More clues to life on other planets?

[bejay1957]

I know we occasionally touch on finding life elsewhere in our Solar system, recent announcements suggest that life can exist in the most unlikely places - such as Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression; this has popped up in a couple of feeds over the weekend:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170803-in-earths-hottest-place-life-has-been-found-in-pure-acid

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/news/a27655/scientists-find-life-in-earths-most-barren-hellhole

 

[ronin]

Never sure if these scientists really think these things through. Consider this approach:
Life began on earth about 3.8 billion years ago, OK simple form but life, so it has had 3,800,000,000 years to adapt to each and every condition here.

We as mammals started to rise some 64,000,000 years ago from a shrew like creature.

So that simple life has had 60x the period of time to evolve sufficently to be able to survive in that depression then we have had to evolve from a shrew.

In that context is it really surprising? Especially when considering that  bacteria have evolved sufficent to be resistant to our antibiotics in what is really 50 to 100 years. Also life did not start in a nice blue sky oxygen rich atmosphere, it began I think in a methane and sulpher atmosphere, the seas were red from the rust in them. What we live in today is the waste product of those early creatures.

Sometimes I have the idea that thye should cease making out of strange it is to find leif in places but maybe point out how strange it is, at least on the earth, to not find life. Also in geology times what has the landmass where the Danakill Depression been? It will not have been the hot dry inhospitable place it is today. And "inhospitable" is measured in terms of human conditions.

[Ouroboros]

15 minutes ago, ronin said:

Never sure if these scientists really think these things through. Consider this approach:
Life began on earth about 3.8 billion years ago, OK simple form but life, so it has had 3,800,000,000 years to adapt to each and every condition here.

You make a good point. It's appropriate to say these discoveries show that life is capable of existing in a whole variety of environments from the benign to the very very harsh. But as you say, such discoveries says nothing about whether life can initiate in such environments. We really don't know whether life needs a very specific set of conditions to get going or whether a whole spectrum of environments would be suitable. 

[Ouroboros]

....  And what would be a truly profound discovery would be life on Earth not based on DNA, or at least sufficiently different that it was clearly not descended from the same progenitor as all life discovered on Earth so far has been shown to be. Such a discovery would suggest that there is more than one way for life to get going.