Pretty cool stuff
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Let’s exploit the mine for commercial resources and kill every species there as well! /s
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Does the organism need water?
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Oh man this is like those cool 80s early 90s movies! I’m so excited I just can’t hide it
But in July, a team led by University of Toronto geologist Barbara Sherwood Lollar reported that the mine’s dark, deep water harbors a population of remarkable microbes.
It would seem so, at least as a medium to live. That would suggest they probably need to ingest some? I don’t know, do bacteria need to ingest water?
Some of these organisms’ metabolism depends on sulphur, not oxygen. And some of them eat pyrite (fool’s gold). This news makes Jules Verne’s fiction seem almost pedestrian, which isn’t easy. Some organisms also thrive in temps well above 100c, which was previously thought impossible.
What’s most interesting (to me) is that some of the scientists are now speculating on the possibility that there may exist organisms deep in the earth that do not depend on RNA/DNA for reproduction.
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I think they need it to reproduce, why dehydrated food doesn’t go bad.
But very interesting about using minerals in the cave to survive. I suspect there are other organisms on the deep ocean floor like this that don’t need sunlight as well.
It is interesting. If life arose more than once, there’s no reason to think it would have to have DNA. On the other hand, if DNA-based life is so widespread, other variations may have had trouble surviving.
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So far I haven’t seen any evidence for that. Any links?
So far all organisms on earth have been traced back to one common ancestor. Which itself is mind blowing. Whether that common ancestor was from here on out there is another mind blowing question.
Extremophiles have been studied for years.
Some estimate that there’s more (bacterial) life underground than overground considering the size of the potential habitat. And yes some do not depend on solar energy at all, their energy is chemically derived. Which leads me to speculate they could be out there in deep space too.
Evidence that scientists are speculating about it or that it exists?
Evidence for other types of life not DNA or RNA based?
There certainly isn’t. It would be huge news.
No evidence to date, it’s just speculation (as far as I know). Still, if professional biologists in the academy are willing to openly speculate on the no-RNA thing then it’s remarkable. For many that could be career limiting.
Yeah its quite challenging to detect life if the way you detect life usually depends on standard materials and chemistry.
Also another challenge is to prove something is alive if it is actually in its resting state, like a spore?
Or if it grows really really slowly like over hundreds or thousands of years.
It would be amazing to discover another independent life form than the ones we know.
Does it? The first thing you’d do is stick some of the water under a microscope, I guess
That doesn’t even work with the vast majority of life forms in the ocean.
They only reason we know there is a massive diversity of viruses and bacteria in the ocean is because we can detect their DNA and RNA, but the vast majority have never been grown in any lab or seen under any microscope.
In particular the diversity of ocean viruses is very puzzling.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-discover-nearly-200000-kinds-of-ocean-viruses-20190425/
Viruses, true, but they aren’t quite “life”. If we’re not talking about DNA-based life, it’s not even clear that viruses would exist. But you could be right that something really strange and really small could escape our attention.
I’m not only talking about viruses , bacteria and funghi are incredible diverse too.
The old view was that viruses aren’t alive but yes they are very much life they just move around a lot and don’t need to produce all the material they use. But they do have millions of unique genes and proteins encoded (humans only have something like 20k genes). Viruses themselves are very diverse.
Sure, but certainly visible. My point was that seeing life would seem to be the first way to detect it, and probably a pretty darn good way in most cases.
Not really as I just linked above.
How many viruses and bacteria can you see with the naked eye ?
Bacteria miniscule amount. Viruses…None.
You can’t grow the vast majority of bacteria or viruses in a lab which is what you need to do first to be able to identify them in a microscope. And for viruses you need an electron microscope usually.
There’s so much we still don’t know about microbes in particular.