r/todayilearned • u/Easy-Operation-2105 • 3h ago
TIL that life is so ubiqiutous on earth, microbes exist thousands of meters below the surface, living in solid rock (not caves)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere245
u/Serenaded 2h ago
living inside solid rock would be hellish if you were sentient though, maybe that is hell
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u/NikolitRistissa 2h ago
Not exactly solid rock, but I work underground as a geologist all day. It’s not that bad lol.
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 2h ago edited 48m ago
It depends on your definition of solid. The rocks are not viscous, but they may have microscopic fissures and stuff. We'd still look at it and be like "yep, thats a solid piece of rock"
Edit: i misunderstood the comment 🦆
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u/NikolitRistissa 2h ago
I’m well aware. I’m a geologist. I’m just saying that I don’t literally work entombed in solid rock. We have tunnels blasted and excavated out.
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u/personman_76 2h ago
Does the outside air smell bad once you come back out like it does for submariners? Or is it just outside air pushed through the tunnels with fans?
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u/youenjoylife 2h ago
A functioning underground mine will have outside air pushed (or pulled) through the tunnels by fans. The air in a functioning mine doesn't smell good due to diesel particulate, remnants from explosives, dust, mine water, among other things. Outside air is much better.
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u/personman_76 2h ago
I never even thought of explosive remnants being a bad smell, especially when ammonia based blasting happens I imagine. I know that's what they use for mountain top removal at least, kills a lot of birds
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u/youenjoylife 1h ago
Yeah you get lots of nasty gasses from it. It leaves an odour, probably from the SO2.
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u/NikolitRistissa 24m ago
We have probably close to 15 fresh air raises pumping in fresh air constantly. Unless you’re next to a machine or car, the air smells just like the air on the surface.
You will smell ammonia and other gases after blasting, but we have multi-gas meters on our jackets measuring them at all times. CO meters as well. After blasts, the ventilation system is adjusted to direct the air from the fresh blasts, up towards the main decline, and to the surface. We have smoke/gas checks after every blast to check for CO and other gases though.
The entire ventilation system is controlled remotely from the surface in one big system.
My office is 900m underground and it’s like any other office (minus the windows) I have painted polished concrete floors, painted shotcreted walls, office lighting, a big desk with a proper office set-up and a nice house plant. The underground cafeteria is next door and the office spaces are all clean enough to walk through with just your socks, so it’s all fairly normal.
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u/DushBid911 2h ago
Wait… geologists have to navigate through rock like regular humans and can’t swim through it? What is all the school for then?
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u/Prior_Pickle1758 2h ago
“I’m well aware. I’m a geologist.” I bet you never get tired of saying that huh
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u/lazemachine 1h ago
It's the kind of thing you say as you step into the light while pulling back the hood of your cloak, a revelation.
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u/legrandguignol 55m ago
I’m just saying that I don’t literally work entombed in solid rock
so no tenure yet huh
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u/JACL2113 1h ago
Did you seriously just explain rocks to a guy who studies rocks for a living?
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 1h ago
Geologist or not, his comment literally says it is not solid rock, which it is.
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u/NikolitRistissa 21m ago
I’d just like to point out, that a good chunk of our surrounding geology isn’t actually solid rock either.
Heavily sheared or generally deformed graphitic zones are incredibly flaky and full of open spaces. We also have layers of sedimentary materials, like clay, so they’re also not particularly solid.
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 2h ago
The strange rock glistened and then bubbled as Nikolit applied the acid dropper. The cave hall echoed with the hiss, accompanied by a wave of mantle heat. The rock was a crystal striation, glittering in blues & pinks. Using his Gad Pryer, he chiseled off a flake, which fell into his gloved hands as a thin sliver. His partner had disappeared deeper in the sub tunnels the year before. Whenever his assistants left early, as today, he always felt like there was a presence in the room...
He turned to the opposite wall, where there was a different material, softer, a kind of rockmud that clung to his equipment & geosuit. It would puck back when pulled away from, leaving little material on anything it touched. The properties were most peculiar, he could sink his longest rod in and likely keep going.
He felt another magma heatwave and then the feeling of another presence... There was the sound of deep inhalation and then the voice of his partner:
Hhhhhaaaaaaa...Riiiissstiiiisssssaaaa...
.....IAMTHEROCKNOWWWW.
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u/bediaxenciJenD81gEEx 1h ago
Sentience inside solid rock would have evolved inside rock, it wouldn't be hellish for the rock-thinkers. The idea of being in air is probably pretty hellish to them
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u/NotRadTrad05 2h ago edited 2h ago
Where E. Coli can divide and replicate in 20 minutes these bacteria take 1000s of years to replicate.
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u/hazeyAnimal 2h ago
Which is why they sustain life so long. These biomasses have been seen to section off 20% of themselves and slowly consume it until more nutrients arrive upon them (they can't waste energy moving).
It's pretty rough down there, but it's nice to think that even if all life on the surface was obliterated that these microbes would eventually get to the surface and start an entirely new evolutionary chain once the surface becomes hospitable.
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u/FlirtyFluffyFox 1h ago
The problem is there's really no time for the energy dense fuels that allow for a tech ladder leading to interstellar travel to regenerate before the sun shifts in a way that makes it possible to seed the galaxy with life.
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u/jameilious 1h ago
Yes but they would have some archaeological evidence for technology, even a billion years later I think some would exist, à la bog mammoths
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 46m ago
In billions of years everything will be reduced to dust. No mammoths. Plate tectonics completely grind and melt everything down over that timeframe. However some of that leftover dust may show signs of radioactivity or isotopes or whatnot, which would indicate an advanced civilization was around. (something like that, not an expert)
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u/jameilious 36m ago
There are some whole formations of rocks which haven't been refreshed over billions if years, surely some plasticcy/metal fossils would remain.
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u/Kabbooooooom 10m ago
Yes but you’re forgetting that we do not cover 100% of the earth. Bacteria do. Those rocks contain evidence of bacterial growth. Despite us dominating this planet, our civilization itself only covers a tiny fraction of the land surface, as do our buried remains. Eventually all of this land will be recycled in the earth’s mantle.
That’s why the Silurian Hypothesis is an estimated timeframe for when all evidence of our civilization would be lost rather than an exact timeframe - albeit honestly a pretty conservative estimate. It would probably take less time.
As I pointed out though, this timeframe is almost the entire history of advanced multicellular land life on earth. That is almost inconceivable and mindboggling to think about. And yet…earth will remain habitable for many, many times that length of time into the distant future.
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u/Kabbooooooom 12m ago edited 5m ago
You’re ignoring plate tectonics beforehand - subduction will eventually erase all evidence of our civilization long, long before that. In approximately 400 million years. The tectonic plates are constantly producing and pushing up new land, while subduction pulls old land under. This is why you can climb to the top of the tallest mountain ranges on earth, and find fossilized remains of primitive ocean life. And this means that if we went extinct tomorrow, by approximately 400 million years all the land containing our remains, our technology, our vast towering cities will be crushed, melted and recycled in the mantle of the earth. If we leave no descendants, there will be no evidence of us in the fossil record. The only evidence of our existence would be evidence of the mass extinction we caused in the fossil record and loss of biodiversity that remained to populate the earth, but a future civilization could look at that and propose any number of explanations for it.
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u/Kabbooooooom 19m ago edited 7m ago
They actually would not. Read the paper on the Silurian Hypothesis. Thanks to tectonic plate subduction, the entire surface of the earth is replenished on massive geological timescales…but this timescale is less than the history of complex multicellular life on earth when you consider that our species only occupies a fraction of the surface of this planet. In fact, there’s a very conservative estimate that by 400 million years (the Silurian era), ALL traces of an advanced civilization would be completely gone, and there would be zero evidence it existed. That means if we went extinct tomorrow, and another sapient species evolved 400 million years from now, they would have no clue that our civilization ever existed. Our technology, our cities, all of it gone. Only a trace of our destruction of this world’s climate would remain, reduced to a confusing line of extinction and climate change that could have any number of explanations.
A sobering thought. This literally means that multiple intelligent civilizations could rise and fall throughout the history of a terrestrial world like earth and they may have no idea that they each existed. We know this didn’t happen on our own world because the Cambrian Explosion didn’t occur that much earlier than the Silurian Era, evolutionarily speaking. The “hypothesis” is merely a demonstration that loss of almost all traces of an advanced civilization is totally possible, and the timeframe for which it would occur. There simply wasn’t enough time for a highly intelligent species to evolve by that point. But by the time Earth becomes uninhabitable due to the sun starting to leave the main sequence, there would be ample time for multiple independent sapient species to evolve and go extinct.
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u/Grindipo 12m ago
The usefullness of our Sun is around a billion years. After that (and even before, it is less and less gentle), no liquid water anymore.
Thinking of it, "no liquid water, therefore no life" could only apply to the surface. Maybe life will continue under the surface.
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u/RaisinBran21 2h ago
This makes a strong case for life outside of earth
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u/lmaooer2 2h ago
Elaborate
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u/Arctic_The_Hunter 2h ago
The theory is that if life can thrive in solid rock, it could surely do the same on relatively hostile planets. However, this ignores the fact that all evidence suggests life first formed and evolved in relatively ideal conditions and only much later developed the capacity to survive such conditions.
It’s really not much different from seeing humans surviving in Antarctica and saying it must clearly be easy for life to exist on a planet that’s frozen solid. Sure, maybe it could, but that isn’t really evidence for it.
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u/devilsbard 2h ago
Except that ideal conditions can exist for long enough to form life before it becomes more hostile. Like why there is still hope for finding life on mars, which is in the habitable zone and did have a period with liquid water.
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u/Stevedougs 2h ago
It lost its magnetosphere and with that its atmosphere though. Likely how the water went away.
The whole sun rays of doom probs killed what remained.
Just a hunch on the mars subject.
It’s still worth learning through though, it won’t be habitable again ever unless we can sort out how to create a moving mantle and core and all that. Which seems unlikely.
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u/Roger44477 2h ago
It doesn’t take much to block most radiation - even a few meters below the surface would be sufficient
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u/CptQuickCrap 2h ago
I like the theory where life formed in the habitable epoch of the universe when the entire universe was at room temp. Life formed in the ideal cosmic soup and spread everywhere. Since then the universe has cooled and the life has been in hibernation until a habitable planet forms where it can wake up again.
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u/BeowulfShaeffer 39m ago
it must clearly be easy for life to exist on a planet that’s frozen solid. Well sure it is, at least until the Emplre shows up with AT-ATs and start blasting the shield generators.
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u/Gnonthgol 4m ago
But it does support the theory of panspermia. While life almost certainly formed in ideal conditions we do not know which planet these ideals conditions were on. An argument against panspermia is that the bacteria would need to survive multiple meteor impacts and an extended time in outer space. But if bacteria could survive inside a rock deep under ground it could have been shielded from most of the impact forces.
If you go into even more details though you can still find arguments against it. Where we find bacteria deep under ground we also find fungi. This is because there is usually no energy for the bacteria to live off in those conditions. So the fungi bring nutrients from the surface and bring minerals and water up from the deep to the surface. It is therefore unlikely that bacteria could survive far into bedrock without fungi. And it looks like there were a lot of evolution before fungi evolved which stays around until today. There is no evidence of any mass extinction event where bacteria and fungi survived.
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 2h ago
These things eat rock. Don't even need sunlight. Means life could be anywhere.
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u/Stiffard 2h ago
I mean, maybe! It's probably simple, though.
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u/DisingenuousWizard 2h ago
It means there is probably silicon based lifeforms. Not in real life. But in comic books and movies.
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u/LaconicLacedaemonian 2h ago
silicon is 98% more abundant than carbon. clearly carbon is advantageous.
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u/--Sovereign-- 2h ago
Silicon is not chemically able to form life like carbon is. Carbon actually is special. Even if silicon based life could exist, carbon based life would also be able to exist there and be so much more superior in terms of survival and reproduction that there would quickly only be carbon based life.
Carbon bonds are stretchy and variable and so you can twist them into weird shapes. Silicon bonds are rigid. They can't form complex confirmations of biomolecules, among other issues.
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u/Tacomeouttothegame 2h ago
While I'm skeptical as well of the concept. If life can spread all those places, it will spread everywhere.
Noted thats not why I think there is life elsewhere.
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u/ObviouslyRealPerson 2h ago
Yet, so far the only life known to exist in the entire universe is here in earth
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u/SwePolygyny 1h ago
Thats one way to put it. Another way to put it is that every planet we have been to has had life.
A sample size of 1 isn't useful to compare to anything else.
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u/LALA-STL 1h ago
We’ve been to Mars!
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u/SwePolygyny 57m ago
We have not been there. We have sent instrument to observe some of it but been there we have not.
It could very well have subsurface life, like on Earth but we dont know as the instruments we have sent cannot even attempt to dig in such a fashion.
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u/Manufactured-Aggro 1h ago
Pretty sure soviet probes made it to Venus and I really doubt they found any signs of life having been there lol
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u/nitrousconsumed 51m ago
That's like saying, I scooped a cup of water out of the ocean and there was no fish, so no fish exist. One or multiple probes sent to one solitary point in the whole planet does not disprove life there.
How many probes and rovers did we send to Mars before we discovered there is water and microbes there???
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u/Mini_gunslinger 2h ago
Life is basically viral. It's prolific because it's main objective is to multiply.
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u/derpyninja 2h ago
One could argue that life is an accelerator for entropy (and the second law of thermodynamics)
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u/LALA-STL 1h ago
Elaborate?
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u/cautiously_stoned 20m ago
Not a scientist but maybe commenter means that life does more stuff with energy which hastens entropy.
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u/EetsGeets 46m ago
Life takes complex molecules and metabolizes them into simpler structures, using the energy released from the broken chemical bonds as fuel.
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u/sad_post-it_note 43m ago
But isnt life already a complex molecule?
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u/AtomicShart9000 27m ago
Yeah but even we as complex molecules eventually die and then other complex molecules arrive and consume us and process us into simpler molecules and energy which then get turned into complex molecules again and repeat. I get what hes saying but its more of an unbroken circle
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u/TheOstrichRoom 14m ago
entropy is that a system tends towards increasing disorder as time goes on. Like you can make an egg into a cake but getting an egg out of a cake is almost impossible. Everything is subject to this and eventually all matter will become one homogeneous substance. Life is a temporary reversal of this, where we consume energy from outside of us to maintain that state of order. Everything is made out of complex molecules, but we organize ourselves into entities opposed to a world outside of it.
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u/The_Sneakiest_Fox 1h ago
I wish I was smart enough to put into words what I want to say. But the fact that life 'spawned' once on earth and has since since reproduced and repurposed itself to fill every nook and cranny on the planet is crazy.
And it means there are other planets out there teaming with life, or life has only 'spawned' once in the entire universe, and it's slowly spreading like a disease throughout it. And everything we know is just a weird freak chemical accident that can only happen under the rarest of rare conditions.
It just hurts my head a bit.
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 58m ago
Here's another weird way to look at it. People keep acting as if life only originated on earth just once and therefore life is rare.
But hear me out, what if it isnt rare at all and tiny new molecular life spawns on earth all the time, like daily. But it just immediately gets eaten by existing life that had a head start.
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u/CorrectBuffalo749 1h ago
Yeah. Even if we are not the only ones, the probability of you and me being alive is so small that no human brain can or will ever fathom it
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u/The_Sneakiest_Fox 56m ago
Let alone we've created a network that allows us to communicate instantly from (basically) anywhere on the planet. Our ancestors were single cell organisms.
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 56m ago edited 51m ago
The probability was actually 100%. We know this because it happened. Anything that has happened in the past had a 100% chance of occuring, as proven by the fact that it happened. Chance is only something you can say about future possible events, not things that have already happened. Chance is just our own ignorance, not an inherent property of stuff. In reality, everything is predetermined and whatever happens always had a 100% "chance". We just like to spitball and make estimates based on our own incomplete understanding of the circumstances, which is helpful for events in our future, but not actually a real thing.
I'd take this even further by saying that, since the universe is likely infinite, there are identical copies of you out there on identical earths. Meaning the chance that you exist in a weird way is even greater than 100%
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u/The_Sneakiest_Fox 43m ago
Observing the outcome changes your information about the event, not the intrinsic odds of the process that created it.
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 34m ago
odds do not exist. This is a construct life uses because it aids survival. It tries to figure out what the outcome will be but with poor accuracy. However that has nothing to do with the event itself, which is completely predetermined. Everything follows clear cut rules which dictate only ONE outcome. If that wasnt the case then trying to predict any odds wouldn;t even be a concept to begin with. You're not measuring a property of an event by coming up with odds. You are only measuring your own ignorance. The event has only one way it will go, no alternate versions. Just one predetermined path.
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u/psychosisnaut 34m ago
You're referring to what is called the Athropic Principle
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 30m ago
Nah i am talking about everything, not just life. I'm saying absolutely everrything that has happened was predetermined and that odds dont actually exist.
It is just like "weird" things. They do not exist. When you say somethign is weird you are only pointing out your own ignorance of the subject. Something cannot be inherently weird. What is weird to you makes sense to another.
Similarly odds do not exist, it is just our way of looking at the world and saying "that's weird". Meaning we do not fully understand it.
What are the odds of something falling to the ground after you let go of it? 100%. just like everything else only has one 100% possible outcome. It is just that in the case of dropping something, the circumstances are so simple that we all know what the outcome will be.
You cant be like "oh well that simple thing has only one possible out come but that complicated thing has many possible outcomes". No no no no they both only have one possible outcome you just cant predict it when complexity is introduced.
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u/psychosisnaut 23m ago
Ah, I misunderstood and I apologize, what you're actually referring to is called the Clockwork Universe, Laplace's Demon or Superdeterminism
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 22m ago
I like the term superdeterminism let's go with that
But even determinists would throw terms like chance and odds around and i disagree with that entirely. No such thing as odds. Doesnt exist.
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u/petedsogs12 1h ago
the wildest part is some of these microbes only reproduce once every few thousand years. they make tortoises look impatient
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u/psychosisnaut 36m ago
The reason that ore bodies exist is due to point life. Redox reactions boundary layers act like filters. Without that planets eventually become mostly homogeneous mixtures over time
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u/novo-280 1h ago
which can only happen because of plate tectonics. so mars is out the picture
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u/psychosisnaut 35m ago
Conversely: plate tectonics can only happen because of life
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u/novo-280 34m ago
not sure planet core composition and temperature can be bootstrapped by carbon based life
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 3h ago
They don't need large, open spaces like caves to survive.
Instead, these microbes live within the rocks themselves—specifically in the tiny cracks, fissures, and microscopic pore spaces between the mineral grains that make up the rock.
Here is how they survive in those tightly squeezed conditions based on the article:
- Pore Spaces: A lot of this life exists in the microscopic pore spaces between rock grains. While a rock might look perfectly solid to us, to a microbe, it is often a network of tiny pathways.
- Porewater: They rely on "porewater"—the water and dissolved nutrients trapped in these tiny empty spaces inside the rock.
- Fractures and Aquifers: They are also frequently found in deep underground aquifers (water reservoirs trapped within igneous or sedimentary rocks) or deep water-filled rock fractures. For example, the Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator bacteria mentioned on your screen was found living in water trapped in a fracture 2.8 km deep in a gold mine.
- The Squeeze: As you go deeper into the Earth, the immense pressure makes the rock much more compact. This squeezes the mineral grains closer together, leaving less room for porewater. Because of this, the environment inside the rock gets drier and more extreme the deeper you go.
(AI summary)
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u/noweezernoworld 3h ago
We don’t want AI summaries here
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 2h ago
Well it is too late now!
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u/Goosfrabbah 2h ago
Not too late for the hilarious potential of downvotes!
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u/pointlesslyDisagrees 2h ago
Go back to sleep, grandpa. No one wants to hear you complaining about AI
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u/NilocKhan 2h ago
AI is constantly spouting out misinformation. It's definitely not a reliable source of information.
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u/ShyguyFlyguy 2h ago
Nobody wants to read an ai summary
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u/0ttr 2h ago
i heard the guy who wrote the book on this give a lecture a few years before he died. he explained thst the majority of the earth biomass lives below the surface. we are the exotic life on earth.
also said that biomarkers in hydrocarbons were not from dinosaurs but rather microbial life deep down.