[HN Gopher] Tubeworms live around deep-sea vents
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Tubeworms live around deep-sea vents
Author : marban
Score : 82 points
Date : 2024-10-17 17:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| blakesterz wrote:
| The study is here:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52631-9
|
| Lots of cool pictures if you like oceanography stuff.
| mmooss wrote:
| It includes the actual photos of the animals in the subseafloor
| crust:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52631-9/figures/2
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52631-9/figures/3
| bityard wrote:
| paywall'd
| herdymerzbow wrote:
| https://archive.is/I23NT
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Works for me.
| 1egg0myegg0 wrote:
| Are we in the Dune timeline?
| Tagbert wrote:
| Yes, but we have to get through the Butlerian Jihad first.
| pineaux wrote:
| This will inevitably happen. Life is more robust than
| electronic systems. The electronic systems will be destroyed
| for their aggression.
| avaldez_ wrote:
| >Life is more robust than electronic systems. The
| electronic systems will be destroyed for their aggression.
|
| Compelling argument. However from the moment I understood
| the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the
| strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of
| the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as
| though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude
| biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my
| kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine
| is immortal.
|
| Jokes aside life may be more robust but in a very narrow
| set of conditions where it evolved. Look at Mars for
| example. No life (as far as we know) but three robots
| happily wandering like _what do you mean this planet isn 't
| habitable? Atmosphere? Biomass? Planetary magnetic field?
| Tell me more_
| alserio wrote:
| but those robots are also robust only in a narrow set of
| conditions: the short frame of their operative lifetime.
| life can survive in extremely harsh conditions for eons.
| really just a different subset of the conditons space,
| arguably bigger. life tends to, uh, find a way
| grvbck wrote:
| >However from the moment I understood the weakness of my
| flesh, it disgusted me.
|
| _I don 't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I
| want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark
| matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't
| even express these things properly because I have to - I
| have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid
| limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out
| with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel
| the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine!_
| VladimirGolovin wrote:
| I wonder, is an electronic system capable of doing anti-
| entropy work on itself (the way life does) necessarily AGI-
| complete? It turns out that there are many complex
| behaviors (like drawing or generating sensible text) that
| don't require AGI-completeness.
|
| (Stumbled upon the answer while formulating the question -
| no, being capable of doing anti-entropy self-maintenance
| work isn't AGI-complete because there's plenty of life
| that's perfectly capable of that without being generally
| intelligent.)
| ruleryak wrote:
| https://archive.is/I23NT - mirrored
|
| I won't pretend to be a biologist, so forgive me if this is
| naive, but this does feel like it's at least within the realm of
| possibility of working similarly on Europa, right? As in a non-
| zero chance at least.
| jl6 wrote:
| It would be bold to declare it _im_ possible. We know so little
| about abiogenesis. There might be a critical ingredient or
| condition that Earth had which Europa lacks.
|
| Or maybe not. Europa's ocean could be teeming with life.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Discovery and detailed analysis of life on Europa in my
| lifetime would be amazing. Even better if we can get
| Attenborough there.
| hinkley wrote:
| Scary life that tries to eat the astronauts...
| r00fus wrote:
| There's a theory that life actually originated not directly
| through photosynthesis based life, but originally from a very
| constant source of energy - the earth's crust - Hyperthermophile
| archaea - using non-oxygen based metabolism which migrated to the
| surface where photosynthesis evolved and took over as the core
| energy source.
|
| All laid out in Paul Davies' book - fascinating read:
| https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Fifth-Miracle/Pau...
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Similar to Nick Lane's work!
| vibrio wrote:
| Oxygen is a great book that covers a lot of this from geology
| to microbiology to chemistry.
| pineaux wrote:
| Actually this is not a theory. Photosynthesis came millions of
| years later than life. Plants are evolved from animals, not the
| other way around. Basic animals are less evolved than basic
| plants.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Plants and animals evolved from different lineages of
| eukaryotic organisms. They share a common ancestor, but
| plants did not evolve from animals. Plants evolved from green
| algae, while animals evolved from colonial protists.
|
| I also take exception with the concept of "more" or "less"
| evolved. Do you mean "complexity"?
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| He is right though that, "Photosynthesis came millions of
| years later than life." And the parent post's claim,
| "There's a theory that life actually originated not
| directly through photosynthesis based life," misrepresents
| that it is a commonly held view that life originated not
| directly through photosynthesis based life. It is generally
| understood that life predates photosynthesis.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Yes, they are right that photosynthesis came later, but
| then veered way off track saying that plant evolved from
| animals.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I probably should have acknowledged they were right about
| that, but I was so jarred by what they were wrong about
| it's the only thing that had my focus.
| bmitc wrote:
| Regarding Davies' book, what are the first four miracles that
| the title is referencing?
| tomcam wrote:
| Turbo Pascal, Porsche 911, Mtn Dew Throwback, Scarlett
| Johansson
|
| Just spitballing, haven't read the book
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Nice
| gardenmud wrote:
| It's a Bible reference.
|
| >The fifth miracle of Davies' title refers to Genesis 1:11:
| "Let the Land Produce Vegetation." (The first four Biblical
| miracles are the creation of the universe, the creation of
| light, the creation of the firmament and the creation of dry
| land.) It is proverbial in the popular science publishing
| world that God is good for sales, especially since Steven
| Hawking sold millions of copies of an otherwise unremarkable
| book by promising that a unified physical theory would enable
| us "to know the mind of God." Commercial requirements alone
| seem to have dictated that word "miracle," since Davies
| begins the book by disavowing it. Like other evolutionary
| scientists he starts with the presumption that "it is the job
| of science to solve mysteries without recourse to divine
| intervention." Life is not a miracle because scientists wish
| it to be a product of natural forces which they can explain.
|
| - http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/fifthmiracle.htm
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Didn't we already know that? Chloroplasts are a whole different
| organism that was subsumed by photosynthetic organism cells
| much later, much like mitochondria. Moreover, isn't the
| dominant hypothesis that life originated in the primordial
| soup, basically underwater?
| adrian_b wrote:
| The primordial soup hypothesis has been obsolete for decades.
|
| It does not explain which is the source of energy. Without a
| continuous source of energy life cannot exist.
|
| Moreover, it does not explain how the soup becomes
| concentrated enough to enable the formation of complex
| structures. Any primordial soup would have been too dilute
| for the dissolved substances to have chances to interact.
|
| The only plausible hypotheses for the origin of life are not
| in the middle of a soup, but at the surface of some minerals,
| more likely inside pores in the minerals. The minerals must
| have been metallic sulfides, more precisely sulfides of iron
| with some content of cobalt and nickel, as these 3 metals
| included in sulfide clusters are the catalysts for all the
| chemical reactions that are necessary and sufficient for
| sustaining the simplest forms of life.
|
| The catalysts Fe, Co and Ni are equally important with the
| structural non-metals H, C, N, O and S for the origin of
| life. Life is impossible without both kinds of chemical
| elements.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Primordial soup is not obsolete, it just isn't the whole
| theory anymore. That the early oceans were rich with
| minerals and proteins already is still accepted
| adrian_b wrote:
| Not even in the earliest variant of the primordial soup
| theory there was any supposition that it contained
| proteins.
|
| About a half of the amino-acids that are contained in
| modern proteins can form in the absence of life, and it
| was supposed that the "soup" contained those ten amino-
| acids.
|
| The original "soup" theory did not explain how you could
| get proteins from amino-acids. Proteins cannot form
| within a soup, because they can form only by extracting
| water from amino-acids, which cannot happen when they are
| inside water. (The living cells extract the water from
| substances like amino-acids, in order to make polymers by
| condensation, by using special dehydrating agents that
| are acid anhydrides; the most important classes of such
| acid anhydrides are either polyphosphoric acids like ATP
| or thioesters; such dehydrating agents cannot appear
| naturally in a "soup".)
|
| A way to form proteins would be not in a soup, but on
| some rock where the water evaporates and leaves a residue
| of amino-acids that could condense into proteins, more
| precisely into peptides, in the absence of water. However
| not even this is good enough to explain the appearance of
| a self-reproducing system. Such a system can appear only
| in a place where amino-acids are synthesized continuously
| (like attached on the surface of minerals with catalytic
| properties), and not like in the theory of primordial
| soup where it was supposed that they could be synthesized
| in the atmosphere, by lightning and UV light, then they
| would fall in the sea, which could have never
| concentrated them sufficiently in a single place.
|
| Also the mineral ions that could have existed in a
| primordial "soup" are not those that could have provided
| catalytic functions. In the beginning, the primordial
| ocean contained mostly potassium ions, and later also
| magnesium ions, because these are the most easily leeched
| from rocks. The primordial ocean had condensed from
| volcanic gases and initially it contained only volatile
| acids, like hydrogen chloride and carbonic acid. Then
| slowly it has dissolved the more soluble parts of the
| rocks, so that the dissolved ions, starting with
| potassium, have neutralized the acids, and then other
| less soluble ions have been leeched from rocks, until
| eventually the ocean water has reached the current
| composition of its salts, but this happened after a very
| long time, most likely long after the appearance of life.
|
| It would be very unlikely for life to appear in an ocean
| with the current salt composition, because many of the
| ions present now in sea water would interfere with the
| biological chemical reactions. All the living cells that
| are inside sea water spend a considerable part of their
| energy with preventing undesirable ions, like sodium and
| calcium, from entering the cells. At the origin of life,
| such highly-efficient ion pumps could not have existed,
| so such harmful ions must have been not abundant in the
| ocean of that time. Therefore the probability for the
| appearance of life is much higher on a young planet with
| a young ocean and the probability decreases on an old
| planet, where chemical equilibrium is reached.
|
| The primordial ocean acquired relatively soon a high
| concentration of Fe(II) ions, but those are not suitable
| as catalysts in the form of hydrated ions. All the
| ancient enzymes that use iron as catalyst use it in the
| form of iron-sulfur clusters, exactly like the iron that
| can be found in non-soluble iron sulfide minerals, so it
| can be presumed that the original catalysts were iron
| sulfide crystals alone, without the protein part that is
| now attached to the iron-sulfur cluster, in order to
| position it correctly inside the living cells.
| 47282847 wrote:
| That's how I learned it in school 30 years ago?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Actually it is beyond any reasonable doubt that the origin of
| photosynthesis is much more recent than the origin of life.
|
| The reason is that photosynthesis requires very complex
| structures for which there exists no plausible way to appear in
| non-living conditions, but only after a long biological
| evolution from simpler structures.
|
| Photosynthesis is much more correctly named as "phototrophy"
| (i.e. feeding with light), because light is not used directly
| in any synthesis, it only provides energy and in some variants,
| not in all, it also provides reduced molecules that can be used
| later in redox reactions (typically the so-called NADPH). The
| name "photosynthesis" was coined at a time when nobody had any
| idea about how it worked.
|
| The so-called oxygenic phototrophy a.k.a. oxygenic
| photosynthesis, where free dioxygen is generated by splitting
| water, has appeared only once, in the ancestor of blue-green
| algae a.k.a. cyanobacteria, billions of years after the origin
| of life and a very long time after the bacteria had evolved
| into a large number of distinct groups.
|
| The anoxygenic phototrophy a.k.a. anoxygenic photosynthesis,
| where no oxygen is generated, is still encountered in many
| groups of bacteria, which instead of water oxidize dihydrogen
| or carbon monoxide or reduced compounds of sulfur or of iron.
|
| It is possible, but far from certain, that anoxygenic
| phototrophy already existed in the ancestor of all present
| bacteria. Even in the not very likely case when this were true,
| there is no doubt that anoxygenic phototrophy has appeared
| after a long evolution, like also the current genetic code of
| the nucleic acids, which is also the result of a long evolution
| from simpler genetic codes, despite the fact that there are no
| known survivors from that early time.
|
| The results of the current research leave no doubt that the
| mechanism that has been used by the earliest forms of life for
| obtaining energy is the one that is still used in the so-called
| acetogenic bacteria and acetogenic archaea (a.k.a.
| homoacetogenic bacteria and archaea). For obtaining energy,
| these convert dihydrogen and carbon dioxide (or carbon monoxide
| and water) into acetic acid.
|
| So at the origin of life, the required energy source was free
| elemental hydrogen a.k.a. dihydrogen (or/and carbon monoxide).
|
| Dihydrogen is also produced today in volcanic gases and in
| hydrothermal vents and it was produced in greater quantities in
| the past, when Earth had more hydrogen than today, because a
| significant part of the hydrogen has been lost in space, as it
| cannot be retained by the gravity of Earth when it is not
| combined with heavier elements.
|
| Both in volcanic gases and in hydrothermal vents the origin of
| dihydrogen is in the reaction of volcanic rocks with water,
| where the water oxidizes the reduced iron ions (FeII) that come
| from the interior of the Earth into rust (FeIII).
|
| Because volcanic gases are mainly released during violent
| eruptions, the more peaceful hydrothermal vents, where gases
| with high dihydrogen content are released slowly during long
| times in stable conditions are a more likely place for the
| origin of life.
|
| Moreover, the hydrothermal vents also release alkaline ions
| (because of the increase in positive electric charge of the
| oxidized iron ions, which repels the alkaline ions), which
| create a gradient of ions in their path towards sea water,
| which is likely to have been an auxiliary source of energy also
| since the origin of life. All the present life forms still use
| ion gradients as intermediates in the energy-transforming
| processes.
|
| The source of energy is the most important factor for the
| origin of life. There have been plenty of fantastic theories
| about the origin of life, which have omitted to provide an
| explanation for a continuous source of energy, without which no
| form of life is possible, so there is no doubt that all those
| theories were wrong.
|
| Free dihydrogen is not produced only at the surface of the
| crust, like in hydrothermal vents, but it is also produced at
| great depths, wherever volcanic rocks are infiltrated with
| water. The acetogenic bacteria and the methanogenic or
| acetogenic archaea do not need any other source of energy, so
| they can live there without problems.
|
| While the acetogenic bacteria and the methanogenic or
| acetogenic archaea need only dihydrogen, besides normal
| constituents of the rocks, like water and carbon dioxide, so
| they can live at any depth below the surface of the Earth where
| the temperature is not too great for life, many of the so-
| called anaerobic bacteria actually need substances, like
| sulfate or nitrate or oxidized iron, that are products of
| oxidation caused by the activity of the phototrophic algae and
| plants, so even when those anaerobic bacteria live in caves or
| on the deep sea bottom they are still dependent on Sun's light
| and on the oxygenic phototrophic organisms. Therefore such
| anaerobic bacteria are unlikely to live at great depths and
| their metabolism is not relevant for the origin of life.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think one of the most interesting things to investigate on
| Mars is if similar stuff happened there. They may quite
| likely have life at the deep in rocks phase that hasn't
| progressed to plants and animals.
|
| Probably better investigated by robots than by Musk building
| a Butlins there.
| RachelF wrote:
| The title of the article is incorrect, the worms live in the
| crust, not "beneath the planetary crust" (in the magma).
|
| The Economist magazine is not what it used to be, sadly.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Yeah, beneath the planetary crust is asking a lot.
|
| Probably didn't want to settle for less but you take what you
| can get . . .
| davidw wrote:
| I finally unsubscribed this summer.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| For me the last straw was a piece they did on Julian Assange
| when he was still going through his kangaroo court debacle in
| the UK, a pure hit job. It was gruesome stuff.
| foobar1962 wrote:
| This annoyed me as well.
| hinkley wrote:
| We've known about tube worms for an awfully long time. If we
| found them in the mantle that actually would be worth a news
| article. This is middle school biology. And has been for
| decades.
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| The Economist's specialty is business and finance, not
| science. It's not out of the place for their journalists to
| make such mistakes, the same way many science publications
| make silly mistakes when talking about business matters.
| hinkley wrote:
| Technically the article does say the young gestate farther
| into the vents, which is news. Not surprising news, but
| still news.
|
| "Under the seabed" would have been more accurate.
| metalman wrote:
| my personal take on evolution,is based on two fact like pieces of
| information, first is that life can perhaps be seen as extreamly
| complex assemblies of matter and energy and second that the
| universe is a vast field of energy gradients with a general mish
| mash of all of the possible elements of matter lodged in a
| variety of disks,spheres,blobs,and ribbons, leaving much of it
| open for life to work in some form which is just a re phaseing of
| what many have suggested is the feeling of the inevitability of
| life,which I might add,is miracle enough
| foobar1962 wrote:
| 1) take a breath 2) the universe is big, really big...
| adolph wrote:
| > life can perhaps be seen as extreamly complex assemblies
|
| Sounds similar to Assembly Theory as promulgated by Cronin et
| al
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9
| steveoscaro wrote:
| I've always had the vague feeling that life is like little
| whirl pools in the river of energy flowing from low entropy to
| high entropy. Water can flow uphill if you observe only
| snippets of the journey.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| anyone know the source of "life is fire, slowed down, with an
| attitude"?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Tjeerd van Andel -- one of the original _Alvin_ divers from
| Scripps -- once told a group of us that their excitement at
| finding giant mussels around these smokers was both scientific
| and culinary. Large, rich and meaty, with a hint of Radon,
| apparently, which meant they had to limit their intake.
|
| It's a shame there weren't any deep sea potatoes to complete the
| classic mosselen-friet / moules frites / mussel French fries
| combo.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The current HN title is, ah, underselling the find here. We
| already knew tubeworms live "around" vents.
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