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Lake Vida is one of the numerous lakes crushed beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.  And there’s life in it.  Microbial life, but life all the same.  And sure, the lake’s only about 60 feet under the ice, (unlike lake Vostok which is 13,000 feet under the ice) but it’s still impressive.  The lake is super salty, devoid of light and oxygen, and cold enough to freeze sea water and still something lives in it.

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Let’s take some of those critters along when we visit Jupiter’s moon, Europa.  If there’s no life already there, we can introduce them.  Then in a few hundred million years they may evolve into sentient neighbors.

What blows me away about the finding is that microbial life can thrive despite this extremely hostile environment. I mean no oxygen, no light, acidic water and extreme cold? Makes you wonder about Mars. Is here life hiding just under the surface of that basaltic rock?

Cap’t Jack

Kinda negates the “fine-tuned” argument, IMO. Wherever we look on earth we find life.  As far as I can tell we have now identified life in areas with completely different chemistry and temperature differences in the hundreds of degrees.
As long as there is any kind of tuning going on, seems that eventually matter itself will develop aspects which might be analogues to actual living structures.

Write4U - 27 November 2012 04:46 PM

Kinda negates the “fine-tuned” argument, IMO. Wherever we look on earth we find life.  As far as I can tell we have now identified life in areas with completely different chemistry and temperature differences in the hundreds of degrees.
As long as there is any kind of tuning going on, seems that eventually matter itself will develop aspects which might be analogues to actual living structures.

The fine tuning comes in when you wanna make those cells organize into slime,
and then, the real fine tuning starts,
getting that slime to crawl and think.

Kinda negates the “fine-tuned” argument, IMO.

Funny, I was thinking the same thing. Just another nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design.

Now if only we could get people to shut up about it we could start shoveling on the dirt.