Many Worlds

Tag: extremophile

The Message of Really, Really Extreme Life

May 28, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Hydrothermal system at Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, where uniquely extreme life has been found in salt chimneys and surrounding water. The yellow deposits are a variety of sulphates and the red areas are deposits of iron oxides. Copper salts color the water green. (Felipe Gomez/Europlanet 2020 RI)

Ethiopia’s Dallol volcano and hot springs have created an environment about as hostile to life as can be imagined.

Temperatures in the supersaturated water reach more than 200 degrees F (94 C) and are reported to approach pure acidity, with an extraordinarily low pH of  0.25.  The environment is also highly salty, with salt chimneys common.

Yet researchers have just reported finding ultra-small bacteria living in one of the acidic, super-hot salt chimneys.  The bacteria are tiny — up to 20 times smaller than the average bacteria — but they are alive and in their own way thriving.

In the world of extremophiles, these nanohaloarchaeles order bacteria are certainly on the very edge of comprehension.  But much the same can be said of organisms that can withstand massive doses of radiation, that survive deep below the Earth’s surface with no hint of life support from the sun and its creations, that keep alive deep in glacier ice and even floating high in the atmosphere.  And as we know, spacecraft have to be well sterilized because bacteria (in hibernation) aboard can survive the trip to the moon or Mars.

Not life it is generally understood.  But the myriad extremophiles found around the globe in recent decades have brought home the reality that we really don’t know where and how life can survive;  indeed, these extremophiles often need their conditions to be super-severe to succeed.

And that’s what makes them so important for the search for life beyond Earth.  They are proof of concept that some life may well need planetary and atmospheric conditions that would have been considered utterly uninhabitable not long ago.

 

Montage from the Dallol site: (A) the sampling site, (B) the small chimneys (temperature of water 90 ºC. (C) D9 sample from a small chimney in (A). (D-L) Scanning Electron Microscope and (M-O) Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope images of sample D9 showing the morphologies of ultra-small microorganisms entombed in the mineral layers. (Gomez et al/Europlanet 2020 Research Infrastructure)

The unusual and extreme life and geochemistry of Dallol has been studied by a team led by Felipe Gómez from Astrobiology Center in Spain.… Read more

SETI Reconceived and Broadened; A Call for Community Proposals

November 21, 2016 / / 0 Comments
A screenshot from a time lapse video of radio telescopes by Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan of Sunchaser Pictures was shot at several different radio astronomy facilities—the Very Large Array (VLA) Observatory in New Mexico, Owens Valley Observatory in Owens Valley California, and Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. All three of these facilities have been or are still being partly used by the SETI (Search for the Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. You can watch the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrxpgUJoHRc

A screenshot from a time lapse video of radio telescopes by Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan of Sunchaser Pictures that was shot at several different radio astronomy facilities—the Very Large Array (VLA) Observatory in New Mexico, Owens Valley Observatory in Owens Valley California, and Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. All three of these facilities have been or are still being partly used by the SETI (Search for the Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program.

Earlier this summer, Natalie Cabrol, the director of the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, described a new direction for her organization in Astrobiology Magazine, and I wrote a Many World column about the changes to come.

Cabrol’s Alien Mindscapes – Perspective on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” laid out a plan for the new approach to SETI that would take advantage of the goldmine of new exoplanet discoveries in the past decade, as well as the data from fast-advancing technologies.  These fresh angles and masses of information come, she wrote,  from the worlds of astronomy and astrophysics, as well as astrobiology and the biological, geological, environmental, cognitive, mathematical, social, and computational sciences.

In her article,  Cabrol said that a call would be coming for community input on how to develop of a Virtual Institute for SETI Research. Its primary goal, she said, would be to “understand how intelligent life interacts with its environment and communicates.”

That call for white papers has now gone out in a release from SETI, which laid out the questions the organization is looking to address:

Question 1: How abundant and diverse is intelligent life in the Universe?

The Virtual Institute will use data synergistically from astrobiology, biological sciences, space and planetary exploration, and geosciences to quantitatively characterize the potential abundance and diversity of intelligent life in the Universe. The spatiotemporal distribution of potential intelligent life will be considered using models of the physicochemical evolution of the Universe.

Question 2: How does intelligent life communicate?

By drawing from a combination of cognitive sciences, neuroscience, communication and information theory, mathematical sciences, bio-neural computing, data mining, and machine learning (among others), we will proactively explore and analyze communication in intelligent terrestrial species. Building upon these analyses, we will consider the physiochemical and biochemical models of newly discovered exoplanet environments to generate and map probabilistic neural and homolog systems, and infer the resulting range of viable alien sensing systems.

Question 3: How can we detect intelligent life?… Read more

Many Worlds, Subterranean Edition

November 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Scanning electron microscope blue-tinted image of nematode on biofilm, collected from Kopanang mine almost one mile below surface. (Borgonie, ELi)

Scanning electron microscope blue-tinted image of a nematode on bio-film, collected from Kopanang mine almost one mile below surface. (Borgonie, ELi)

One of the richest lines of research for those thinking about life beyond Earth has been the world of microscopic creatures that live in especially extreme and hostile environments here.  The realm of extremophiles has exploded in roughly the period that exoplanet discoveries have exploded, and both serve to significantly change our view of what’s possible in nature writ large.

I was reminded of this with the publication today of a paper on extreme life in the deep mines of South Africa.  This is not a brand new story, but rather significant step forward in a story that has implications galore for the search for life beyond Earth.

The extremophile chronology in South Africa goes like this:

First there was the microbe D. Audaxviator, “the Bold Traveler,” found living in light-less solitude more than two miles down a South African gold mine. Nothing alive had ever been found in rock fractures at that depth before.

Then there was H. Mephisto, the “Worm From Hell,” the first complex, multi-cellular creature (a type of worm) found living at almost equal depths in the same group of mines.

SEM of critters

Scanning electron microscope images of species of worms and a crustacean from Driefontein and Kopanang mines (Borgonie, ELi)

Now the researchers who made both of those discoveries have discovered a “veritable zoo” of multicellular creatures living in the wet rock fissures of the gold and diamond mines of the Witwaterstrand Basin of South Africa, roughly
a mile below the surface.

The earlier discoveries (reports about them were published in 2006 and 2011) had already changed scientists’ understanding of life in the rocky underworld. They had also given encouragement to those convinced that microbes and maybe multi-celled creatures can survive in fissures deep below the surface  of Mars and other moons and planets. The latest jackpot carries this shift in thinking further.

“It is very crowded in some places down under,” said Gaetan Borgonie of ELi, a Belgian nonprofit that studies extreme life, and of South Africa’s University of the Free State in Bloemfontein.

Borgonie, lead author of a paper about the “veritable zoo,” said that his discovery in 2011 of a new species of nematode at great depth had been dismissed by some as a “freak find.” But now, he said, “the fact that we have found in two mines, in different water, two ecosystems featuring several types of invertebrates hopefully puts that notion to rest as wrong.”… Read more

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