6 ms·
How deep does life go?
- p1esk 3y agoI hoped it was about how deep life goes underground.
- trescenzi 3y agoIt 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 3y agoGood news. Seems then that an Armageddon type of event would not extinguish all life on earth.
- temp0826 3y agoThink 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.
- huytersd 3y agoHonestly 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 3y agoI 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 3y ago20 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 3y agoThe 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 3y agoA hot surface does very little to life several miles below it.
- pfdietz 3y agoSince heat is flowing out of the Earth, the temperature below will eventually become hotter than the temperature at the surface.
- non-chalad 3y ago[flagged]
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago2.8 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- PostOnce 3y agobased 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 3y agoI'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 3y agoiirc we could plausibly move to Titan and live off nuclear energy
- science4sail 3y agoWhy not just move the Earth? You could do that over a few million years using a gravity tractor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor
- BurningFrog 3y agoI remember reading somewhere that that may have saved life on Earth at least once.
- 082349872349872 3y agoIf there is a Creator with an inordinate fondness for beetles, their fondness for prokaryotes remains obviously superordinate.
- blurbleblurble 3y agoAll the way deep.
- femto 3y ago> The Alvin’s most famous dive, however, was its 1968 exploration of the wreck of the ill-fated Titanic. That should be 1986?
- mkl 3y agoYes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin#Exploration_of_RMS_Titanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin#Exploration_of_RMS_T.... It was only found in 1985.
- miramba 3y agoNoticed that too and wondered: A typo or AI?
- anarbadalov 3y agoA typo. Thank you for flagging! I updated the article and added a correction. HN is the best.
- MC995 3y agoI 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 3y agothis 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.
- miramba 3y agoI knew the Titanic was discovered in the mid 80s, but was pretty sure it was not not by this submersible, but a ship pulling a camera. So that took the entire sentence into question and that could IMHO very well been an AI that merged nuclear sub in the 60s and Titanic in the 80s because they were both deep sea operations by this vessel or something.
- b800h 3y agoI 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 3y agoVerily 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 3y agoPerhaps, 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/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019asbi.book..261T/abstra...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- basil-rash 3y ago
- denton-scratch 3y ago> 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 3y agoI 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.html http://publications.iodp.org/proceedings/370/101/370_101.htm...
- klyrs 3y ago> Our primary objective during Expedition 370 was to study the relationship between the deep subseafloor biosphere and temperature. Not "no purpose."
- cyberhell 3y ago[flagged]
- hnbear 3y agoSeems weird to talk about the deep sea and miss Challenger Deep/Marianas trench, and the Trieste completely.
- permo-w 3y agoone 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
- eleveriven 3y agounique adaptations to life in environments with limited light and resources is indeed fascinating