Deep Life
Teeming masses of organisms thrive beneath the seafloor
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/337918/title/Deep_Life
I love this sort of stuff. Sometimes (often) scientists in mature (or thought to be mature) disciplines get all cocking thinking they know everything (or at least know what they don’t know) and then stuff like this gets discovered turning their convictions on their heads. For a very long time, even when it was shown that the sea floor wasn’t the lifeless muddy plain that people thought before they set eyes on it, scientists didn’t think anything interesting happened there. It seems to me that, particularly for those of us interested in the origins of life or astrobiology (is there a distinction?), that the determination that life has basically completely infected the entire crust of the planet and not just one or two forms of life, but likely thousands of wildly different forms of life (of course, still dependent on DNA and most of the amino acids we are familiar with (but how would we recognition them if they weren’t DNA-based or use amino acids?)) shows that once life has arrived on a planet (through Panspermia or native evolution (I favor that life is inevitable, so I expect native evolution is the driving force occasionally salted via Panspermia)) that planet (or moon, or asteroid) is infected forever. Simulations have shown that even the impact that formed the moon, as violent as that was, probably wouldn’t have been enough to totally eliminate life from the Earth, even though the oceans had boiled away and the top few miles of the surface were molten rock (there would have been rafts of non-molten rock, the centers of which would have been cool enough to support some of the extremophiles discovered the last decade or so). Life is tenacious and I expect that if we are finally able to adequately explore just our own solar system we will find life pretty much ubiquitous (would that we could get warp drive and explore the galaxy!).
