
Ancient life, millions of years old and barely alive, found beneath ocean floor - J3L2404
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ancient-life-millions-of-years-old-and-barely-alive-found-beneath-ocean-floor/2012/05/17/gIQA3zIRWU_story.html
======
rickyconnolly
From a shrewd entrepreneurial point of view, these critters must have all
kinds of interesting enzymes and hardware that allow them to operate at such
low metabolic rates.

Dissecting their repair mechanisms might give us insights into regenerative
medicine in the near future, and technical knowledge for suspended animation
for long distance transport or generation jumping in the not-so-near future.

~~~
anusinha
Studying organisms like these would certainly teach us a lot about cellular
maintenance and extremely slow patterns of gene regulation.

Relatedly, note that storing information in DNA is the longest lived form of
information storage. Harddrives tend to deteriorate in ~10 years or so. Flash
Memory has a similar life time. Books can last hundreds to thousands of years,
but no more, and stones and rocks and fossils, perhaps a few hundreds of
millions of years. But genetic information can be maintained for billions of
years--it is a discrete information encoding, is easily copyable, and has
noise tolerance and error correction. Not very useful (yet!) to store
information and data, but very interesting to think about conceptually: humans
have been reconstructing in metal and silicon what nature developed billions
of years ago. Sort of cool to think about.

------
nsns
"Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all."

And yet some creatures are believed to be immortal while being "very alive".
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality>

------
rhino42
Why is the post by easy dead? It looks fine to me....

~~~
pohl
Good question. Is a relatively young (45 days) account with low karma (17)
enough to auto-kill posts? None of easy's submissions or comments seem out of
line to me. I'm quoting the post here because Rachel Sussman's TED talk on
species longevity is spectacular.

 _If you found this interesting you might also enjoy a TED talk by Rachel
Sussman entitled "The world's oldest living things":_

[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/rachel_sussman_the_world_s_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/rachel_sussman_the_world_s_oldest_living_things.html)

~~~
easy
Maybe it's "too much too soon" from a new account? I think all the submissions
I made so far came from technology review articles I've been reading so
perhaps PGs code thinks I'm an account created to spam for a particular
domain.

~~~
mkr-hn
Probably a few people being overeager with the flag link.

~~~
rhino42
That's my best guess. Worst part is, easy probably didn't even know it was
dead

~~~
chc
Why wouldn't easy have known? easy isn't hellbanned AFAIK.

~~~
easy
As far as I can tell the status of a comment as being dead is not apparent to
the user who posted it (unless they're not logged in obviously). This is
actually quite an elegant way of dealing with trolls if you think about it;
instead of knowing they've been banned and trying to game their way around it
they assume they are just being ignored and give up.

------
furiouslysleepy
C'thulu?

