Would be weird if Mars did not have some kind of ancient life still sprawling under the rocks, life is a lot more common then people think, a lot more resilient and seems to occur quite easily as long as the building blocks and there.
Yeah. Every time I come across one of those click baitey videos like "Has the Big Bang been proven wrong?!", I just think until I hear it from Anton, I aint buyin' it!
so couldn't this technically mean that bacteria may be dormant beneath the surface of mars? Mars does have clay after all (oh this was mentioned in the video afterwards)
I'm from the northwest territories, and it's beautiful land. Great Slave Lake was the swimming pool I grew up with. There was an ancient hole about twenty five feet or so in diameter, don't know how deep tho...😃
ANTON I believe you are a wonderful person and I truly appreciate(love)the variety of knowledge you share with us on a daily basis... Thank you for being a wonderful person...
As a marine micropaleontologist I don't find this at all surprising. Age of the sediment probably is not as important as depth of burial and the temperature/pressure regime the bacteria were in. I'll guess we'll find them most similar to other extremophiles. Smectite is a highly layered, highly expandable type of clay mineral. In this case expandable means it's very prone to fitting water molecules and other similar-sized polar molecules and cations into it's interlayer structure. A great place to stash water, nutrients and waste products in you're a bacteria.
@@tonydagostino6158 whoa , we’re on two different pages here, I was positing an open ending thought, basically, starting a conversation about something not yet known. But you seem to have all the answers already. You have a materialist worldview, and the hubris that goes along with it. Have a good day.
Earth likely has temperate locations underground with billion-year-old microbes. For these samples I'm skeptical, since microbes could migrate across clays over thousands and millions of years. To convince me the sample has to be very alien genetically and have a very convincing geological habitat boundary.
Where do those bacteria get their energy flow from? You can have life in a sealed jar indefinitely if it is exposed to sunlight, but what's preventing the swift entropic heat death in this case??
Well... if so, then 2 billion years of evolution has occurred on whatever life was there when the clay was formed. It's not that any individual bacterium in the sample is 2 billion years old. And 2 billion years is a lot of time for evolution to work, so this might not really resemble life from 2 billion years ago so much as their deep-time descendants.
7:57 “ I mean once again this is a 2 billion year old bacteria still alive still kicking still producing stuff”. But presumably not the same as bacteria 2 billion years ago. While there were likely far less competitive pressures, there still must have been some genetic changes through the generations that spanned that timeframe, right? Unless they were dormant most of the time.
It is not clear yet. Expecting bacteria to be alive after 2BY is a lot, but so was 250,000 years just a few years ago. We'll have to wait and see what this case was. I assume these are just later generations of an original population.
Thanks Anton, watching Anton is scientifically proven to improve your day ( even if it's not been great ) and it definitely improves your mind. You even inspired me to make my own YT channel 💛!
Lol I think the Thing was from space, it came down in a spaceship. There is a weird movie where bacteria deep inside the earth form weird monsters, though... I can't recall the name.
anton you are the best scientist on the internet - so educational and you can explain the most complicated ideas in an understandable manner. You are wonderful! Wow this is a mind blower!
Anton, this finding of living bacteria in deep igneous rocks may also explain why we geologists have found so much petroleum where we never expected to find it. If so then some oil may not technically be a fossil fuel, since its production might be an on going, living, process. Just maybe??!!
something being a "fossil fuel" doesn't mean it's not being created anymore. The process is just so slow that our consumption outpaces it many many many times over.
Super curious what you think the turnaround time "should" be for something like this, especially when the teams who did the discovering were busy... doing the discovering. Their mission was to get the samples in the first place and find the bacteria, sequencing and data analysis are next steps.
@@Avendesoranot like HT sequencing and assembly exist for a decade, especially for procaryotes. Even with low concentration samples. Pretty sure even as a service.
@@emmanuels7723 Sequencing takes weeks, analyzing the resulting data and correlating it with everything you already know to determine if your hypothesis about their age is correct takes SLIGHTLY longer. I promise. They actually do more than just glance at the results and go "eureka!".
So applying that process to the recently retrieved asteroid sample would be worthy of further anlysis. Considering they indicated clays were present in the samples.
So is the bacteria or the rock 2 billion years old? There seems to be a discrepency between the thumbnail and the title. 😅 I assume the bacteria are on a lot of new generations by now?
The bacterial _colony_ is 2 billion years old, encapsulated in 2 billion year old rock. An individual bacterium within the colony is not 2 billion years old.
These bacteria were separated from the rest of the world for hundreds of millions of years, yet somehow found a way to survive in these isolated environment. Think of it as an alien environment here on Earth.
I hope somebody is seeing to it that none of these bacteria get loose... Who knows what these tough little dudes could do to our current life forms ... 😮
They're probably optimized for extreme conditions, meaning they won't thrive in our "normal" environment. Though yeah, there's no reason not to take precautions!
My money is on our immune system for this one. These little guys have been sitting in some cozy clay forever without being bothered, while we've been exposed to almost everything imaginable on the planet.
Mind blowing! It would be interesting to get more information about the genetics and morphology of these bacteria. Our oldest bacteria belongs to Archeobateria family so let's see if these bacteria are part of this group or completely different! Great presentation on another ground-breaking scientific discovery!
This has got to be one of the most under-appreciated discoveries in our lifetime. If we could verify it, maybe with a few more carefully collected samples, t would, how shall I say it, rock our notions of biology. Tardigrades? Amateurs… These guys survived snowball Earths, the end Permian, and more. They slept through the impact event at the end of the Cretaceous. We young kids with our oxygen and multicellular life…
Since the bacteria were located in clay filled cracks in the rock the bacteria can be much more recent than the age of the rock itself. A new book published by Austin Macauley Publishers titled From Chemistry to Life on Earth outlines abiogenesis in great detail with a solution to the evolution of the genetic code and the ribosome as well as the cell in general using 290 references, 50 illustrations and several information tables with a proposed molecular natural selection formula with a worked example for ATP.
Thank you, Anton. Discoveries like this are massively perspective-changing! And it sure seems we're seeing more and more like this. I hope this is a clear indicator to the scientific community that we REALLY don't know much at all and that being open for fundamental shifts in understanding should be the norm. We'll never know everything about the real drivers of existence, but we can at least be more humble about our place in the universe.
Anton's videos are always informative and accurate. There is no guile in him, which is very blessed. You are truly a wonderful person Anton. I hope someday you meet Brother Guy Consolmagno.
I think the formation of life was basically an absolute freak event much, much rarer than people think, thus explaining the fermi paradox. I don't think there's alien life anywhere close enough for us to observe.
Hallelujah 🙌🏻!!!!! The daily jesus devotional has been a huge part of my transformation, God is good 🙌🏻🙌🏻. I was owing a loan of $49,000 to the bank for my son's brain surgery, Now I'm no longer in debt after I invested $11,000 and got my payout of $290,500 every month…God bless Mrs Susan Jane Christy ❤️
Read a great book once:Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith FRSE (24 November 1931 - 26 August 2016) was an organic chemist and molecular biologist at the University of Glasgow.[1] He studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he gained a Ph.D. in Chemistry (1957).[2] He was most famous for his controversial 1985 book Seven Clues to the Origin of Life.
Hey Anton. Love your videos. In this one there’s a slight correction. You say the place the scientists went was bushveld in South Africa. That’s like saying they went to forest in Germany. It’s just a type of terrain. What you meant to say is the Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC).
Hey, Anton, great topic. Thank you very much for this post. What software do you use to change your background for the podcast? I wanna try. I'm using this myself.
Volcanic rocks sustain life, meaning life can start and be ready to develop further when conditions allow for it. That is good news for finding extraterrestrial life.
Hi Anton, new subscriber here. I really like your choice of topics and style of presentation. I am looking forward to skimming through your back catalog. Not sure if you've found it already, but I would recommend Michael Levin's work on bioelectricity. He's doing some mind-blowing stuff that I think you and your audience might get a kick out of.
I have a friend who is a Professor in Microfossils. He also studied under Dr Suzuki. Fantastic news about his latest research. He is also a genius regarding the evolution of microfossils too.
Now I know why I felt guilty about my rockhounding past, I was destroying communities all along. Well, I kinda learnt my lesson but those rocks, millions of years old .. have started to crumble because I took them out of their habitat. I figured they'd be run over by bulldozers anyway, which may have been better than my cleaning them.
What an astonishing story! Very old rocks but how old are those organisms really? Consider the heat and pressure they must have experienced over a period of time up toward 2000 million years..!
They don't have to have been isolated for two billion years. Even if the researchers are taking extreme care to prevent contamination by their research procedures of acquiring the samples in the first place, that doesn't imply that has never been any environmental contamination over two billion years.
When building a house basement you learn that for every few feet below the water line, the hydrostatic pressure against the wall increases 100 pounds per square foot per unit distance....that is the pressure increases ALOT. Changes in pressure in geological terms are caused by everything, up to the position of the moon . Water flows in and out of tiny spaces even at great deepths because of this pressure.Bacteria go along for the ride. Unlikely that these bacteria are as old as the researcher wishes. This is why physics and geology should be known by any biologist.