Theoretical origin of life: deep underground (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 14, 2022, 22:33 (954 days ago) @ David Turell

And early in Earth's origin:

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2022/04/12/did_life_start_deep_below_earths_surfa...

G"old, an influential Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University who also nurtured interests in biophysics and geophysics, published a paper, "The Deep, Hot Biosphere," in which he proposed that life may have initially began many kilometers below Earth's surface. Writer Will Hunt summarized Gold's basic contention in his 2019 book Underground:

"'Four billion years ago, Gold pointed out, the surface of the Earth was a war zone. It was being inundated with lava from volcanic eruptions, baked under intense UV rays, and pummeled with a barrage of asteroids. It was extremely improbable, Gold argued, that the original delicate reactions of life... could have occurred amidst such tumult. The subsurface, on the other hand, was stable: no weather, no harsh light, no violent seismic activity."

"According to Gold, the subsurface's warmth, coupled with nutrients both present in rocks and rising in fluids from farther below, provided a fertile ground for nascent microbial life. Over many millions of years, some of these microbes, gently baked inside Earth, migrated upwards, seeding the surface with life.

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"Thankfully, scientists elected a more enlightened approach to Gold's ideas – they undertook ambitious research probing deeper into the Earth than ever before. While these efforts largely debunked Gold's claim that oil and gas were as old as the Earth, they did turn up lots and lots of life!

"'Overwhelming evidence now supports the presence of a deep biosphere ubiquitously distributed on Earth in both terrestrial and marine settings," a team of scientists wrote in a 2017 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Microbes have been found as far as 2.8 kilometers underground, munching on a range of minerals for "food" and generally subsisting at a much slower pace compared to life up above. Some are so different from surface microbes that they've garnered a catchy nickname: "intraterrestrials". Crucially, in regards' to Gold's bold hypotheses that deep microbes could have started life and may exist in the interiors of far-flung planets, scientists have found a bacterium that seems to exist totally independent from Earth's surface. Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator was found under a deep gold mine in South Africa and exists at temperatures as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the absence of organic compounds, light, and oxygen."

Comment: I added the 2017 material prior to this one. This is a 'where' concept, not a woolly lab approach. I find it reasonable under Gods design.