Ancient life, millions of years old and barely alive, found beneath ocean floor

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ancient-life-millions-of-years-old-and-barely-alive-found-beneath-ocean-floor/2012/05/17/gIQA3zIRWU_story.html

by J3L2404 • 14 years ago

119 13 14 years ago

washingtonpost.com

rhino422• 14 years ago

Why is the post by easy dead? It looks fine to me....

pohl• 14 years ago

Good question. Is a relatively young (45 days) account with low karma (17) enough to auto-kill posts? None of easy's submissions or comments seem out of line to me. I'm quoting the post here because Rachel Sussman's TED talk on species longevity is spectacular.

If you found this interesting you might also enjoy a TED talk by Rachel Sussman entitled "The world's oldest living things":

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/rachel_sussman_the_world_s_...

easy2• 14 years ago

Maybe it's "too much too soon" from a new account? I think all the submissions I made so far came from technology review articles I've been reading so perhaps PGs code thinks I'm an account created to spam for a particular domain.

nsns• 14 years ago

"Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all."

And yet some creatures are believed to be immortal while being "very alive". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality

furiouslysleepy• 14 years ago

C'thulu?

rickyconnolly• 14 years ago

From a shrewd entrepreneurial point of view, these critters must have all kinds of interesting enzymes and hardware that allow them to operate at such low metabolic rates.

Dissecting their repair mechanisms might give us insights into regenerative medicine in the near future, and technical knowledge for suspended animation for long distance transport or generation jumping in the not-so-near future.

anusinha• 14 years ago

Studying organisms like these would certainly teach us a lot about cellular maintenance and extremely slow patterns of gene regulation.

Relatedly, note that storing information in DNA is the longest lived form of information storage. Harddrives tend to deteriorate in ~10 years or so. Flash Memory has a similar life time. Books can last hundreds to thousands of years, but no more, and stones and rocks and fossils, perhaps a few hundreds of millions of years. But genetic information can be maintained for billions of years--it is a discrete information encoding, is easily copyable, and has noise tolerance and error correction. Not very useful (yet!) to store information and data, but very interesting to think about conceptually: humans have been reconstructing in metal and silicon what nature developed billions of years ago. Sort of cool to think about.

Ancient life, millions of years old and barely alive, found beneath ocean floor

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