I’ve already accounted for both of those things, which makes me wonder if you’re really reading what I wrote? The first thing I said was stick some under a microscope which is certainly “seeing”. I’m not talking about the naked eye. And then I talked about viruses and whether they can be characterized as “life” or would even exist in a non-DNA paradigm. All good though! it’s all totally speculative.
Here’s another interesting article about how microbes can 'come back to life '.
I’m not sure if you understand that the vast majority of life that we know about is not detectable in water under a microscope.
Name one kind.
The vast majority, read the links to Craig venters ocean diversity project. It’s not me that’s stating it.
OK, I will do that. Perhaps I am laboring under a misconception
You could see some of the bacteria in a microscope. But you have to stain them and separate them . And then you’d confuse tens of thousands or even millions of them because you are only seeing a picture of the outside even if you manage to be able to isolate some of them and stain them. And the rarer ones will be crowded out by the much more common ones. You can’t really learn much about them under a microscope itself. You need to look at their biochemistry, grow them up and do a bunch of experiments on them.
But you could still see them right? And even in the case of something really small, certainly with an electron microscope. How did these scientists initially determine there was life in the waters of that mine? That would be interesting to know. I have no idea what biologists might do in these situations, in fact.
I doubt there could be a situation where rarer non-DNA life was coexisting with DNA-based life. DNA-based life is so robust it would surely have eliminated it from the picture? We’d be talking about an extremely localized situation where only the alternate form of life was present.
The mine is obviously a very different environment. I recall that yes some scientists have simply gone in and looked for bacteria in the areas where there are.hot water pools and used a microscope . Some can be seen in a microscope. But it’s difficult cos they are obviously adapted to live in extreme heat and pH. They will try and DNA sequence them to understand if they are novel microbes.
Also some of them are spores and they might not spring back to life without the right conditions. And their reproduction could be really slow.
I’ve seen Deepstar Six enough times to know how this is going to end.
It’s a good question. Did life pop up multiple times and our form became dominant and wiped out the others or they just died out? Or was life seeded here and it’s common in our galaxy already (panspermia )?
Or was it just a really fortuitous event ?
It’s sure fun to imagine that there’s other kinds of life out there on Earth that we somehow missed cos of our blind spots. There’s no reason that another kind of life couldn’t exist right here on Earth…In fact to me it feels kind of weird that there’s only one kind that we know of (because although plants and people and fish and jellyfish and bacteria all seem very different we are actually really just cousins, you pretty much take a gene from a bacteria and a plant or a jellyfish , just do a little tweaking and it can work in an animal, same vice versa, we are basically made out of the same lego ).
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It seems likely that if there is some form of “life” in the deep molten earth, they would naturally be extremely hard to find. Not many have gone in there to check…
How cool would it be though. I totally agree there is so much we dont know. We will always be finding out and learning incorrect things 
Viruses are a great example of something we can see, differentiate and identify, use and ultimately probably figure out. And we still cant figure out how to classify them. If thats not motivation for exploration and an open minded approach to science i dont know what is 