There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/kurzgesagt/comments/10jlyyk/kurzges...
There's a maybe better (very good) article on life in the crust from the NYT june 2024 here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobi... . Top comment "This article is one of the most powerful articles I have ever read in the NYT. I am so grateful that the author wrote it. It cemented my belief that that all life is deeply connected from the beginning to the present day and beyond..."
Does anyone know the paper(s) from the 1980s where the discovery was published?
Ghiorse & Wilson, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2164(08)70206-5
I think there are two strands: petroleum companies have long been interested in any connection between deep biology and oil; and I think around that time people found microbes in a few sterile-seeming aquifers.
Do we know anything about the occasional Methane emissions I heard about on Mars?
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.
Update: It’s so hard to believe that this was captured in 2008!
A huge part of the plot is about him getting water which he ultimately does by extracting it from fuel, but it'd have been trivial to get it from the soil itself. If you can excuse the butchery of measurements, even just the 2% level is moist enough to extract a liter of water per cubic foot of soil! For more consistent measurements, that's 35 liters of water per cubic meter of soil!
I suspect when we finally get boots on the ground and can start doing real research and exploration, we're going to find more surprises than we could ever imagine.
[1] - https://www.space.com/22949-mars-water-discovery-curiosity-r...
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.
Carbon-Carbon covalent bonds are the strongest we know. 300°C is nothing, carbon melts beyond 3000°C. Some organic molecules in our cells degrade at higher temperatures, but it depends on the availability of other species to react. Otherwise, hydrocarbon chemistry can be done beyond 300°C.
I am not saying that this kind of organisms are likely (I have no clue, it’s not my field). But from a chemical point of view there are 2 factors that could be at play:
- exotic organisms could rely on different chemistries altogether to produce energy and rely on molecules that are unstable under our standard conditions;
- and also chemistry under pressure could be very different from what we are used to on the surface.
You can fantasize about exotic biochemistries all you want, but what we know about carbon based life here on earth is rather specific in its limits.
How about the organisms living in or around the hydrothermal vents in the mid-ocean ridges?
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 air, etc.) has been higher and lower (sometimes by a lot) in the past.
What makes anyone think that they know the ideal amount of anything? Higher temperatures will certainly cause change, but why does every prediction paint a 'worst case scenario'?
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.
But that is what most of us tacitly suppose. Ultimately the world's a park.
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
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 off the west coast of the US or north coast of Australia) will likely be exterminated, but the world will adapt just fine to those new evolutionary pressures. We don't have enough carbon available to create a Venus scenario, so the worst-case probably doesn't kill off all life, and a little chaos can be exciting. I'm sure other people have more sane lists of pros to weigh the cons against, but I try to be honest.
Whatever the "ideal" state is, or whatever positives we can cook up, there are a number of severe negatives which we've demonstrated time and again we have no idea how to address at a global scale, where just winging it doesn't seem prudent:
- Much of the currently populated world will be under water. We have a hard enough time housing a few Syrian refugees and El Salvadorean asylum seekers. Where are we going to put all of Florida, the populated halves of Louisiana, Alabama, the Carolinas, Virigina, ...?
- The frequency and geographic diversity of wet-bulb events will increase substantially. If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time for too long and don't have A/C, you will die. Shade won't save you. Being indoors won't save you. Fans and swamp coolers won't fix it. Beyond the sea level rise, this will render vast swathes of land uninhabitable (like much of India).
- The frequency and intensity of severe weather events -- straight-line winds, tornados, hurricanes, ... -- will increase. We're expecting 20-40% more CAT4/CAT5 hurricanes by the year 2100. In the US, tornado alley will expand eastward. Much more importantly than all of that, the increased energy and humidity will make storms less predictable (harder to evacuate in time, much more devastating).
- The impact isn't limited to people. Our crops have been domesticated over hundreds to thousands of years, and GMOs can only do so much to address hardiness when growing soft balls of sugar and starch on a stem (also applies to corn and wheat, not just typical fruits and vegetables). The last thing you want with a growing population, with some of your best crop land being claimed by the ocean, with neighboring crop land being claimed by oceanic storms many years, with that growing population having less space to exist and encroaching inward toward the rest of your crops, is for crops to be harder to grow. Even if 4 years out of 5 are fine, an extra hot spell followed by an extra humid spell is all it takes to kill your tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and potatoes (or make a huge dent in their yield that year). Other crops have other undesirable weather patterns. There's a chance this is controversial, but I'll posit that mass starvation (above and beyond the current levels of global starvation) every 5-10 years isn't a good outcome.
And so on. I haven't yet seen anyone try to argue that those negatives are good. Maybe it's a "China hoax" or whatever, but a nicer average climate in Canada (mind you, the extreme weather events will still make most months more unpleasant than the status quo -- averaging weather isn't usually useful) or whatever the proposed upside happens to be won't make up for the cons if the thing is real.
Art imitates life. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
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.