6 ms·

Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

138 points by yk 2mo ago

cyberax 2mo ago
> Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia. So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). Nothing about this is sealed.
  - john_strinlai 2mo ago
    >Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?
    - dyauspitr 2mo ago
      > Mesothermal, sulfidic groundwater (up to 1 mM in H2S) originating from an artesian sulfidic aquifer underlying the region enters at the bottom of the cave’s lower passages. This results in a constant flow occurring tens of centimeters to 1 m below the water surface at flow rates of about 5 L/s https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/
      - 0-_-0 2mo ago
        Right, so it was sealed only in the biological sense, which makes sense since there needs to be an inflow of energy
- shdwslrkr 2mo ago
  [dead]
statictype 2mo ago
Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects. Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.
- weaksauce 2mo ago
  the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    There’s residual and radioactive heating from the Earth itself that can provide energy for an ecosystem. We expect Jupiter’s moons to provide similar environments because of tidal deformations (which provide enough energy for Io’s vulcanism).
- quuxplusone 2mo ago
  That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...
  - j13n 2mo ago
    Humans didn’t evolve from chimps.
    - 0-_-0 2mo ago
      No but they could over 5 million years
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!
wpollock 2mo ago
Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.
- shdwslrkr 2mo ago
  [dead]
- bcraven 2mo ago
  "Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."
  - defrost 2mo ago
    That quote, from the AI generated article, simply asserts the cave was sealed, it doesn't explain how the cave came to be sealed, nor how it is that modern humans infer the cave has been sealed and for how long.
  - Rebelgecko 2mo ago
    On the flip side, the wiki article for the cave mentions that new species arrived as recently as 2 million years ago...
- defrost 2mo ago
  Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary. There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time ( One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave )
pokpokpok 2mo ago
Does anyone have the original source of this information? This article seems to be AI generated: https://www.pangram.com/history/fdf6dfd6-1a9c-4267-a90c-a3cf2711c0f5 https://www.pangram.com/history/fdf6dfd6-1a9c-4267-a90c-a3cf...
- john_strinlai 2mo ago
  while looking at the wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave), this popped up from 2015 from bbc earth: https://web.archive.org/web/20210531110415/https://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-living-in-romanias-poison-cave https://web.archive.org/web/20210531110415/https://www.bbc.c...
- croes 2mo ago
  Pangram isn’t a reliable detector
  - BlackRabbit1 2mo ago
    Still the linked article reads like slop
    - croes 2mo ago
      Doesn’t mean it is. I bet you can find pre-AI articles that sound like slop too.
      - lelanthran 2mo ago
        I keep requesting this here, but so far I haven't been given any links. There's probably a good reason for that.
- phyzome 2mo ago
  Pangram isn't useful for single documents. Too many false positives. It only gives something approaching actionable results if you use it on an entire corpus.
andrewstuart 2mo ago
Great first line for a story.
- visarga 2mo ago
  It is indeed well written but I feel it has LLM smell, not that is a bad thing.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    Let’s not be racist, please. It doesn’t matter if the intelligence is based on carbon or silicon.
    - lelanthran 2mo ago
      You think machines are a race? Where did you go to school?
      - layer8 2mo ago
        Even space is a race.
charlie0 2mo ago
It's all fun and games until they run into another branch of homo sapiens ala the descent....
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  Or the Reptilians. Or nazis from the centre of the Earth.
hulitu 2mo ago
> Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Oh, so that's why my neighbour, Vasile, drills day and night. He hopes to discover a new life form. /s
broken-kebab 2mo ago
Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.
- springtimesun 2mo ago
  Stake the claim then. I’ve also read a fair bit of LLM text and this didn’t trip anything for me. Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.
  - homeonthemtn 2mo ago
    It's Claude. I picked up on it too (I am also a heavy Claude user) The title alone gives it away. Sentences like this also trigger my daily annoyance: "Researchers found an elegant way to test it, and the timing was almost too convenient." Me: "Almost too convenient is expressing an opinion. Rewrite this to be straight forward, succinct information" Claude: "You're right, and I was wrong. That's the second time you've had to correct me this session. Let me update my memory to adjust for this" Eye twitch
    - everybodyknows 2mo ago
      And the nonsensical, chatty slang > Let me ... As if Claude actually needed the human user's permission or cooperation to do so.
- RamblingCTO 2mo ago
  I know what you mean. Flowery and fluffy. I don't see any clear giveaways, but it feels like it and is a bit annoying to read because the information in there isn't very dense.
  - raptor111 2mo ago
gregoriol 2mo ago
The wikipedia article says "While animals have lived in the cave for 5.5 million years, not all of them arrived simultaneously. One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years."
TacticalCoder 2mo ago
This already happened in the past: they found a cave totally sealed since so long that spiders still had eyes, but non-functioning ones (for they were totally in the dark for generations and generations, eyes didn't make sense anymore). Just as the holy books predicted. Oops, sorry, just as Darwin predicted.
franze 2mo ago
> this was not an ordinary cave. It was something far rarer so probably a cheap openai model
DannyBee 2mo ago
Isn't this the opening to a few of those "virus destroys humanity" movies?
- mistrial9 2mo ago
  [dead]
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
sntran 2mo ago
For some reason, I feel sad. I was always fascinated when finding an article about newly found discoveries on Earth, and the comments from Hacker News were usually helpful and adding more to the stories. Now, we talk about whether such discovery was written by LLM. Does it really matter?

138 points by yk 2mo ago

> Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia. So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.

dyauspitr 2mo ago
Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). Nothing about this is sealed.
- john_strinlai 2mo ago
  >Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?
  - dyauspitr 2mo ago
    > Mesothermal, sulfidic groundwater (up to 1 mM in H2S) originating from an artesian sulfidic aquifer underlying the region enters at the bottom of the cave’s lower passages. This results in a constant flow occurring tens of centimeters to 1 m below the water surface at flow rates of about 5 L/s https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/
    - 0-_-0 2mo ago
      Right, so it was sealed only in the biological sense, which makes sense since there needs to be an inflow of energy
shdwslrkr 2mo ago
[dead]

statictype 2mo ago

Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects. Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.

weaksauce 2mo ago
the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  There’s residual and radioactive heating from the Earth itself that can provide energy for an ecosystem. We expect Jupiter’s moons to provide similar environments because of tidal deformations (which provide enough energy for Io’s vulcanism).
quuxplusone 2mo ago
That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...
- j13n 2mo ago
  Humans didn’t evolve from chimps.
  - 0-_-0 2mo ago
    No but they could over 5 million years
- somenameforme 2mo ago
  We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!

wpollock 2mo ago

Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.

shdwslrkr 2mo ago
[dead]
bcraven 2mo ago
"Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."
- defrost 2mo ago
  That quote, from the AI generated article, simply asserts the cave was sealed, it doesn't explain how the cave came to be sealed, nor how it is that modern humans infer the cave has been sealed and for how long.
- Rebelgecko 2mo ago
  On the flip side, the wiki article for the cave mentions that new species arrived as recently as 2 million years ago...
defrost 2mo ago
Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary. There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time ( One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave )

pokpokpok 2mo ago

Does anyone have the original source of this information? This article seems to be AI generated: https://www.pangram.com/history/fdf6dfd6-1a9c-4267-a90c-a3cf2711c0f5 https://www.pangram.com/history/fdf6dfd6-1a9c-4267-a90c-a3cf...

john_strinlai 2mo ago
while looking at the wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave), this popped up from 2015 from bbc earth: https://web.archive.org/web/20210531110415/https://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-living-in-romanias-poison-cave https://web.archive.org/web/20210531110415/https://www.bbc.c...
croes 2mo ago
Pangram isn’t a reliable detector
- BlackRabbit1 2mo ago
  Still the linked article reads like slop
  - croes 2mo ago
    Doesn’t mean it is. I bet you can find pre-AI articles that sound like slop too.
    - lelanthran 2mo ago
      I keep requesting this here, but so far I haven't been given any links. There's probably a good reason for that.
phyzome 2mo ago
Pangram isn't useful for single documents. Too many false positives. It only gives something approaching actionable results if you use it on an entire corpus.

andrewstuart 2mo ago

Great first line for a story.

visarga 2mo ago
It is indeed well written but I feel it has LLM smell, not that is a bad thing.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  Let’s not be racist, please. It doesn’t matter if the intelligence is based on carbon or silicon.
  - lelanthran 2mo ago
    You think machines are a race? Where did you go to school?
    - layer8 2mo ago
      Even space is a race.

charlie0 2mo ago

It's all fun and games until they run into another branch of homo sapiens ala the descent....

rbanffy 2mo ago
Or the Reptilians. Or nazis from the centre of the Earth.

hulitu 2mo ago

> Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Oh, so that's why my neighbour, Vasile, drills day and night. He hopes to discover a new life form. /s

broken-kebab 2mo ago

Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.

springtimesun 2mo ago
Stake the claim then. I’ve also read a fair bit of LLM text and this didn’t trip anything for me. Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.
- homeonthemtn 2mo ago
  It's Claude. I picked up on it too (I am also a heavy Claude user) The title alone gives it away. Sentences like this also trigger my daily annoyance: "Researchers found an elegant way to test it, and the timing was almost too convenient." Me: "Almost too convenient is expressing an opinion. Rewrite this to be straight forward, succinct information" Claude: "You're right, and I was wrong. That's the second time you've had to correct me this session. Let me update my memory to adjust for this" Eye twitch
  - everybodyknows 2mo ago
    And the nonsensical, chatty slang > Let me ... As if Claude actually needed the human user's permission or cooperation to do so.
RamblingCTO 2mo ago
I know what you mean. Flowery and fluffy. I don't see any clear giveaways, but it feels like it and is a bit annoying to read because the information in there isn't very dense.
- raptor111 2mo ago

gregoriol 2mo ago

The wikipedia article says "While animals have lived in the cave for 5.5 million years, not all of them arrived simultaneously. One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years."

TacticalCoder 2mo ago

This already happened in the past: they found a cave totally sealed since so long that spiders still had eyes, but non-functioning ones (for they were totally in the dark for generations and generations, eyes didn't make sense anymore). Just as the holy books predicted. Oops, sorry, just as Darwin predicted.

franze 2mo ago

> this was not an ordinary cave. It was something far rarer so probably a cheap openai model

DannyBee 2mo ago

Isn't this the opening to a few of those "virus destroys humanity" movies?

mistrial9 2mo ago
[dead]

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

sntran 2mo ago

For some reason, I feel sad. I was always fascinated when finding an article about newly found discoveries on Earth, and the comments from Hacker News were usually helpful and adding more to the stories. Now, we talk about whether such discovery was written by LLM. Does it really matter?