I don't know how many of you have been following the story, but a team of Russian scientists in Antarctica have now drilled down through almost 4 kilometres of ice to around 50 metres above the surface of Lake Vostok, a huge underground body of water of similar size to Lake Ontario, which it is believed has been effectively isolated from the rest of the planet for possibly millions of years. If anything is living down there, then its evolution is likely to have gone off at a completely different tangent to all other life forms on the planet, so we may be on the brink of discovering a type of life that is completely new to us. Furthermore, conditions in Lake Vostok are thought likely to be similar to conditions on Europa, a moon of Jupiter which is now considered to be the most likely place in our Solar System to harbour life, and scientists believe that the discovery of life in the lake would greatly increase the probability of life on Europa. This would have made a great science fiction novel. It's mind-blowing to think that it's real!
It's a wonder why we keep probing the outer reaches for life, when we have yet surveyed all the life that exists on this rock.
Oh my god dinosaurs. Yesss. *cough* Sorry, I really like biology so I should know better than to respond like that. /super excited I'll keep an eye on the news feeds, I guess.
Yes, at the bottom of Alien Lake, there will be Chef's dad in an eternal debate on the merits of donating money to freeloadin' prehistoric sea-critters.
Aw, man... look what those fools are about to unleash. Those scientists don't read enough H.P. Lovecraft.
You know I think that was pretty much a plot to a SyFy movie. Well sorta. A megaldon was frozen in ice and something happened and it had battle with a giant octopus. I wonder what they will find down there.
Late last year they discovered that Arsenic based microbe in California too... Cool time to be alive!
True. An idea I have flipped back and forth on the back of my mental knuckles for years is the idea that life may not have been a singular event on this or any other planet. We know that there are some clear devisions between certain kinds of life on this planet already. Viruses and the Archaea are quite different from other forms of life to the point that the virus does not fit into our present definition of life and thus is given a difficult to explain quasi-alive status. But is that the fault of the virus or the fault of an incomplete and exclusionary definition of life? What if life of new kinds* comes into being all the time and are simply squashed out by the preponderance of what already exists and competes? Now image a place like Lake Vostok that is removed from the rest of the competition. The odds might still be against new kinds of life coming into being because surely the lake had life in it already before it was sealed away, but maybe, just maybe, the odds might not be so against. * When I say new life, I mean utterly novel and not having any shared lineage with anything else at all. From scratch. Out of the package, shiny and new.
