New Extremophiles: a few more (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, June 06, 2022, 14:52 (692 days ago) @ David Turell

A list:

https://mindmatters.ai/2022/06/earths-weirdest-life-forms-show-that-et-life-is-possible/

"It’s not clear what The Blob at the Paris Zoo even is, in scientific terms. It has 720 sexes, no limbs, and no brain. Yet it makes decisions. Stranger still: “Polycephalum’s type of organism is thought to have existed for roughly a billion years though it has only been studied intensively in recent decades. It is technically called a “protist” (a catch-all category for life forms that are hard to classify). It makes decisions with no apparent source of intelligence.”

"Among the life forms known as extremophiles are many creatures that no scientist expected to find. That includes the Deinococcus radiodurans bacterium which can survive “15,000 gray dose of radiation, where 10 grays would kill a human and it takes over 1,000 grays to kill a cockroach. This species, in fact, is exemplary in many ways, encompassing also the ability to survive cold, dehydration, vacuum and acid.” (LiveScience, (August 2, 2011) From the BBC (September 22, 2020),we learned that some radiodurans survived three years on the outside of a spacecraft.

"Loriciferans can survive with no oxygen.

"Deep in Canada’s Kidd Mine 350 miles northwest of Toronto live microbes that breathe sulfur and eat fool’s gold (pyrites) – (NBC News, September 7, 2019)

"They’re not alone down there, according to NBC News: “In the eye-opening report, a team led by Cara Magnabosco, a geobiologist at the Swiss technical university ETH Zurich, estimated that some 5 x 10^29 cells live in the deep Earth.”

"One fellow deep Earth dweller, Geogemma barossii can stand temperatures of up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 Celsius). They can be viewed in the video below at 39 seconds.

"A fungus living at Chernobyl eats radiation: “In 1991, the strange fungus was found growing up the walls of the reactor, which baffled scientists due to the extreme, radiation-heavy environment. Researchers eventually realized that not only was the fungi impervious to the deadly radiation, it seemed to be attracted to it.'”

Comment: My view is if life started in the Hadean period of chaos on early Earth, it had to have very tough aspects of its resistence to adversity. That life is here is a miracle I would attribute to a designing God.