A Dream Like Mine

thenewenlightenmentage:

Alien Safari

Seth Shostak: Our next speaker is T.C. Onstott. He is a Princeton University geochemist, and one of Time magazine’s “100 most influential people of 2008.”

T.C. Onstott: I’ll be talking about Subsurface World. Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of those places within our solar system where we might expect to find Subsurface World.

By analyzing the DNA within a bacterium, we can figure out the metabolic pathways an organism can have. We discovered one particular organism 3 kilometers beneath the surface in South Africa. This organism is capable of living without any interaction with the photosphere above. It’s deriving all of its nutrients from the surrounding minerals, and it contains all that it needs to survive within that environment. It doesn’t need any other micro-organisms. It is a one-world environment. The other interesting aspect about this is that the radiation from the environment, just the normal decay of radiogenic isotopes, is sufficient to maintain this organism indefinitely. So it never does achieve any type of entropic death. There is enough chemical energy provided by the decay of uranium to oxidize water and the production of reducing compounds to keep the system going.