A Completely Separate Ecosystem on Earth 323
Suman writes "A lake hidden beneath 19 meters of ice and gravel has been found near the bottom of the world that might contain an ecosystem completely separate from our own. In a modern version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic book Lost World, NASA funded scientists are now plotting a mission to drill down into the lake and remove a sample of water from the lake for analysis. Lake Vida, buried under Antarctic ice for over 2,500 years, is liquid only because of a high salt content that results from salt being expelled from water above as it turns to ice. Previously, scientists drilled to within a few meters of the lake and indeed found frozen microbes. Their existence bolsters speculation that similar microorganisms could be found in frozen brine beneath the surface of Mars. If living organisms are found in Lake Vida, they may give an indication that life might even still exist under similar frozen ice-sheets, such as under the larger Lake Vostok, parts of Mars, and even moons of Jupiter such as Europa. Pictured above, a robot meteorological station continues to monitor surface conditions over the ice-sealed lake." We've mentioned this lake before.
The trouble with isolated environments (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, there is this article, about the Rio Tinto in Spain [earthsky.com], which supports life despite a pH of around 2. It might not be totally separate or isolated, but that's a pretty alien environment. (another similar story, including a brief discussion of astrobiology, is here [chronicle.com].
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:5, Informative)
It's highly unlikely that there's any life on Io [ucar.edu]. It appears to be too extreme for extremophiles [astrobiology.com]. Perhaps you are thinking of Europa [msoe.edu]. Europa [spaceref.com]'s the icy moon. Io [solarviews.com]'s the volcanic one covered in sulfur.
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, we should certainly be taking preventative measures to ensure that we don't contaminate other worlds...but I don't think it should be something that paralyzes us and stops good science from being done. The chance of actual contamination occuring is just too low to spend too much energy worrying.
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, it's unlikely that our garden variety bacteria would survive on Europa, but then, how likely is it that life would arise on its own? If you believe in the latter you have to allow the former, which is a lot more likely, statistically...
Daniel
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it is not. Not that you or I can provide much in way of statistics to speak of, but consider the fact that "our" microbies would have only one chance to get enough of them to mutate, to survive, and failing that. They're dead, until next spaceship comes, if ever. On the other hand, getting native ones to develop can happen at any single point over millions of years, under potentiallty varying circumstances.
Chances of either happening are probably miniscule, but one is a continuing process, and the other discrete tiny one-time chances. I'd put my money on life evolving spontaneously, over someone bringing in specialized life-forms ill-suited for new environment any day.
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand your point, but frankly, the same question could have been asked in the seventeenth century about bringing rats, cats and pigs to Madagascar. How could they possibly compete with the native and well-adapted dodo?
And that's just an example, of course. There are many such examples, not just that one, of native species being decimated by introduced species.
The problem is that the dodo, for example, was well-adapted in a locally maximal sense, not in a maximal sense. Rats are better adapted for Madagascar than dodos were; they were just never given a chance there until the 1600s.
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:3, Informative)
You have heard of spores, haven't you? The garden variety stuff would be the easiest to get rid of, but the unusual stuff would still hang around. Take any random sample of atmospheric air, filter it, expose the filter t
No such thing as isolated (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:4, Insightful)
We? Speak for yourself!
Any "contamination" from such a probe will have to compete with native microbes in Io's natural environment. Most likely, it will be quickly overrun and out-competed for nutrients. If it DOES contaminate and take hold of the planet, then it was meant to be; it probably would have heppened by now from meteor impacts. Earth itself has been contaminated with martian rocks. I don't hear you environmentalist wackos complaining about that.
"it was meant to be", lol (Score:4, Insightful)
I, for one, welcome our new petrified microbe overlords... yep, they're a serious threat all right.
it probably would have heppened by now from meteor impacts.
Giant meteorites burning through our atmosphere & hitting the ground with such force that it blasts rocks containing live bacteria at escape velocity out past Mars & the asteroids, narrowly avoiding Jupiter's gravity well & gently touching down in a hospitable place on Io - and you call that probable? Like it happens on a daily basis.
If it DOES contaminate and take hold of the planet, then it was meant to be
What are you, some sort of predestinationist? It's OK to hang about in SARS clinics or have unprotected sex with AIDS sufferers, and if we get infected, well, "it was meant to be"?
From where I'm sitting, such an event would be our choice, the humans planning the mission, since we could by a simple choice not allow it the chance of happening.
Environmentalist wacko complaints aside, try to see it from a simple science viewpoint at least. Any life on Io (or Europa or underground lakes etc) can be viewed as a (very rare) experiment, with the potential to learn a lot about how life develops, and if we introduce external influences we run a real risk of contaminating the results.
That alone is enough reason to take every precaution.
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:5, Insightful)
This lake is rare in the sense of largish perfect diamond, and thus notable, but it is not rare in the sense of unique, and thus truly breaking news.
The contamination of any of these lakes could amount to something of a scientific tragedy, as each may have unique enviromental qualities, but on the other hand, if we restrict our early experiments to the smaller and less significant lakes, if we make a mistake or two learning our way about the process major tragedy might be avoided.
And we're likely to make a mistake or two despite our best efforts. We only learn by making these mistakes. It's called "trial and error," not "trial and continued success."
See the early Bill Cosby routine entitled, "Oops."
So the real scientific import of Vista and her sisters is that we can explore them before we tackle Vostok, and ultimately Io. If we accidentally contaminate Vida it's a possible tragedy. If we contaminate Io it's an unmitigated disaster.
KFG
P.S. (Score:3, Interesting)
The ocean, in human terms, is in many ways a desert , despite representing an immense quantity of water, because it is salt.
"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
Salt water turns fresh when frozen.
If you have a means to freeze salt water, like, oh, say, the air temperature ( sal
Re:P.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
You can test this yourself by making and freezing some salt water at home in an ice cube tray. After freezing the water will taste fairly fresh, at least much fresher than it did before freezing. (Some molecules can, indeed, get trapped in the ice matrix if the ice forms around them faster than they are pushed aside. These trapped molecules actually precipitate out of the ice over time, sort of worming their way through the flaws they inherently create in the matrix. That's why we put down salt to melt ice. Perhaps that reference will make it intuitively clearer that while salt and water mix splendidly, salt and ice reject each other. Since sea water freezes in massive quatities at a time quite a bit of molecular salt gets trapped. It takes about three years for such huge chunks of ice to go completely fresh. Have I set a world record for a parenthetical yet?)
Yes, many icebergs do actually come from fresh water glacial ice, (and it's this glacial ice that some Japanese and Americans actually pay ridiculous amounts of money for, generally "harvested" in Alaska), but as you point out yourself, some of them are broken pack ice.
Remember that there is no land under the Arctic ice cap. What precipitation there is acumulates on a thick bed of frozen sea water. In the summer large chunks of the edge of the ice cap break off and form icebergs.
Look at a map of Antarctica. Notice that there is a rather large "fringe" of ice around the land mass. Some of them so large and of such age as be named "ice shelves." Some of these ice shelves are fed by glaciers, but they all consist mostly of pack ice, frozen sea water. Which is fresh.
The Ross ice shelf has been much in the news of late. Very old and larger than France it has started breaking up, creating icebergs measuring tens, and even hundreds, of miles in extent.
Google on "Ross ice shelf" and you'll come up with lots of sites talking about pack ice, glacial ice, the creation of icebergs from both glacial ice and pack ice and the phenomenon of salt water turning fresh when frozen. The fact has ecological import with the breaking up of the Ross shelf since the bergs drift northward and melt over period of years, diluting the ocean.
One of the sites on the first page of hits has lots of pretty pictures, including stages of sea water freezing to create pack ice, including "grease" ice.
I've spent most of my life living in places where I could look out a window and see either the Hudson river or its major tributary the Mohawk (the other day I wrote about the Mohawk being my "backyard." Right now it is literally. That's what you get for living on a river flood plain). I distinctly remember the first time in my extreme youth that I looked at the river and suddenly realized that I could tell it was about to freeze because it had an odd sort of "greasy" look about it. Some four decades later I still like to go out and watch the grease ice form on the river. There's just something about it that fascinates.
Also google on "oceanic conveyor belt" to learn why even a fairly minor dilution of the ocean's waters north of the Ross Shelf might be of some concern.
KFG
We kill animals and eat them, we wipe out species (Score:3, Funny)
Re:We kill animals and eat them, we wipe out speci (Score:2)
But in Soviet Russia (and everywhere else), the microbes kill us.
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The trouble with isolated environments (Score:3, Funny)
Woops. (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the Mars theory of life existing in frozen climates, the funny thing is when the fiery residents of the Sun, laugh and realize we puny humans can exist on the frozen climate of Earth! Their probes will be made of molton sunspots that will sadly destroy much of our ecosystem in efforts to understand it, or at least that is the premise of a sci-fi book I may write in the near future. My point is that life is all a matter of perspective, not that I truly believe there is life on the Sun (although there must be).
Re:Woops. (Score:3, Insightful)
At least, this time, we're going to drill in a fragile area in this name of Science, not Capitalism (As in for oil)
Re:Woops. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Woops. (Score:2, Funny)
Sincerely,
NASA
Re:Agreed! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Agreed! (Score:3, Interesting)
This is NASA, not a bunch of 5th graders and a shovel. There is no competent scientist in the world who is not aware of the dangers of contaminating one's results. It's one of the basic tennants of science.
Sure, but what if the whole environmental contamination stuff just gets signed off in one of the thousands of yearly safety waivers? What if the engineers feel pressured not to talk to management because of political concerns? Or what if the whole project fails because somebody forgot to use inches i
Re:Woopsistry (Score:2, Insightful)
Thanks for a wonderful demonstration of Sophistry.
Them commies don't drill for oil, they respect the environment!It always scares me when Reactionaries try to do this sort of thing. Not because they are particularly destructive people, but we all make mistakes, and we don't want this ruined.
Re:Woopsistry (Score:3, Insightful)
Them commies don't drill for oil, they respect the environment!
Quite a sophist-icated argument you've got yourself, there. He wasn't contrasting Capitalism with Commununism, but with Science (i.e. the motivation to own with the motivation to know). You're knocking down a straw man.
Re:Woops. (Score:4, Insightful)
Please explain that?
Contamination is bound to happen. How far in the future is a matter of question, but if humans continue to invent and expand as we have allways done then inevitably we will settle other planets or the moon maybe even other galaxies. Are you arguing that the lake should be left as it is never to be touched? I think it's inevitable that exploring the scientific finds will contaminate the lake but I also think that nasa can figure out ways to reduce that contamination maybe even to the point of irrelevance.
Also... if a "sun scientist" were smart enough to build a probe an launch it out of the suns gravity to the earth (keep in mind that that is exponentially harder then us sending probes to mars as they don't have orbital dynamics working in their favor), don't you think they would also be smart enough to build said probe out of something solid and non-molten, as to not destroy the planet they intend to explore?
Re:Woops. (Score:4, Funny)
Actually the "Sun Scientists" have been transmitting large dosages of radiation into space to find life in the universe and were quickly surprised to find life on the third moon from the sun. Some scientist in the community ponder weather the life existed before the experiment started and wonder whether the search for life alters the data findings. This controversial project to find life in the universe may be coming to an end due to pressures from galaxy enviromentalists and budget cuts on the project.
Re:Woops. (Score:2)
Re:Woops. (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a hugely unjustified jump in logic, if it qualifies as logic. 100 years ago we knew that ice was cold, we knew that the sun gave us light, we knew that we had one moon; the body of knowledge that we held 100 years ago that still remains true is immense. To use examples of the things that we were wrong about as evidence that everything we know is patently false is ri
Re:Woops. (Score:3)
Fine, but the question of is there life on Mars isn't asking if a tiny microrganism hitched a ride. It's asking if there is life native to mars. And we have never been to the sun so this in no way supports your assertion that there must be life on the sun.
Humility also rules that if we believe one thing, the opposite must be true in some form or another.
It certainly does not. Humility rules that we accept the possib
Re:Woops. (Score:3, Interesting)
You seem to be equating energy with "life". While I can see why that would make sense on a philosophical level, it makes the term far too general to be useful for other purposes. That is, we can't ask "is there life {insert location here}" because the answer would be "obviously, yes". Besides, we already have a useful term for what yo
Just who are the moderators here, anyway!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Moderators - do a little critical reading for Christ's sake!
Re:Just because you can't grasp it... (Score:3, Insightful)
"The fact that the Sun emits it's rays in every direction possible, makes it quite funny that humanity believes there *might* be life everywhere, when in strict archetypical fact, this systemic nourishment proves that stars shed life-giving energy as a systemic fundamental and therefore these ecosystems are much larger than human perception currently understands. "
I could just as easily argue that because stars shed death-dealing energy (that high energy radi
Re:Just because you can't grasp it... (Score:3, Interesting)
what a load of bogus crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Woops. (Score:2)
Completely separate ecosystem? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Completely separate ecosystem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, for a more serious response, is it really a completely separate ecosystem? I mean, a) it's only 2,500 years, and b) it still evolved (see (a)) from the same stuff we're all made of. Or maybe I'm being insufficiently semantic... There's a difference between a completely separate ecosystem and a completely independent one.
Mars. Europa. Eroticon Six. Those would be completely independent. Which then leads to another question: if all you're studying is
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Shouldn't we be discussing Daylight Savings Time or something? (Aside: Don't news websites and such generally post helpful little icons that tell you when the time change is coming? Or did my ad blocking in Firefox work too well this time?)
Re:Completely separate ecosystem? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Completely separate ecosystem? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's arguable. No organic material has entered or left this underground resevoir apparently for 2500 years, so if any organisms are living in it, these organisms had to support each other in a stable relationship -- or they'd have all died by now.
This is like one of those terrariums described in my old high school biology textbook: put a snail & a plant into a glass container, seal the container, & see how long this ecosystem survives. The plant will provide oxygen for the snail, the snail CO2 for the plant -- at least until the snail eats the entire plant.
This experiment, of course, will come to an end much faster if the sealed environment isn't kept in light: energy must enter any ecosystem from somewhere, & in the case of Lake Vida I wonder if geothermal energy would enter this environment -- in the Martian equivalents -- in sufficient amounts to make it viable for life.
Geoff
Re:Completely separate ecosystem? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's certainly not separate in the sense that it would provide any kind of interesting model for what we might find on other planets. 2,500 years is an instant in evolutionary time and the existence a group of organisms that are just recently isolated is quite a different matter from life that evolved totally independently. Id does indicate
Hey, I just saw this on Stargate SG1 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hey, I just saw this on Stargate SG1 (Score:2)
Human destruction (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Human destruction (Score:2)
Re:Human destruction (Score:2)
Re:Human destruction (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you said that there had to be a way to gain the knowledge without harvesting it from the earth. Well, I hate to be rude, but there isn't. In order to learn about what is going on in there, SOMETHING has to go in and come back out, be it a probe, a sound wave, or a photon. What if the creatures in there a sensitive to the vibrations in sonar? What if our radar measurements just so happen to be at the exact resonance frequency of some molecule in their basic structure? Ultimately, any method we use to study the area has a chance of killing off the whole lake. However, the odds or any of these happening is slim. Furthermore, the data we would get from this probe would let us KNOW which measurement option are safe.
Finally, I suspect that someone is going to attack with the claim that, since ANY observation could result in destruction (regardless of how small those odds might be), we should simply not study it at all. Well, there's a couple of problems there. First, what do we do when some natural disaster threatens this ecosystem (ie earthquake). Without this research would wouldn't have knowledge on how to help restore the balance. All we could do is just sit back and watch them die. Also, just as there is a small but non-zero chance that any observation will destroy the system, there is also a small, but non-zero chance, that there will be startling new discoveries in there. I'm not saying it's going to cure cancer, but the knowledge of the balances of that ecosystem might help us in trying to find balance in other ecosystems that have been damaged. You say that it is our greed for knowledge that is destroying the earth, but do you honestly think the earth can be restored without knowledge?
Re:Human destruction (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait a minute. Pure? As is what sense? Pure is a thoroughly human contrivance. Humans are part of the Earth's ecosystem; we evolved here. Therefore, in order for the Earth's ecosystem to be "impurified" it would have to be contaminated by something outside the ecosystem. That's not us, nor is it anything we could possibly do. Do we shame a dog for crapping on the grass? After all, it's
Woah (Score:5, Funny)
So Einstein's head was/is a metereological station? Dind't know that...
Re:Woah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, yeah, I know, don't bitch about how stories are accepted, but having something that says "Pictured above" in a
In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
This should prove fascinating (Score:4, Informative)
Further, because of the extreme demands of the salt solution, the microbes will necessarily be adapted to such conditions. Since we know the timescale (see paragraph 1), we can trace through junk DNA and older DNA fragments how the evolution occured. (Microbes are simple enough that detailed analysis of the gene sequences is well within reach.)
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and no.
Evolution is a combination of mutation and selection.
Mutation happens all the time, and is usually negative or irrelevant (most often irrelevant). It happens at a somewhat fixed rate. If negative, the mutation will not survive; irrelevant changes will often persist.
Just occasionally the mutation is wildly successful, and in that case can be wildly successful and will often spread through the population- so the change will often appear in a populaton suddenly (and of course there is an associated genetic change with this.)
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:2)
Take a small irrelevant mutation that later proved to give people the ability to survive the black plague.
People had been walking around with this gene for ages without needing it until the dissease came.
Jeroen
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:2, Interesting)
I would imagine that DNA mutations would happen at very slow rates in bacteria living in such cold conditions - but the species that were able to colonise such an env
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:3, Informative)
Changes in genes that code for important proteins are definitely relatively rare. Usually such mutations are fatal, and get eliminated.
Changes to noncoding DNA are quite a bit more common. Most species have quite a bit of this stuff, and usually (but not always) mutations that
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:3, Insightful)
If you define the term 'proof' so strictly that something that survived such thourough challanges and scrutiny as the concept of evolution did is not proven by your terms, there's nothing much you can be really sure of. For example, how can you know that smoking really causes cancer? Maybe the statistics are al
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)
We can test the current tectonic plate models. How? The plates move on timescales of tens of millions of years. This lake is 2500 years old.
We know how fast DNA diverges, No, we don't. Not over periods as short as 2500 years. And not very well at all over longer periods, either.
This isn't "Insightful". It's nonsense.
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:3)
But just think of how vast the evolutionary changes of the past 2500 years have been! Compare modern homo sapiens (linguistic centers evolved enough to handle written language, hands prehensile enough to create subtle works of art, brains capable of abstract philosophy and mathematics, sophisticated democratic social systems, etc.) with our primitive hominid ancest
Re:This should prove fascinating (Score:2)
Tectonic plate movement seems to be unconnected to the rest of what you're talking about, but it seems irrelevant anyway, as the lake looks to be well inside the antarctic plate [usgs.gov] which would have moved only couple of miles in that timeframe (I would have thought the fact that there has been so
Scientific Article on Lake Vida ... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/100/1/26#B8 [pnas.org]
-Bill
Neat.. but not that neat. (Score:5, Insightful)
Such a lake sadly tells us little about the real question, from where does life originate in the first place?
As for environmental concnerns, there are those who suggest that if Man is as much a natural organism as any other living thing and no more, then ALL of his actions must be natural, including the contamination of a 2,500 year old lake.
Re:Neat.. but not that neat. (Score:2)
Re:Neat.. but not that neat. (Score:2)
Huh? I think that is pretty extreme because that could effectively be a blanket ideology that allows mankind to do whatever they want, including what would be an eventual self-destruction and the destruction of others.
I can see the point, but given that man is sentient and
Re:Neat.. but not that neat. (Score:2)
Re:Neat.. but not that neat. (Score:3, Insightful)
This lake is *only* 2500 years old. On geological and evolutionary timescales that is but a blink. Australia was settled by humans maybe 60,000 years ago (20x older than the lake) and the continent separated from the rest of asia and polynesia tens of millions of years ago (at least 1000x older than the lake). And just to put that ti
Bad idea! (Score:5, Funny)
i live in a separate ecosystem (Score:4, Funny)
america has been a separate ecosystem for years!
La Vida Virgen (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:La Vida Virgen (Score:3, Insightful)
I Saw This Movie Before (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Saw This Movie Before (Score:2)
We found life! (Score:2)
I'll fill you in on it later... I'm feeling a little under the weather!
*Completely* Seperate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:*Completely* Seperate? (Score:2)
I wonder how long it will be, before we find that rocks/grit from Earth have landed on Mars. This could happen from asteroid collisions or maybe from volcanic eruptions?
Not to be petty about off-topic posting (Score:3, Interesting)
But why is the Astronomy Picture of the Day site posting a photo of a weather station? We're not talking about a photo of Europa. Nor a picture of a probe to Europa. We're not talking even talking about a picture dealing with a test project to help plan for a probe. It's a weather station sitting at the site while they plan what to do next.
Just because NASA is paying for it doesn't mean it's got jack to do with astronomy. It's almost as if they've hired the slashdot editor crew. The next thing you know, they'll start having duplicate pictures posted all through the archive.
That is not a lake! (Score:4, Funny)
Connected Through Time and Space (Score:3, Insightful)
While it sounds more inaccessible to today's technology, only a few years ago many rain forests were similarly distinct. Some species of insects and birds have ranges of a single tree or a few hectares.
The same goes with inaccessibility in terms of the depths of the oceans.
The collection of ecosystems, biomes, niches - whatever level it is broken down to - gives barely a hint of the diversity of speciation.
The Prime Directive should be foremost in minds of all. It was agreed that Antarctica would not be a place for economic development; that has been the usual reason the protocols that would degrade an ecosystem have been lowered historically.
Next time... (Score:4, Informative)
Yippy (Score:3, Funny)
Scientists on parade... (Score:2, Interesting)
Life can survive under extremely harsh environments. All well and good, but not surprising. But can it be created in those same harsh environments. Scientists can't answer that part.
What is so great about finding life? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What is so great about finding life? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, probably because there is no single discovery that would have more important scientific and philosophical repercussion?
Is the emergence of life o
Dan Brown already wrote the novel (Score:3, Informative)
how are they going to do it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice plagiarism... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nice plagiarism... (Score:3, Insightful)
And what is up with a low /. id number, no comments, no journal, and only one story submittal? Suman [slashdot.org] is one of the more mysterious shades lurking in the electronic deep.
clearing up some things (Score:5, Informative)
The headline is wrong; this isn't a closed ecosystem. Sand and gravel from the surrounding valley, laced with microbes, nematodes, and even a species of insect is constantly blown onto the surface where it melts into the ice by solar heating in the summer. Some of that sediment makes its way into the lake itself. Under that much ice the sunlight is quite weak, but still capable of driving photosynthesis, albeit slowly. Every summer a small amout of fresh water from glacial melt fills the lake, replacing water that was lost by sublimation and wind erosion from the ice cap (the ice cap itself is replenished by new ice freezing on the bottom.) In addition most other lakes of its kind form a "moat" of meltwater around the shallow perimeter of the lake during summer; I don't recall if Vida does but it's likely.
Preservation is a significant concern among the people performing this type of research. Like many things in life it's a balance of how much to defer; too little and the lake could be seriously damaged, too much and we don't learn what we could. In general the sorts of techniques used don't contaminate things to a noticable level; sampling holes are shielded from excessive light, water samples once taken from the lake are never returned, that sort of thing.
The significance of this research on Martian or Europan life is not so much treating them as direct analogues as it is characterizing what strategies life might use under those conditions, to understand where and how we might look elsewhere. The dry valleys of Antarctica (home of lake Vida) were once warmer and wetter, just as Mars was. If there was life on Mars some of its last remnants likely survived in melt-fed, ice-capped hypersaline lakes. It's certainly imperfect knowledge, but whatever we can learn is helpful.
Re:Oh man... (Score:2)
Re:For all those thinking "the Andromeda Strain".. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For all those thinking "the Andromeda Strain".. (Score:2, Informative)
A lot of bugs that cause us grief are opportunists that find their way to the wrong place. Take Clostridium Tetani that normally lives in the soil. Or Salmonella - so called because it was first discovered in Salmon guts.
You got the immune system backwards. It attacks 'passwords' that it recognises - it doesn't indiscriminately attack everything that it doesn't recognise. It is constantly evolving, so that it can discover the 'passwords' of organisms that it hasn't yet encountered.
Regarding anti
Re:For all those thinking "the Andromeda Strain".. (Score:2)
Re:Will life ever be "found?" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Will life ever be "found?" (Score:2, Funny)
They'd send missionaries out to convert the aliens. The missionaries would then catch some terrible alien diseases from them shortly before catching their spaceships home. Everyone in the churches would be wiped out, and justice would be done.
Re:We have no immunity to the ancient viruses insi (Score:3, Funny)
Re:is this lake named after girl in fhm (Score:2)