[HN Gopher] How deep does life go?
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How deep does life go?
Author : Hooke
Score : 138 points
Date : 2024-04-08 21:43 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| macawfish wrote:
| All the way deep.
| p1esk wrote:
| I hoped it was about how deep life goes underground.
| trescenzi wrote:
| It is:
|
| "It found living bacterial cells 1,626 meters below the
| seafloor, in rocks 111 million years old, at temperatures of
| 113 degrees Celsius. This led the authors to estimate that
| bacteria in subsurface sediments may make up as much as two-
| thirds of total bacterial biomass."
| mongol wrote:
| Good news. Seems then that an Armageddon type of event would
| not extinguish all life on earth.
| huytersd wrote:
| Honestly I don't think anything could extinguish _all_ life
| on earth short of maybe 20 comets hitting earth at the same
| time or something.
| samplatt wrote:
| I wonder how long it'd take for life to leave after Earth
| leaves the goldilocks zone. How much life would there be
| after the oceans have evaporated and stripped into space?
| If life could evolve to not require water at all, maybe
| it could survive until the sun physically envelops the
| planet.
| antonvs wrote:
| 20 comets (or asteroids) wouldn't even come close to
| doing it. Events like that can cause extinctions of many
| ecosystems, by many others will be essentially
| unaffected. Microbes in the sediment below the seafloor
| are a good example. They wouldn't even notice the comets.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The slow and inexorable brightening of the Sun (it's
| already 30% brighter than when it settled onto the Main
| Sequence) will eventually cause a runaway greenhouse
| effect. The oceans will all be converted to steam and the
| surface temperature will be far beyond what life could
| survive. After that things only get hotter until the Sun
| enters its end stages and leaves the Main Sequence.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A hot surface does very little to life several miles
| below it.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Since heat is flowing out of the Earth, the temperature
| below will eventually become hotter than the temperature
| at the surface.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| 2.8 billion years[0] is the high estimate before _all_
| remaining life on earth goes extinct. Likely including
| these little buggers.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
| PostOnce wrote:
| based on our current knowledge, not only of the science
| that we can extrapolate to the future, but of our
| technology and how we will apply it
|
| note that that list is all negative things we suspect
| will happen and include no accounting for our own
| intervention in matters
| zehaeva wrote:
| I'm not sure how anyone's intervention could ever
| withstand some of these effects.
|
| I could foresee maybe a sun shade of some sort to help
| mitigate the increase in temperature, but at some point
| the sun is going to envelope the earth.
|
| Also, this several billion years into the future. Anyone
| left wouldn't be anything you could remotely call human.
| Evolution hasn't stopped in humans.
| stuart73547373 wrote:
| iirc we could plausibly move to Titan and live off
| nuclear energy
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere that that may have saved life
| on Earth at least once.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Think bigger with your mass extinction events! Maybe a
| rogue blackhole zipping through the inner solar system and
| ripping the crust off the planet like a ripe tangerine.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If there is a Creator with an inordinate fondness for
| beetles, their fondness for prokaryotes remains obviously
| superordinate.
| femto wrote:
| > The Alvin's most famous dive, however, was its 1968 exploration
| of the wreck of the ill-fated Titanic.
|
| That should be 1986?
| mkl wrote:
| Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin#Exploration_of_RMS
| _T.... It was only found in 1985.
| miramba wrote:
| Noticed that too and wondered: A typo or AI?
| anarbadalov wrote:
| A typo. Thank you for flagging! I updated the article and
| added a correction. HN is the best.
| MC995 wrote:
| I would think just a simple typo.
|
| Mixing up 1986 -> 1968 is a very human transposition error
| that I've not personally seen a LLM make.
|
| Now, if the article said the the famous dive was done by
| Alvin and the Chipmunks and not the deep submersible vehicle
| Alvin, I would suspect AI.
| permo-w wrote:
| this is the kind of error humans make because we generate
| text letter by letter. LLMs generate text in whole words or
| meaningful fragments of whole words (tokens). unless 1986
| is unusually statistically similar to 1968, an LLM is
| unlikely to make that mistake.
| b800h wrote:
| I wonder how much of an impact these bacteria have on climate
| change, given how numerous they are, and that their activities
| appear to fix CO2.
|
| For example, from Wikipedia:
|
| hydrogen sulfide chemosynthesis: 18H2S + 6CO2 +
| 3O2 - C6H12O6 (carbohydrate) + 12H2O + 18S
| basil-rash wrote:
| Verily I say unto you, bacteria have had a far greater impact
| on climate change than humans could ever dream to. Oxygen
| wouldn't be here without them, for one. And plant-available
| Nitrogen.
|
| All the changes we are seeing now are absolutely nothing
| compared to the impact bacteria had had on the climate.
| toss1 wrote:
| Perhaps, but bacteria do it on time scales of hundreds of
| millions of years, while humans do it on timescales of
| decades or centuries.
|
| Take _ANY_ other process and speed it up by 5-6 orders of
| magnitude and see how different it is. For example, try
| sipping your coffee at only 3 orders of magnitude faster --
| it 'll literally require an explosion to accelerate to
| 1000fps and then decelerate to 0 to traverse the 2' from
| saucer to lips in in 2/1000 sec instead of 2 sec. The effect
| on ecosystems is similar; changes that would be easily
| adapted to by all flora and fauna are instead fatal to many.
| And those ecosystems sustain us.
|
| Moreover, even the slow pace of bacterial climate change is
| no solace -- the most notable change they caused was the
| Great Oxidation Event and Snowball Earth wiping out almost
| all life for 300 million years.
|
| I'd prefer to not whistle ignorance into the wind. I'd rather
| we take simple measures that make life better for everyone
| and everything, and yes, using sustainable energy sources
| instead of burning valuable and increasingly scarce
| hydrocarbons is a basic step.
|
| [0] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019asbi.book..261T/abs
| tra...
| basil-rash wrote:
| The changes introduced by bacteria were certainly not
| adapted to by all flora and fauna, as you go on to
| describe. But here we are.
|
| Had the bacteria said "hey guys all this Oxygen we're
| making is seriously disrupting the environment and killing
| a lot of stuff, we should limit our productivity in order
| to ensure that doesn't happen, after all we're the greatest
| things that will ever be on this planet so we have to make
| sure it's well suited for us and only us forever and ever
| and ever", here we would not be.
| toss1 wrote:
| It is silly to speculating about the results of bacteria
| somehow limiting or compensating for their excess O2
| production, especially since there could be many ways it
| could have been done (not necessarily limiting, but
| evolving CO2 or CH4 producing species to counterbalance,
| etc.). Such speculations could just as easily conclude
| that we could have evolved a billion years earlier if
| they'd "done something", and we'd now be 1000x as mature
| a species.
|
| Even if we make your assumption that humans are somehow
| entitled to do whatever we want, it is massively stupid
| to ignore the fact that we depend on an extremely complex
| web of life to survive. We can break some links, but
| breaking too many will literally be suicidal.
|
| When we see that we are doing something that _WILL_
| inevitably break many of those links (not to mention
| flood most of our major cities in decades, which is
| already happening), the only wise thing to do is to
| adjust course to prevent that destruction.
|
| Yet you seem to think it is a good idea to spread
| ignorance and stupidity. That way is guaranteed to NOT
| advance even humanity's self-centered interests. Do you
| have some fetish about burning hydrocarbons or some
| religion that makes it sacred?
| postmodest wrote:
| Are we really playing whataboutism for the banded iron
| formations from 3.7Gya?
|
| Are you going to mention the Siberian Traps next?
|
| My dude, civilization almost collapsed several times due to
| like, one volcano. Imagine a 20% increase in global CO2 due
| to human activity.
|
| You can say "well, the earth recovered from the Permian
| extinctions" but that's meaningless, we're talking about
| _humanity_.
|
| Trilobites weren't all "oh, no worries, the Cyanobacteria
| didn't end life on earth so we're totally fine, brah! We're
| _rationalist trilobites_!"
| basil-rash wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I made no mention of humanity.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The drill reached 4,776 meters and the deepest core was
| collected at 1,177 meters
|
| So they did 3,599m of drilling for no purpose? This seems
| inexplicable, perhaps I'm misreading it.
| seszett wrote:
| I think the journalist just didn't understand exactly what this
| mission did[0]. It drilled through 1 177 meters of rock, in a
| place where the ocean floor was 4 776 meters below the surface.
|
| [0]http://publications.iodp.org/proceedings/370/101/370_101.htm
| ...
| klyrs wrote:
| > Our primary objective during Expedition 370 was to study the
| relationship between the deep subseafloor biosphere and
| temperature.
|
| Not "no purpose."
| alexwasserman wrote:
| Seems weird to talk about the deep sea and miss Challenger
| Deep/Marianas trench, and the Trieste completely.
| permo-w wrote:
| one of the most fascinating and mysterious things to me are
| subterranean or exclusively cave-dwelling (mega)fauna. the
| earth's crust is a very big place
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