“This is huge. What it means is that there’s a whole part of the microbial world that we don’t know about.” – Kenneth Nealson, University of Southern California, 21 July 2014
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
This discovery, adding in correlation to the recent ones, not only raises an entirely new set of questions about what constitutes life, but also changes the specs for what represents a habitat suitable for life itself. Unsurprisingly, NASA has equally expressed interest in this “dark energy biosphere,” due to the extreme conditions where some of these bacteria thrive could be replicated, for example, in the solar system. In the same way, environments previously considered hostile to life for lack of essential components will possibly be reconsidered, opening up new possibilities in the quest for alien life.
Photo Credit: Science Photo