This reminded me of a Kurzgesagt video from a few months ago on the same topic [0]. I see that the author, Karen Lloyd, was one of the experts they consulted when making that video.
While we are talking about Kurzgesagt: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HjHMoNGqQTI
Did you not find the response from Kurzgesagt, linked below that video, to be a persuasive rebuttal?
https://www.reddit.com/r/kurzgesagt/comments/10jlyyk/kurzges...
To paint a full picture and form your own opinion, here's the counter-rebuttal: https://old.reddit.com/r/thehatedone/comments/10pb1q9/my_res...
That thing is "How Kurzgesagt Cooks Propaganda For Billionaires" and seems a bit of a moany biased rant about billionaires bad etc.
Reminds me of Thomas Gold's "Deep Hot Biosphere" theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold#%22Deep_Hot_Biosph...
I got sucked into spending quite a while reading about that stuff after seeing a link to Gold on HN. He was an interesting guy. Since he died in 2004 some of his ideas, like a lot of life in the crust seem to have proven correct. Others - that most oil and gas has a primordial origin, not from life seem mostly wrong. There are definitely primordial hydrocarbons - Titan has seas of methane. However on the inner planets a lot evaporated and the majority of our fossil fuels seem of biological origin.
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..."
> The major categories of visible life on Earth have been pretty much settled for centuries. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that scientists found “intraterrestrials” — microscopic organisms living in what the biogeochemist David Valentine calls a “microbial purgatory deep below the Earth’s surface."
Does anyone know the paper(s) from the 1980s where the discovery was published?
Here's a survey article from the late 80s which should have a rich references section for you:
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.
Thanks!
If there is life on Mars, it will be deep underground!
Do we know anything about the occasional Methane emissions I heard about on Mars?
There are areas on Mars where we strongly believe brine is right below the surface, so there could be life underground but it may not all be that deep.
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.
This is incredibly exciting! I had no idea that we have photo evidence of ice on Mars. Thank you for sharing this!
Update: It’s so hard to believe that this was captured in 2008!
Liquid water below the surface is the newer interesting part. You can see Mars ice caps with a telescope from Earth.
I think this also derives naturally from another really interesting observation. The surface of Mars, that apparent desert, is 2%+ water by weight. [1] I say "+" because later studies have shown it to be even moister. So this is really interesting in the context of the movie/book "The Martian" because this surprise came out after the book was released.
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...
We may have to decontaminate the water, which might be full of azides or other things. On the flip side those compounds may be useful for industry or fertilizer in the long term.
Perhaps. If it does, it probably couldn't be past a certain depth. The deepest man-made hole was about 12km, and reached roughly 180C at that depth. That's well beyond what even the most durable hyperthermophile organisms can withstand, to speak nothing of what the pressure would be like at greater depths.
Every time we assume a limitation like this we've been wrong. If tardigrades can survive floating through space, I think it's reasonable to guess that there might be life that survives at the other extreme.
Where do you draw the line for the other "extreme"?
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't see why there could't be stabilizing adaptations for phosphate groups, or evolution of alternatives like phosphonates, thiophosphate or imidophosphate. Evolving stable enzymes that still have catalytic activity is also a big lift, but life consistently surprises us.
While it’s true and impressive that tardigrades can survive all that, that doesn’t mean they can thrive there. They survive it by entering a stasis, but that’s about as far from living as one can get temporarily.
There's loads of life down there but there seems a top limit to all known life around 130C. "The current record growth temperature is 122 °C, for Methanopyrus kandleri".That allows you to go ~10km down.
> 180C at that depth. That's well beyond what even the most durable hyperthermophile organisms can withstand
How about the organisms living in or around the hydrothermal vents in the mid-ocean ridges?
A couple covered here imply "probably <120C": https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/deep-sea/microbes-keep-hydro...
Seems a lot more productive and straightforward to sample rather than speculate.
From what i read, this post doesnt announce we’ve found some crazy extremophile unicellular microbe. Just that there is evidence to suggest they are there (due to the chemical makeup of soil/boreholes).
1 cross borehole electromagnetic imaging rhubarb
Stapledon, The Flames: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flames:_A_Fantasy
clarke's "the fires within" was coincidentally also published in 1947
Hell?
>If the subsurface were like an inert container, we could just pump that gas down there, sit back and watch the global temperature stabilize and the glaciers creep back to where they’re supposed to be.
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'?
We can pretty clearly delineate how much of warming and CO2 concentration is human-caused.
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.
I think you're hesitating over saying "it's supposed to be nice for people".
But that is what most of us tacitly suppose. Ultimately the world's a park.
Human accelerated change is the concern.
Some comics [0] [1] might be able to get the point across in a way that words seldom do when arguing on the interblags.
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.
It's funny/ironic that an active webcomic, whose tagline says it contains sarcasm, and often publishes absurd fake graphs and fake figures, the same comic that is cited here for comic relief and biting insight into nerd topics, the same comic where an entire indepdent wiki has arisen to explain each comic in turn, this comic also once-in-a-while publishes totally serious graphs that are not made-up but based on facts and Randall cites his sources with a straight face, meanwhile writing a somewhat serious blog called "What If?" that tries to distill some absurd question into reality, or at least truth in speculative fiction.
Art imitates life. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.