
Deep Beneath Your Feet, They Live in the Octillions - dnetesn
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/science/subsurface-microbes.html
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ryanmercer
Doesn't even have to be deep beneath your feet, a square meter of average soil
contains thousands of _species_.

In that square meter you can have 10,000,000,000 baceria, 1,000,000,000
protozoa, 5,000,000 nematodes, 100,000 mites 10,000-200,000 individual
Collembola, 10,000 rotifiers and/or tardigrades, a few thousand larger
insects/spiders/diplurans and dozens of slugs & snails. That's within a few
inches of the surface. A cubic meter would increase that considerably for
stuff like bacteria and protozoa.

This is my biggest issue with terraforming another planet. It isn't the
massive geo-engineering, it's adding all of that biodiversity and spreading it
over a regional or global scale... even transplanting an initial acre would be
a daunting task.

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mistrial9
maybe a _natural_ square meter of average soil.. think of the micro-plastics,
hard chemicals and decaying man-made materials and _their_ prevalence.. quite
a mess I would think

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EamonnMR
I was surprised to recently read that there are bacteria and archea living
inside oil wells.

[https://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/resources/oilfield_review/...](https://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/resources/oilfield_review/ors89/jan89/4_bacteria.pdf)

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kieckerjan
Reminds me of the Deep Hot Biosphere theory by the brilliant and controversial
Thomas Gold. Posited as early as 1992 this theory states that microbial life
is very prevalent at great depth and that it may be responsible for the
production of hydrocarbons.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold)

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Luc
I remember reading this at the time and finding it quite persuasive. I would
love to find out how it fares compared to current scientific consensus.

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heyjudy
[https://outline.com/3HbVpd](https://outline.com/3HbVpd)

