(ORDO NEWS) — Surprisingly, the researchers found that microbes that remained under the seabed more than 100 million years ago returned to life during the study, in fact, came to life. Such a discovery could be a major step towards the search for alien life.
Scientists not only went down to one of the deepest places in the ocean, but also dug a hole in the underwater soil more than 80 meters deep. As a result, they not only managed to find microbes there, but also to revive them, to bring them back to life.
The discovery was made by Steve D’Hondt, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island and co-author of the new study. He noticed that microbes multiply by observing them in the laboratory:
“Dr. Yuki Morono (Japan Agency for Marine Science and Technology Geomicrobiologist and lead author of the new article) offered them a variety of foods. It turned out that within a few weeks they begin to grow, divide and exhibit the full range of metabolic behavior.”
Thus, microbes buried under the seabed more than 100 million years ago have come back to life.
“They, in fact, came out of a prison in which they were for 100 million years. There they didn’t have enough food, and now they are back in the world and behave like normal microbes.”
He added that the surprising results suggest that because life can survive in places that were once considered uninhabitable, it raises the likelihood of basic alien life elsewhere in the universe.
“Several conclusions can be drawn from this study. As soon as we saw them in sediments hundreds of millions of years old, in which there was almost no food, we came to the conclusion that microbes are largely present in all sediments of the world’s oceans, so they may well be everywhere.”
“Also, if microbes can survive 100 million years in starvation isolation on Earth, perhaps they can survive a billion years or two billion years on Mars, Europa or other space objects.”
“Usually the bacteria in our gut take a few minutes to several hours, depending on the organism. But between what happens in our gut and 100 million years, there are so many orders of magnitude that it is not so difficult to get another one with a factor of 1 in 10 in order to live on Mars.”
“Now people have discovered many planets orbiting other stars and have increased the capabilities of telescopes. I think the search for alien life is only a matter of time.”
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