Extremophiles & the Search for Life in the Solar System

NASA is searching for Extremophiles - but that doesn't mean they want MTV-ready punkboarders prepared to basejump off a Saturn rocket while high-fiving a satellite (though with recent efforts like "Name our GLAST satellite" and the proposed multiplayer NASA game, they're obviously after the publicity).  Extremophiles are organisms which can bask in the kind of conditions where we'd be too busy freezing, melting, exploding, or all three.

The idea is that extraterrestrial life doesn't have be as wimpy as our human frames, with the way it complains about "lack of oxygen" or "lethal levels of radiation".  You know, girly stuff.  Earthlike conditions might be rarer than a four leafed clover fertilized by Yeti dung but that doesn't mean we're on our own in the universe.  An international team of scientists is heading for Lake Untersee in Alaska to search for unusual lifeforms.

"A lake?" you might be asking indignantly, "How do I get a job in NASA, because even I know things live in those!"  Not a lake like this - under constant ice cover, filled with liquid that makes bleach look like fruit punch, and percolated through with a constant supply of methane.  A closed container of lethal chemicals bubbling with flammable gases?  They might call it Lake Untersee, but we call it a Death Jacuzzi and anything that actually lives there has the right to call Mike Tyson a girl scout and sleep with Jet Li's girlfriend.

But why check this lake in particular?  There are tons of equally lethal environments: the Siberian permafrost, volcanoes at the bottom of the sea, even nuclear reactors.  For one it's because we've already found life in all of those.  Yeah.  For another, the Untersee Lake of Lethality is a good model for environments known to exist throughout the solar system.  Recent examinations of gas venting from the Saturnian moon Enceladus indicate an underground lake.  A lake near freezing, under constant ice coverage and venting to space, perhaps, but that's a tropical resort for any Unterseenian organisms.

Finding extremophiliacs under the antarctic ice will support hopes that we might find ET without having to invent warpdrive.  More awesomely, it will further prove that life is DAMN good at what it does.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

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Source Links:
Hunting Extremophiles  http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/07feb_cloroxlake.htm?list208336
Enceladus Lakes http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassinif-20080207.html