Life Found In Deepest Layer of Earth's Crust 335
michaelmarshall writes "For the first time, life has been found in the gabbroic layer of the crust. The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect, but they are different from the bacteria in the layers above; they mostly feed on hydrocarbons that are produced by abiotic reactions deep in the crust. It could mean that similar microbes are living even deeper, perhaps even in the mantle."
Living under surface (Score:4, Interesting)
This got me thinking an interesting idea.
Why don't humans populate more of the inner earth? Sure, most people don't like the environment just like that, but you can build it. Make fake environments. In the end, they will look and feel natural too. You can also easily get rid of gasses and other pollution problem by dumping them upwards.
And if you go deep enough, who owns the land? Can you start a new country like lets say, 50 kilometers below surface?
Re:Living under surface (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Living under surface (Score:4, Funny)
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
Re:Living under surface (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't know how to describe it - I can give you a list of problems, like Ventillation, Heating, Vitamin D - which all have obvious solutions available,
but they just aren't as efficient as living on the surface.
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"I don't know how to describe it - I can give you a list of problems, like Ventillation, Heating, Vitamin D - which all have obvious solutions available,"
You mean cooling. In deep mines, it gets pretty hot. Temperature increases by 30-50 degrees Celsius for each kilometer of depth.
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Yes - I knew that too - I just couldn't think of the word for conditioning air...
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In that specific case 'cooling' might be a pretty good choice.
Re:Living under surface (Score:5, Funny)
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> Yes - I knew that too - I just couldn't think of the word for conditioning air...
This may be a local colloquialism but around here the word for 'conditioning air' is 'AIR CONDITIONING'.
You're welcome.
Re:Living under surface (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Living under surface (Score:4, Insightful)
Central Greenland or the depths of the Gobi desert would be even easier, and there's plenty of room.
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He was not suggesting subterranean dwellings in those locations. He was pointing out that there is still a lot of sparsely populated surface to live on before resorting to subterranean colonization.
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I bet there's lots of land under the surface of the Moon.
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The ownership of the subsurface would belong to the surface owners all the way to the core.
Now some rights - water and mineral rights - don't always belong to the surface holder, an example in the US is on Indian Reservations, mineral rights remain under the control of the US Department of Interior.
50 km under Kansas would still be Kansas.
We don't populate the subsurface because it's a nasty place, hot and wet.
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They are managed by the government but they definitely belong to the tribes. Indian tribes own 3% of petroleum and gas reserves in the USA and 15% of coal.
Re:Living under surface (Score:5, Insightful)
Indian tribes own 3% of petroleum and gas reserves in the USA and 15% of coal.
Sure. Until the day comes that Uncle Sam or one of his corporate owners wants them. Then their "ownership" will be respected about as well as all the other treaties have been over the last few hundred years....
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50 km under Kansas would still be Kansas.
Ah, such charming naiveté, such amusing nonsense.
50 km under Kansas would be Kansas, were it not actually Khan'saxz, empire of The Dusty Ancient One, who thankfully is content to rule the followers he crafted from nightmares given substance. Were you to dig down to those depths your life would surely be forfeit, if you were truly fortunate and did not instead lose your sanity and your soul.
Just sayin'. Don't dig under Kansas. Bad idea.
Radiation? (Score:2)
Radiation could be an issue, depending on what's in the local rock.
Re:Living under surface (Score:4, Funny)
But if you dig too deep, you will release the clowns. Nothing says oops like busting through an adamantine cavern and finding yourself facing a spirit of fire.
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Just set up a cave-in atop your adamantine mines. A long row of doors should slow the clowns down enough to let your miner escape. When the fun starts, pull the lever and seal them back in.
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Why don't humans populate more of the inner earth?
I can think of several reasons.
That's just a few reasons from t
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travel to and from the surface would take a LOT more time than an equal distance travelled on the surface
This one is actually less likely to be true. Remember that travel on the surface involves the curvature of the Earth. Travel through the Earth can be done in relatively straight lines!
Yes, in both types of travel you still need to avoid obstacles such as mountains above ground or aquifers underground so your path of travel might not be as direct as the optimum path.
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Asimov's Caves of Steel are expensive (Score:2)
Setting up underground cities a la Asimov is a little pricey. These things would effectively be buried space stations whose only advantages are built-in gravity and no worries about radiation or meteor strikes. You'd have to provide air conditioning, fresh air, food, clean water, not to mention the cost of just getting the things built.
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What you're suggesting would not be worth it unless we actually ran out of surface space.
I'm not even sure it would be worth it then. Wouldn't living on or under the oceans be cheaper than living underground?
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I'd think storms would be a significant problem.
Re:Living under surface (Score:4, Insightful)
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Depends on your scale and/or materials choice. You could build a series of medium-sized boats loosely linked together so they could ride waves as a flexible "mat", yet the width of the "mat" would prevent any of the boats from capsizing. If you got caught in a severe storm, it might be a rough ride, but you'd be better off than your landlocked brethren as long as you built it pretty solidly.
Or you could build one massively huge rigid ship that would be big enough to simply ignore any waves under 100 feet
Re:Living under surface (Score:5, Insightful)
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Overpopulation is therefore a self-correcting issue.
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Reading all the replies to this post makes me happy. There *do* appear to be rational, sane logical adults here. But go to a Space Nutter thread and suddenly it's "We must colonize the universe!" "For the species!" "We're running out of room!" "Wahh!"
There are nuts of all sorts, for sure. However there are still some very valid, logical arguments for space exploration and colonization.
First of all, it's never a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket. By spreading the human race among several planets/space stations you lower the chance of humanity being wiped out by a large meteor or other catastrophe.
Secondly, there's a lot of valuable resources out there. It makes sense to form communities near resources such as mineral-rich meteors and asteroid
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First of all, it's never a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket. By spreading the human race among several planets/space stations you lower the chance of humanity being wiped out by a large meteor or other catastrophe.
Pardon me if I wax philosophical, but if the entire human race was wiped out ... so what? Let's say there were people on Earth and Planet X, 6.7 billion people on each. Now say an asteroid wipes out everyone on Earth. Is the scenario where planet X exists better than a the scenario without it just because there are still people somewhere else? It's still 6.7 billion lives lost. Why does it matter so much that there are still some people somewhere?
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If we have no warning then yea you make a good point, but if we have warning then we can evacuate people to an alternate place to live.
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Oh, sure, spread us out around the solar system but you get just one rogue neutron star wandering through and WHAMMO! Next thing you know you're having to go out scrabbling for a pail of air [wikipedia.org].
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It's not entirely deluded paranoia, it's more a matter of examining the short vs the long game. In the short haul, there are much better uses of resources. In the very long term however, it's something we will eventually need to do (many generations down the line) and it's not an entirely stupid idea to start working on solutions to the most obvious problems with a space colonization program. If nothing else, there's all kinds of room for tangential benefits of research, especially in materials and medic
Just proving the rule.... (Score:3, Funny)
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Currently in existence? Death doesn't "exist," it happens. To living things. You don't get to count all the years something is not alive and add that to the 'dead' column. We're talking about life versus death. Death is not the absence of life, it is the cessation of life. Death can only be more ubiquitous than life if you adopt strange metrics which, quite obviously, no one here agrees with you on. I won't call you an idiot because this is all semantics and speculation, and there is no definitive answer. I
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This started out with the little shit claiming someone was an idiot for saying life was ubiquitous. He was utterly failed to prove his initial point.
Which is because he's a troll.
Note the username, which has a string of numbers at the end, numbers which aren't part of the UID. Further note that he's posting with more than one account, same name, different numbers, in this thread.
Do a search on the name, without the numbers. You'll find it's sock puppets all the way down. Check the posting history for any of his accounts, nothing but -1 Trolls. You'll also see him repeating a few lines ad nauseam, arguing with himself and generally crying out for att
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Well, thanks. Now I feel dumb.
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Death does not remain constant. Death is just a transition from living to not living. Is sleep constant? Is eating constant? No, they are actions that occur. You keep asserting things that are unprovable philosophical semantic bullshit, and calling people idiots when they disagree with you, which makes you a self centered pedantic asshole.
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"Ubiquitous" doesn't mean "lasts forever". It means "existing everywhere at the same time". A company can have an ad that is ubiquitous, for example - it seems to be everywhere. Of course, in the history of the universe, that company's ads don't exist for much long than they do exist, and they don't last forever. But they are ubiquitous.
So in the context of the OP, "life is ubiquitous" is a valid, if unproven, assertion that has nothing to do with death.
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It's not either/or in this case.
Everywhere where there is life, there is death.
The one state follows the other.
Ergo if life is everywhere, death is everywhere,
not nowhere.
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I take it you're not a native English speaker, as you clearly don't understand the meaning of the word. It has nothing to do with how long something lasts. You might want to buy an English-language dictionary sometime so you don't sound quite so ESL.
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Listen to what people are telling you. People on this site tend to be smarter than average. They are not, in general, stupid. You have half a dozen people telling you your interpretation is wrong. That is because you are wrong. They are not stupid or ignorant. You are using words in ways that are non standard. And being a total dick in the process. Death does not last forever. Death is an instantaneous transition from living to non living. Life and death are both ubiquitous. But there is more life than deat
have they named it yet? (Score:5, Funny)
if not, it should be Bacillus Balrogus
"The humans dug too greedily and deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of the Chilean copper mine... shadow and flame... and Bacillus Balrogus!"
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If it's really deep, they could name it after the nameless things: "Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things". Except they're nameless.
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Glenn Beck?
Life elsewhere... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: people don't believe there's no life. (Score:2)
Yeah, amazing ; ).
But, perhaps more importantly, is there life elsewhere NOW?
Space is but one dimension in the space-time continuum.
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U R right of course,
"Space is but three of the dimensions et al".
My point was more along the lines of "We'll likely find ancient remains or organisms such as described in the article, not life as we know it".
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The fact of the matter is that -ANY- part of Earth, even one we don't usually imagine having life - like the core of the Earth, is still actually more habitable than half the celestial bodies in our solar system.
We have had our suspicions about life on Mars though!
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Yeah but a subtle point is the bacteria probably didn't *originate* under those conditions. The bacteria more than likely evolved from bacteria living in more life friendly conditions.
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It amazes me that people don't believe there's no life elsewhere in the universe when we're still discovering it in new forms here at home...
In fairness to the people you're criticizing: The life that has evolved into these extreme locations had a nice comfortable eco system to support it on the way there. There's a big difference between life moving into that environment and life originating from it.
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IODP Drilling sponsored by BP, Big Oil et. al (Score:2)
"...Tom Wilson and the entire Shell organization bent over backward to release seismic, well, drilling, and geotechnical data. Shell employees generously shared their time to help design a safe and effective drilling program. The scientists, engineers, and lawyers of Shell, Amerada Hess, and British Petroleum worked together to achieve scientific drilling within industry lease blocks."
http://publications.iodp.org/proceedings/308/acknow.htm
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The question remains... (Score:2)
One question (Score:2)
Did it have horns and a tail?
9km in sedimentary rock (Score:3, Interesting)
The rock in this article was igneous rock. Its more difficult to figure out how bacteria got so deep in that kind of rock.
Re:Ergo oil (Score:5, Informative)
Even if the source is from bacteria instead of peat moss (not dinosaurs), that still doesn't address the rate problem. So far as we know, oil is basically stable at the levels we drill for it, it doesn't decompose into something else over time. If that's true, that means that the deposits that we have access to took millions and millions of years to become as large as they are; in other words, oil still isn't a renewing resource, even ignoring the other long term problems involved in burning hydrocarbons for our energy production.
Re:Ergo oil (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Trying to reason that the fill is slow from the fact that the reservoirs exist is like trying to determine the rate of water flowing out of a faucet by examining the size of a water glass.
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That doesn't do anything about global warming, though.
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Re:Ergo oil (Score:4, Insightful)
The carbon would come from the atmosphere and go back.
How exactly does atmospheric carbon penetrate the kilometers of sediment and rock needed to reach most oceanic gabbros?
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In fact, thinking about it a little more, we really don't want to send carbon dioxide into the earth. We need the oxygen.
The amount of oxygen bonded to carbon in the atmosphere is insignificant, roughly on the order of a thousand times smaller than the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
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That doesn't do anything about global warming, though.
Sure it does. It means that even if life on the surface gets extinguished in flames, life will continue just fine deep inside the earth. So we have nothing to worry about!
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That doesn't do anything about global warming, though.
Easy, pal. This thread will turn into a divisive political shouting match well enough on its own. No need for that kind of talk.
Oh btw the effect of carbon emissions on global temperatures is overstated YOU LOSE nyah nyah.
Sources:
google.com
yahoo.com
tubgirl.com
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Wait a minute, these bacteria are feeding on hydrocarbons... they're not producing oil, they're eating it. Oil that rightfully belongs to us (and by us, I mean oil companies of course). Those bastards! I say we nuke them all. (The oil companies I mean, not the bacteria.)
Re:Ergo oil (Score:5, Insightful)
The sheer amount of chutzpah passing in place of intelligence in this post is just... astounding. It's like stupid has become legitimized!
Ergo the oil argument that much of our oil supply is made from bacteria and not old dinosaurs.
Which has what to do with sustainability, again? You imply sustainability by mentioning it in the next sentence.
If the bacteria is supplied from the crust inside the earth, the oil fields can replenish and oil becomes much more sustainable than before.
I mean... wow! It's just like farming!
We know almost *nothing* about this process, except that the metabolic rate of these bacteria are mind numbingly slow. We're talking at rates where a single reproduction is a thousand years in length. Just how long are you willing to wait for your next tank of gas?
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous
Unless, of course, you look at this with something other than stupid. Get that out of the way, and you see that this changes about as much the grass growth on your lawn over the next 3.5 minutes.
With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
This happens in all wells, either with Oil or Water. It's not like there's a bladder down under ground and we're going to empty it. Oil and water are present in the fissures and pores of the surrounding rocks and soil. When you pump out the water/oil, you create a low pressure point, and fluid seeps from the surrounding soil. It's only in the case of extreme ignorance that this effect seems remarkable.
Your post is an extremely good example of why relying on the "wisdom of the crowds" can instead be relying on the "stupid foibles and commonly mistunderstood ideas" of the crowds.
Anti-oil (was Re:Ergo oil) (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to miss the part where TFA notes that bacteria found deep in the crust degrade the hydrocarbons, which are produced by abiotic processes. That's pretty much the opposite of having an oil supply made from bacteria.
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Ergo the oil argument that much of our oil supply is made from bacteria and not old dinosaurs. If the bacteria is supplied from the crust inside the earth, the oil fields can replenish and oil becomes much more sustainable than before.
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous. With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
So by your argument, we don't have to worry about running out of oil because we can just sit back for another few billion years for the oil fields to get replenished back to their original levels? Hrm...seems like there's a problem in that logic that I can't quite put my finger on.
Re:Ergo oil (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA. (Or the summary, for that matter). The oil there is produced ABIOTICALLY. i.e. from chemical reactions that have nothing to do with dinosaurs, OR bacteria. That, and the bacteria found there don't produce, but eat the hydrocarbons.
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Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged
No, there is exactly one way looking at this that is politically charged, and that is apparently how you've decided to look at it. Which is that oil definitely comes from this bacteria, and it's replenishing our oil supplies just as soon as we can empty them.
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Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous. With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
Abiogenic oil [wikipedia.org], the great oil conspiracy theory. Which of these is the more likely:
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"If the rate of replenishment was fast enough to keep up with our level of usage, the planet would have turned into one big ball of oil a billion years ago."
And if we didn't fish the oceans would be over flowing with fish and piling up on the shores. If there is a specific equilibrium that can be maintained sometimes getting it to that is fast enough. Over course even with fishing things can be overfished but it has been found that populations can rebuild very quickly in those examples as well.
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If oil could be produced with bacteria, then many more companies could set up "oil farms" and give big oil some competition >:) and if oil can be produced from materials on the surface it would be carbon-neutral...
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That sounds like a challange to me.
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What is the point of the bacteria there and what would happen if it was not there?
Don't get me started about the ape-like bipeds on the top of the crust. What is up with those things?
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I was expecting CRAB PEOPLE!