How deep does life go? | Hacker News Reader

How deep does life go?

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154 pointsHooke40 comments

> The drill reached 4,776 meters and the deepest core was collected at 1,177 meters

So they did 3,599m of drilling for no purpose? This seems inexplicable, perhaps I'm misreading it.

I think the journalist just didn't understand exactly what this mission did[0]. It drilled through 1 177 meters of rock, in a place where the ocean floor was 4 776 meters below the surface.

[0]http://publications.iodp.org/proceedings/370/101/370_101.htm...

> Our primary objective during Expedition 370 was to study the relationship between the deep subseafloor biosphere and temperature.

Not "no purpose."

> The Alvin’s most famous dive, however, was its 1968 exploration of the wreck of the ill-fated Titanic.

That should be 1986?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin#Exploration_of_RMS_T.... It was only found in 1985.

Noticed that too and wondered: A typo or AI?

A typo. Thank you for flagging! I updated the article and added a correction. HN is the best.

I would think just a simple typo.

Mixing up 1986 -> 1968 is a very human transposition error that I've not personally seen a LLM make.

Now, if the article said the the famous dive was done by Alvin and the Chipmunks and not the deep submersible vehicle Alvin, I would suspect AI.

this is the kind of error humans make because we generate text letter by letter. LLMs generate text in whole words or meaningful fragments of whole words (tokens). unless 1986 is unusually statistically similar to 1968, an LLM is unlikely to make that mistake.

I knew the Titanic was discovered in the mid 80s, but was pretty sure it was not not by this submersible, but a ship pulling a camera. So that took the entire sentence into question and that could IMHO very well been an AI that merged nuclear sub in the 60s and Titanic in the 80s because they were both deep sea operations by this vessel or something.

Seems weird to talk about the deep sea and miss Challenger Deep/Marianas trench, and the Trieste completely.

I wonder how much of an impact these bacteria have on climate change, given how numerous they are, and that their activities appear to fix CO2.

For example, from Wikipedia:

hydrogen sulfide chemosynthesis:

    18H2S + 6CO2 + 3O2 → C6H12O6 (carbohydrate) + 12H2O + 18S

Verily I say unto you, bacteria have had a far greater impact on climate change than humans could ever dream to. Oxygen wouldn’t be here without them, for one. And plant-available Nitrogen.

All the changes we are seeing now are absolutely nothing compared to the impact bacteria had had on the climate.

Perhaps, but bacteria do it on time scales of hundreds of millions of years, while humans do it on timescales of decades or centuries.

Take ANY other process and speed it up by 5-6 orders of magnitude and see how different it is. For example, try sipping your coffee at only 3 orders of magnitude faster — it'll literally require an explosion to accelerate to 1000fps and then decelerate to 0 to traverse the 2' from saucer to lips in in 2/1000 sec instead of 2 sec. The effect on ecosystems is similar; changes that would be easily adapted to by all flora and fauna are instead fatal to many. And those ecosystems sustain us.

Moreover, even the slow pace of bacterial climate change is no solace — the most notable change they caused was the Great Oxidation Event and Snowball Earth wiping out almost all life for 300 million years.

I'd prefer to not whistle ignorance into the wind. I'd rather we take simple measures that make life better for everyone and everything, and yes, using sustainable energy sources instead of burning valuable and increasingly scarce hydrocarbons is a basic step.

[0] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019asbi.book..261T/abstra...

The changes introduced by bacteria were certainly not adapted to by all flora and fauna, as you go on to describe. But here we are.

Had the bacteria said “hey guys all this Oxygen we’re making is seriously disrupting the environment and killing a lot of stuff, we should limit our productivity in order to ensure that doesn’t happen, after all we’re the greatest things that will ever be on this planet so we have to make sure it’s well suited for us and only us forever and ever and ever”, here we would not be.

It is silly to speculating about the results of bacteria somehow limiting or compensating for their excess O2 production, especially since there could be many ways it could have been done (not necessarily limiting, but evolving CO2 or CH4 producing species to counterbalance, etc.). Such speculations could just as easily conclude that we could have evolved a billion years earlier if they'd "done something", and we'd now be 1000x as mature a species.

Even if we make your assumption that humans are somehow entitled to do whatever we want, it is massively stupid to ignore the fact that we depend on an extremely complex web of life to survive. We can break some links, but breaking too many will literally be suicidal.

When we see that we are doing something that WILL inevitably break many of those links (not to mention flood most of our major cities in decades, which is already happening), the only wise thing to do is to adjust course to prevent that destruction.

Yet you seem to think it is a good idea to spread ignorance and stupidity. That way is guaranteed to NOT advance even humanity's self-centered interests. Do you have some fetish about burning hydrocarbons or some religion that makes it sacred?

> after all we’re the greatest things that will ever be on this planet so we have to make sure it’s well suited for us and only us forever and ever and ever”, here we would not be.

So your contention would be that we should all die off so something else can come around in a few hundred million years?

There isn’t a “should” involved. I don’t have hubris in near enough magnitude to think my desires about what species is in control in 3,000,000 hold any significance regardless.

My point is rather that if we do die off, there will be something that comes along, and it will in all likelihood be an evolutionarily “better” species than humanity. For instance, if we die in nuclear armageddon, there’s a very good chance that whatever comes next will have significant radiation hardening capabilities, and perhaps would even be able to metabolize radiation. These individuals would be far better suited to be Earth’s intergalactic vanguard.

Are we really playing whataboutism for the banded iron formations from 3.7Gya?

Are you going to mention the Siberian Traps next?

My dude, civilization almost collapsed several times due to like, one volcano. Imagine a 20% increase in global CO2 due to human activity.

You can say "well, the earth recovered from the Permian extinctions" but that's meaningless, we're talking about _humanity_.

Trilobites weren't all "oh, no worries, the Cyanobacteria didn't end life on earth so we're totally fine, brah! We're _rationalist trilobites_!"

Speak for yourself. I made no mention of humanity.

I hoped it was about how deep life goes underground.

It is:

“It found living bacterial cells 1,626 meters below the seafloor, in rocks 111 million years old, at temperatures of 113 degrees Celsius. This led the authors to estimate that bacteria in subsurface sediments may make up as much as two-thirds of total bacterial biomass.”

Good news. Seems then that an Armageddon type of event would not extinguish all life on earth.

Honestly I don’t think anything could extinguish all life on earth short of maybe 20 comets hitting earth at the same time or something.

I wonder how long it'd take for life to leave after Earth leaves the goldilocks zone. How much life would there be after the oceans have evaporated and stripped into space? If life could evolve to not require water at all, maybe it could survive until the sun physically envelops the planet.

20 comets (or asteroids) wouldn’t even come close to doing it. Events like that can cause extinctions of many ecosystems, by many others will be essentially unaffected. Microbes in the sediment below the seafloor are a good example. They wouldn’t even notice the comets.

The slow and inexorable brightening of the Sun (it's already 30% brighter than when it settled onto the Main Sequence) will eventually cause a runaway greenhouse effect. The oceans will all be converted to steam and the surface temperature will be far beyond what life could survive. After that things only get hotter until the Sun enters its end stages and leaves the Main Sequence.

A hot surface does very little to life several miles below it.

Since heat is flowing out of the Earth, the temperature below will eventually become hotter than the temperature at the surface.

2.8 billion years[0] is the high estimate before _all_ remaining life on earth goes extinct. Likely including these little buggers.

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

based on our current knowledge, not only of the science that we can extrapolate to the future, but of our technology and how we will apply it

note that that list is all negative things we suspect will happen and include no accounting for our own intervention in matters

I'm not sure how anyone's intervention could ever withstand some of these effects.

I could foresee maybe a sun shade of some sort to help mitigate the increase in temperature, but at some point the sun is going to envelope the earth.

Also, this several billion years into the future. Anyone left wouldn't be anything you could remotely call human. Evolution hasn't stopped in humans.

iirc we could plausibly move to Titan and live off nuclear energy

Why not just move the Earth? You could do that over a few million years using a gravity tractor.

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

I remember reading somewhere that that may have saved life on Earth at least once.

Think bigger with your mass extinction events! Maybe a rogue blackhole zipping through the inner solar system and ripping the crust off the planet like a ripe tangerine.

If there is a Creator with an inordinate fondness for beetles, their fondness for prokaryotes remains obviously superordinate.

one of the most fascinating and mysterious things to me are subterranean or exclusively cave-dwelling (mega)fauna. the earth's crust is a very big place

unique adaptations to life in environments with limited light and resources is indeed fascinating

All the way deep.

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