The Mir had a mutant form of space happy fungus growing on it. There are giant tubeworms thriving on the bottom of the ocean consuming boiling hot sulfur from active volcanic vents. There is a form of bacterium slurping up all sorts of toxic chemicals while living in boiling pools of mud and water in Yellowstone. Bacteria have been found alive inside of glacial ice.
At what point is the environment too extreme for life? Is it ever too extreme for life?
Yours is an extremely interesting and thought-provoking question. There are a lot of environments that look as if they’d be hostile to life, but which, upon reflection, might provide other opportunities for life NOT as we know it.
That said, I think that VERY hot situations are unlikely to be hospitable to life. There are things in boiling hot springs and groping around the outsides of volcanic vents, but I don’t know of anything that actually lives IN magma. I seriously doubt that a plasma would be hospitable to even science fiction life – the extreme temperature strips electrons from atoms. Everything is in a high rate of flux, which makes me think that it would be hard to come up with something capable of the complex interactions that could form the basis for life, The chaos of plasma is antithetical to the order and coding necessary for life, I think.
Closer to home, life becomes impossible if you can’t have an energy mechanism. REALLY dry environments don’t let you move fluids and ions around, or get them (eat). Sealed environments don’t let you get nutrients in or out. So I suspect that some desert environments and deep within, say, ice bergs or snow caps, might be devoid of life. Although that’s not to say that it might not be dormant there. (There IS desert life, of course, but I’m speaking of a really arid environment with no access to liquids. Think of the surface of the moon)
The ultimate arid environment is vacuum. Out in interstellar space you’re away from energy sources, any liquids are frozen solid, and if you’re away from a solid body all you have are rare occasional atoms and ions. No energy, no building blocks, no transport medium.
Now watch someone prove me wrong on this.
Short answer: no.
-b
Wasn’t there something in Scientific American or Nature or something within the past year about tiny bacteria-like organisms being found miles beneath the surface of the earth, living inside solid rock?
I did a quick web search for a cite, but I got a ton of unrelated stuff and I’m not sure how to narrow it down.
Stellar bodies of any kind (ordinary stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes)
The earth’s molten core (or anything similarly hot)
The Pit
Middle School
Yes there was. There has recently been much hooplah recebty about active microbes being found in solid rock, deep within ice sheets, in ultrahot water, in sunless ocean depths, in the most barren of deserts, and on the surface of space vehicles, among other places. Life is incredibly tenacious once it becomes established. One should hesitate to say, “Life cannot do such-and-such,” because, more often than not, life will do just that.
-b