
Strange life-forms found deep in a mine point to vast 'underground Galapagos' - hhs
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/strange-life-forms-found-deep-mine-point-vast-underground-galapagos-ncna1050906
======
DoctorOetker
>Sherwood Lollar wants to sequence the genes of the Kidd Creek microbes and
then do a 23andMe-style analysis to unravel their kinship to other residents
of the deep Earth

Why woud a pop science author make free advertisement for 23andMe? genome
sequencing and genome ancestry are older than some random company _which does
not even do full genome sequencing_ 23andMe only does _genotyping_...

~~~
nightfly
Because more people today are probably more familiar with 23andMe so it's
simple way of explaining it that people would understand.

~~~
DoctorOetker
the mission statement for a pop sci author should be to educate the public,
this means _not dumbing down_.

the only avoidable reason it's more familiar to the public is because of all
the previous pop sci authors preferring to say 23andMe instead of "genome
sequencing" and "genome analysis" etc

if enough pop sci articles stop dumbing down the public would better
understand what this is all about...

~~~
sprafa
I don’t see how that’s some kind of horrific simplification...

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's an ad, and also kind of like calling making yourself french fries a
"McDonald's-style process".

Genetics is both popular-culture topic and part of high school curriculum
nowadays, so it doesn't need too hard explaining, and the kind of person that
wouldn't understand the explanation probably also doesn't know what 23andMe is
(which reinforces this being a sneaky ad).

~~~
DoctorOetker
(upvoted but)

also like calling making yourself fries _making yourself "french" fries_ :P

~~~
TeMPOraL
Hah, sorry. I was taught that this was the correct universal way of calling
this type of food across all varieties of English.

------
ajuc
I think it's very likely that life has originated on Earth many times. If it
happened once, so early in the age of Earth - it should happen more than once.

But the developed descendants of the first life outcompeted the later ones
immediately so we only ever discover life that is related to us.

But if we search where life related to us couldn't go - maybe we'll find
completely independent trees of life?

~~~
garmaine
Then why isn’t there ANY examples of life simpler than a bacterium, which
itself is insanely complex? Why does all life share the same genetic and amino
acid coding system, a relatively arbitrary choice?

More likely, in all seriousness, that life originated in Mars and came here
via panspermia during the early bombardment period. Mars was warm and wet
while Earth was still suffering cataclysmic impacts and only relatively mature
examples of Martian life (e.g. bacteria) would have survived the trip.

If life originated multiple times on Earth there would be evidence for that.
Heck if life originated on Earth there should be evidence for that, which
there bizarrely isn’t.

~~~
dpark
> _More likely, in all seriousness, that life originated in Mars and came here
> via panspermia during the early bombardment period._

I am always surprised at the number of people willing to make assertions like
this. Panspermia itself is a hypothesis. Panspermia _from Mars specifically_
is a huge stretch. There is absolutely no basis for claiming that this is
_likely_.

> _only relatively mature examples of Martian life (e.g. bacteria) would have
> survived the trip._

Why do you make this assumption? Life complexity is not generally correlated
with space survivability. At least not positively correlated.

~~~
perl4ever
"Panspermia itself is a hypothesis. Panspermia from Mars specifically is a
huge stretch."

I think "from Mars specifically" is something that requires evidence to treat
as likely.

However, I don't think "Earth is the unique place where life originated"
should be the default assumption according to Occam's razor. Nothing nearby is
anything like Earth on the surface, but it's not speculation that there were
billions of years and unimaginably large amounts of volume for life to develop
underground in the rest of the universe, where it's warm and sheltered from
radiation. The idea that nothing happened until Earth became "Earth-like"
isn't the logical default. Naming the contrary of this far-fetched claim
"panspermia" doesn't make it a "thing" that needs a "basis". By analogy, I
would say that a creationist claim of humanity originating with Adam and Eve
is what needs evidence, not the contrary assumption, that all humans had
parents.

~~~
garmaine
Where else? Venus' habitable period, if it existed, was quite short. It's
gravity is also much higher and it is inward in the solar system. Even before
it turned into the hell-hole it is now, dynamical models show that it probably
sent few rocks our way.

The Moon appears to have formed without the resources to sustain life as we
know it. There are great candidates for life in the outer solar system
(Europa, Enceladus, Titan), but ejecta from these mostly get eaten up by the
giant planets.

The only likely candidates for solar system origin panspermia is Mars, and
maybe Ceres. Only Mars (and Earth) had the long wet period with open oceans,
geothermal heat sources, plate tectonics, and sizable atmosphere. Mars isn't
the only option, but the odds are way, way higher.

At least for life as we know it. But the point of panspermia is that it
_would_ be life as we know it ;)

------
wrycoder
Tommy Gold looks increasingly prescient. Refer to his book, “The Deep Hot
Biosphere”, written nearly twenty years ago. (And check him out on Wikipedia -
he also first stated how the ear hears different frequencies and that pulsars
are spinning neutron stars.)

These organisms are close to the root of the tree. Photosynthesis came much
later.

~~~
dogma1138
Tom Gold wrote that paper after the discovery of life forms in underwater
thermal vents, during that period he was trying to build a theory of non-
biological formation of fossils fuels the discovery of life forms living in
extreme conditions at extreme depths made him reconsider his stance somewhat
but not to abandon it.

His paper was about microbial life feeding on petroleum and so he postulated
that it would have to reach several KM in depth at least.

------
Herodotus38
I think there is an error/misconception in the first paragraph about this mine
being the deepest spot on land ever explored (unless they mean by people
physically walking around). To the best of my knowledge the Kola borehole in
Russia is much deeper at 12,200 meters.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole)

------
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
Speaking of strange life-forms, the first known fully anaerobic animal,
discovered in 2014:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoloricus_cinziae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoloricus_cinziae)

~~~
ajuc
That is so cool.

------
nonbel
I'd like to see a plot of "most cells in an organism" vs "average
elevation/depth of habitat".

------
jcfrei
Very interesting. This gives us a good idea of what kind of life we might find
on a planet without an oxygen rich atmosphere such as ours.

~~~
BurningFrog
Life on Earth developed without oxygen.

The oxygen only appeared 2.4 billion years ago, as a side effect of
photosynthesis and the event is sometimes called the "Oxygen Holocaust", since
it caused almost all life on Earth to go extinct.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event)

~~~
mirimir
Yeah, that's the really cool thing. Most of the survivors likely live in the
deep biosphere, well protected from oxygen. But some also survive on the
surface, wherever there are anaerobic environments. Such as in some swamps and
sediments, canned food, and far-gone wounds.

------
chiefalchemist
> "We’re finding that we don't really understand the limits to life,” Sherwood
> Lollar said...

As is often the case:

What we don't know > what we think we know

------
BurningFrog
If there is life on Mars, that's where it is!

------
Gatsky
If you are daydreaming about how life started I can recommend ‘A New History
of Life’ by Ward & Kirschvink for getting somewhat up to speed with the
science.

tldr: we don’t know, and may never know

