An interesting fact I learned from an evolutionary biologist is that when there's a gap in suitability life has a tendency to rapidly evolve and adapt to that gap.<p>That's why after mass extinction events, we see explosions in evolution in creatures that had essentially stagnated. Mammals being the best example of this. They went from being small little creatures with little distinction for generations to everything from a mouse to a mammoth. It wasn't until the rapid extinction of the dinosaurs with all the environmental gaps that created that we saw an explosion of different creature types. There were niches to fill.<p>This is likely part of the reason we see life in such extreme conditions. There was a hole to fill and the creatures best suited to survive in that niche did.
>Most of life’s engines run on sunlight.<p>There's a huge amount of life that runs on zero sunlight and instead runs on chemical energy deep in the earth. It makes up maybe 10% to 20% the biomass on earth and a good chunk of its biodiversity and is quite likely where life originated, hundreds of millions of years before photosynthesis evolved. It also quite possibly exists in a similar way on Mars.<p>An interesting example is D. audaxviator, which runs on uranium and is named after a passage in Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”<p>A lot of it has been discovered fairly recently - there's an unusually interesting nyt article on it all, including how they may transform rocks and continents <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobiology-microbes.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobi...</a> or <a href="https://archive.ph/VgzKD" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/VgzKD</a>
The last universal common ancestor (LUCA), the organism that all branches of life descend from, lived in deep sea alkaline hydrothermal vents.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor</a>
Life existed before photosynthesis. Taking electrons from H2S and oxidizing H2 coming out of hydrothermal vents.
Photosynthesis allowed primitive cells to venture out of those vents and into the world.<p>Therefore, it's hardly a surprise that "life finds a way" :)
First off its always nice to see researchers using infrastructure based in Kiel. Makes me a bit proud!
But why can't the articles author give numbers instead of word salad descriptions like one droplet in three litres... For light. The amount, intensity or what?
Worth a moment to recall (particularly as we watch the 2024 YR4 impact odds creep up; not that it is that big) that there are relatively regular events where life has to cope with long sunless periods. A big asteroid impact can blot the sky for years.<p>It is quite amazing to think what evolution has to handle with. The aftereffects after a bad asteroid impact are staggering. No sun for years & the entire earth can get cooked for a few hours from the kinetic energy of the ejecta that gets kicked up. Then everything freezes. So survivors typically do well eating carrion, hibernating and burrowing.
That's pretty interesting stuff. From the article it doesn't sound like anyone is doing a lab test to determine the lower bound for light intensity. Any reason not to? I mean, take a batch of this algae and shine 2x the theoretical minimum light intensity for photosynthesis on it. And another batch of algae with 1.5x, and 1.0x, and 0.8x, and 0.5x, etc.. And see which batches of algae die off? Devil is in the details, I guess?
If you do any caving you see this regularly. Deep deep in the cave wherever there’s moisture there’s moss. The tiny tiny amount of light that reflects/refracts into the cave is enough to grow. You can’t really see in that level of light but as you shine the torch around moss everywhere. Hundreds of meters in and around multiple corners and that level of light is enough!