on Mars. Eking out an existence when the barometer is high, hunkering down when it’s low.

Perseverance might confirm past life on Mars for us. Well, it might pull up the samples that a future mission might use to determine if life once lived on Mars. But we are getting closer.

Let's hope we don't encounter life on Mars, one pandemic per lifetime will suffice, thank you.

You're conflating life as hosts and parasites. Most parasites require co-evolution with hosts. In the case of pandemic viruses, none existing anywhere else in the universe have the slightest chance of infecting us because there is absolutely nothing evolved exactly like us anywhere else.

Or a Martian microbe might just eat through any Earthly thing unable to fight back. Gray goo

Mars... no, obviously that would have to be "red goo"

So it's incorporating large amounts of iron into its system? Take out the magnets and mess that thing up.

Astronauts are routinely quarantined:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_quarantine_facility

You realize that the apollo missions were done like 50 years ago, right?

You are absolutely correct that we have not returned to the Moon in 50 years.

They were quarantined in case they bring back some unknown pathogens we don't know what do with.

There are plenty of things that didn’t evolve to harm us but which can nonetheless harm us. Meteors are an obvious macroscopic example, while toxic chemicals are an obvious microscopic example.

I understand that the boundaries are blurry but this particular comment was talking about life harming other life.

Right, and my point is simply that if inorganic chemistry is more than capable of harming life, it’s a bit strange to assume that organic chemistry and life would somehow have less capability to do so.

I think it's pretty likely there is bacterial life under the surface of Mars.

1 km down should be both warm and moist enough.

Do you really mean today bacterial, and not microscopic or something like it? Bacterial implies a common ancestry with bacteria on earth. That, IMO, is less likely than finding very small life forms that are dissimilar from anything on earth.

Yeah, I like the idea that bacterial life spread between the planets.

We have found Mars fragments on Earth. Some almost almost certainly went the other direction.

You like the idea, that's fine, but if I were to make a bet on PredictionBook... .0001%.

Fragments don't just lift out of a fully formed planet without a collision with another massive body. I assume the Martian fragments you mention are from the early solar system when things were still being formed. Also if something like the Chicxulub impact was enough to lift fragments out of Earth, I assume such fragments would have gotten so hot that any microbes on it just died, to say nothing of the trip in the void of space to Mars which would likely take millions of years before finally crossing paths with it. Good luck surviving the solar radiation and lack of atmosphere in the interim...

I agree that it's a very unlikely individual event.

But it only needs to happen once, with one bacteria surviving the trip over the billions of years when both planets were hospitable to life.

I'd be hesitant to bet against those odds. I'm also not betting for it. Just being open to the possibility.

Wasn't it just a few years ago they found microbes underwater where there wasn't any sunlight? The thinking back then was that all life was directly or indirectly dependent on sunlight. I believe they even found life in some kind of acid. The extremes where we thought life was impossible, we eventually found life.

>Wasn't it just a few years ago they found microbes underwater where there wasn't any sunlight?

It sounds like you're talking about the life around hydrothermal vents[0], which ultimately depends on chemosynthesis[1]rather than photosynthesis. This has been known since the late 70s, and actually fuels significant macroscopic life[2], not just microorganisms.

There's also deepwater life surviving off of things like marine snow[3], which is nutrient carrying detrius from the surface, or whale falls. But both of those ultimately depend on photosynthesis that happens near the surface.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent#Biology_of_h...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis

[2]See giant tube worm, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riftia_pachyptila

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_snow

If you are interested in this, you might want to start looking here [0]. The general term for lifeforms in such extreme environments is "extremophiles". The different classes of extremes have own names though, for example "Acidophiles" for life in acidic environments. There is a list of them in the article.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile

> The different classes of extremes have own names though, for example "Acidophiles" for life in acidic environments.

This bothered me, since "acidophile" is transparently a hybrid compound with one Latin and one Greek root. So I looked up what the Greek root for acid would be.

Turns out it's oxy-, and oxygen was erroneously named for its essential (and completely fictional) role in the formation of acids. Acidophiles should properly be termed oxyphiles... except that everyone would get the wrong idea.

This fails to explain how acidophilus bacteria got their name, though.

Couldn't the closed ecosystem be extremely fragile to outsiders? Or would other organisms be so unadapted that the risk is almost non-existent?

Conversely, would bringing some of these back endanger the local ecosystem? (maybe not endanger, but it could be an invasive species in more favourable conditions).

The risk is essentially negligible. The environments are too extremely different for either one to directly invade the other.

? Invasive species like humans can do a lot of physical damage to the environment that other life depends on.

Sure, most humans cannot infect gorillas but they sure as hell can take away their habitat.

We're talking about microbes though.

Are we? I would have likened those species under Antarctica ice to ~plants (well, sponges are technically considered animals). Invasive starfish species and algae are a thing, for instance.

Some invasive species have adapted to sustain themselves with little light or nutriments. When placed in richer environments, they can reproduce really quickly, outnumber other species and drive them out by competing for resources.

It also depends if it was "closed" for how long, how "closed" it is, and the nature of the contamination.

The most dangerous potential contamination would seem to be from similar modern ecosystems in other parts of the world.

How do they know they're alive and not just corpses/shells that floated there from elsewhere or strange mineral accumulations?

> corpses/shells that floated there from elsewhere

The whole boulder would have had to float in that case.

> It was a real shock to find them there, a really good shock, but we can’t do DNA tests

I'm just curious, why would it not be possible to do DNA tests? Is it too difficult to get to?

Yes, this is taken from the paper:

"Given the inherent complexity of obtaining physical samples (except for mobile fauna caught in baited traps) future studies could use environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques on water and sediment samples to identify taxa", https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.6420... (Open Access)

I think you're right: too difficult to reach.

> ...after sinking a borehole through nearly a kilometre of the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf on the south-eastern Weddell Sea to obtain a sediment core from the seabed.

But you've already done the difficult part - you've drilled the hole, and brought samples back. Now you just need to bring back different samples. (And, I suppose, find a way to grab the right things...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com