Microbial Life In An Undersea Volcano, New Limits Of Life Defined
http://planetsave.com/2012/08/07/microbial-life-in-an-undersea-volcano-new-limits-of-life-defined/
The range of environments that life occupies here on Earth makes it clear to me that life _must be_ ubiquitous in the universe. While everything on Earth has, as a common element, that it requires water to exist (though that water can be in vanishingly small amounts, see http://www.ecology.com/2012/02/16/microbes-atacama-desert/ for an extreme example), it is rather egocentric to assume that life cannot exist in other forms just because we haven’t proved it possible here on Earth. Still, if we decided that we are going to insist on life requiring water, it is trivial to imagine that life could evolve on all sorts of conditions that are common in our solar system (and presumably far beyond). For instance, a bit earlier I blogged about Bacillus stratosphericus (see here for more info), a bacteria that appears to live its entire existence floating about high in the air. Why shouldn’t we expect to find such organisms in Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and possibly Neptune? Then, once some sort of single-celled organism is established, why not expect further evolution into something much larger? Given the dramatic challenge we have had to get off our planet, imagine that even if an intelligent life form evolved in such an environment it would find it incredibly difficult to make any impact beyond its host planet. I got to think now that there has to be life on several other planets in our solar system and even perhaps on Venus as well.
Exciting times to be alive, presuming the anti-science Fundamentalist GOP doesn’t destroy it all in the next few years (just couldn’t resist getting a political dig in).
Heyzoos Christie! Can you believe this? In an effort to provide a link to the bacteria-living-in-salt-crystals above I found all these links to questions about how salt crystals can be distinguished from living organisms! Is any wonder that our critical thinking skills have atrophied to uselessness in this country?
