Reminds me of the Gamma Forest at Brookhaven National Labs. From 1961 thru 1978 they irradiated a section of the pine barrens forest with a cesium-137 source just to see what would happen. It sterilized the soil and hardly anything grows there, almost 50 years later.
That 1967 documentary highlights lichen and clumps of grass growing there. I imagine the soil ecology has been devastated and failed to regenerate which is why larger plants like trees haven't been able to return
This is great, if you have significant amounts of free oxygen to work with, which early earth evidently did not. Would be interesting to see if anaerobic metabolism could also occur without cellular confinement.
It can, that's the reason why UHT milk has a relatively short shelf lifespan and degrades despite being devoid of living microorganisms. The enzymes keep doing their work long after the cell membrane is gone.
Funnily enough, the title made me think about the PhD of a friend, and it turns out it's actually his lab that is featured here, and his name is even mentioned. What a star!
Soil's amazing. So is fungal diversity. Fungal insect interactions. Bryophytes. Slime molds. Ferns. If you have a lawn, do the world a favor and remove it. No need to mow and you'll be amazed at the world that emerges. Especially with a microscope.
> They’re finding that the chemistry of life is not exclusive to life, he added. “It’s the chemistry of geology.”
This has me excited for missions to Europa and Enceladus. Vast quantities of tidal energy flexing unseen ocean floors for millennia is bound to produce some interesting chemistry, if not life.
This is like saying "wood burns, even when the tree is dead" but much, much slower.
The disequilibrium (sugars and free O₂) were produced by living organisms, and this is just the gradual drift back to a lower energy state. CO₂ is common in the universe, and not at all a sign of life. O₂ and sugars are rare.
This seems like the better explanation of my laybrain reading this and thinking; why would you start with soil? If it were a true geological phenomenon then shouldn’t they use a sterile jar of granite dust or something that only existed on earth prior to life? It seems like pointing at a jar of bio matter and saying we can’t stop it is not really a good methodology to base much upon. I barely ever even took a chemistry class in my life but something just feels wrong with this approach to me. I assume that’s what the other scientists who doubt the sterilization were thinking too.
They suggest that the soil can somehow catalyze metabolic reactions and break down complex carbohydrates without life but where would the complex carbohydrates come from?
I'm also curious how they could demonstrate that there isn't some sort of very constrained extremophile producing all their results that doesn't exactly colonize very well but will still function.
It's been speculated for at least a decade now that geochemistry spawned biochemistry and life as we know it. This appears to be the latest instance of this pattern. One of the most notable examples is geothermal processes simply creating calm energy gradients that are stable for billions of years (e.g., underwater alkaline vents), which can then essentially "manufacture" organic compounds, which naturally assemble into more complex compounds like magnetic Lego blocks, which ...
I like to think of the Earth as a supercomputer running a vast self-interactive chemical computation of unfathomable scale for an unfathomably long amount of time. In this view, the Earth is roughly a ~10^38 ops/sec dissipative self-modifying search engine, of which life captures roughly ~10^35 ops/sec into metabolism, heredity, ecological competition, and evolutionary search. Once proper biological evolution kicked in, with some bumps along the road, it has had a general tendency to reallocate that immense compute capacity in a way that increases search adaptivity per joule by finding and stacking "search accelerators" (prebiotic geochemistry/biochemistry, replicators, cells, DNA/RNA/protein systems, mitochondria, sexual reproduction, multicellularity, nervous systems, intelligence / brains, language / culture, science / technology, ?).
> I like to think of the Earth as a supercomputer running a vast self-interactive chemical computation of unfathomable scale for an unfathomably long amount of time.
It would have been very easy for older religions to present strong evidence for divinity: just have some explicit, non-trivial facts in the holy book that were unknown to humankind when those books were written, like earth-moon/sun distance, speed of light, etc.
Complete absence of anything like that is a pretty strong indicator by itself...
I'm not going to track down the references to see if they did this, but surely protein mass spectrometry could show if they have enzymes that are still there.
soil is a biological construct and only occurs on Earth, the regolith on other planets will not support life without major amendments and modifications.
there are orders of magnitude more types of minerals on earth that found in any sample from an extra terestrial source, and while not proven conclusivly there is strong evidence that the bulk of earthly minerals, have biological origins in there creation.
what is not disputed is that the entire top 10km or so of our planet has biological components and biological modifications, 3 billion years will do.that to a world,
the point bieng, is that extraterestrial regolith would be the substance to use in substantiating the premise under consideration, but was not.
AFIAK only Hydrofluorocarbons detection would be considered a unambiguous signal of life, and those require technology.
Life very much seems to be a natural process, largely un-distinguishable from other natural processes. Detection will come from Preponderance of evidence rather than a silver-bullet.
The present study challenges the traditional view that the *respiration of
organic carbon to CO2* is an exclusively intracellular process, revealing that
*organic compound respiration can occur spontaneously in an extracellular
context in soils*.
On the surface, it looks like they rediscovered that oxidation of organic / carbonaceous compounds occurs at low temperatures independently of presence of living organisms. The real contribution of the paper would be in elucidation of the specific mechanisms of oxidation of these organic compounds (e.g. via abiotic catalysis).
Coal oxidation at low temperatures is the major heat source responsible for
the self-heating and spontaneous combustion of coal and is an important source
of greenhouse gas emissions. This review focuses on the chemical reactions
occurring during low-temperature oxidation of coal. Current understanding
indicates that this process involves consumption of O2, formation of solid
oxygenated complexes, thermal decomposition of solid oxygenated complexes and
generation of gaseous oxidation products. Parameters, such as mass change,
heat release, oxygen consumption, and formation of oxidation products in the
gas or solid phase, have been used to qualitatively and quantitatively
describe the oxidation process. Reaction mechanisms have been proposed to
explain the characteristics of consumption of O2, and formation of oxidation
products in the gas and solid phases. Various kinetic models have also been
developed to describe the rate of oxygen consumption and the rates of
formation of gaseous oxidation products in terms of the rate parameters of the
relevant reactions, oxidation time, temperature, and initial concentration of
oxygen in the oxidising medium.
34 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 56.1 ms ] threadhttps://maps.app.goo.gl/pJYr6qiZnMdVwLJS6
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/brookhaven-gamma-forest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsuiLxcDuHY&t=925s
that seems pretty major exaggeration
https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3732/ajb.0800...
Theory on the emergence of photosynthesis whereby chlorophyll-like structures first evolved from harvesting heat rather than light: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/mjpapay/45240-the-first-...
This has me excited for missions to Europa and Enceladus. Vast quantities of tidal energy flexing unseen ocean floors for millennia is bound to produce some interesting chemistry, if not life.
The disequilibrium (sugars and free O₂) were produced by living organisms, and this is just the gradual drift back to a lower energy state. CO₂ is common in the universe, and not at all a sign of life. O₂ and sugars are rare.
They suggest that the soil can somehow catalyze metabolic reactions and break down complex carbohydrates without life but where would the complex carbohydrates come from?
I'm also curious how they could demonstrate that there isn't some sort of very constrained extremophile producing all their results that doesn't exactly colonize very well but will still function.
I like to think of the Earth as a supercomputer running a vast self-interactive chemical computation of unfathomable scale for an unfathomably long amount of time. In this view, the Earth is roughly a ~10^38 ops/sec dissipative self-modifying search engine, of which life captures roughly ~10^35 ops/sec into metabolism, heredity, ecological competition, and evolutionary search. Once proper biological evolution kicked in, with some bumps along the road, it has had a general tendency to reallocate that immense compute capacity in a way that increases search adaptivity per joule by finding and stacking "search accelerators" (prebiotic geochemistry/biochemistry, replicators, cells, DNA/RNA/protein systems, mitochondria, sexual reproduction, multicellularity, nervous systems, intelligence / brains, language / culture, science / technology, ?).
42
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Complete absence of anything like that is a pretty strong indicator by itself...
Compare to this paper from 2003:
https://sci-hub.kvnp.top/10.1016/s0360-1285(03)00042-x