The Most Alien Life We’ve Ever Seen Is Right Beneath Our Feet

There is a long time to have life outside the ground, it has a small organisms in our planet, who has not spared society, as everything we imagine.

These germs are once found in places, for example, in the world’s deep sea crust or are found in the volcanoes below the Arctic Permafrost. In these tough environments, they do not survive only in these tough environments, so the basic principles of biology have been challenged that the thinking style was established.

Karen Lloyd, a microbial biogeeookist at the University of Southern California, learns these underground organisms for the most part of his life. In his new book, IntratRestriers: Find the oddest life on the groundHe explores readers in a round of his work and one round of others, these germs are pointing.

Gizmodo has so far talked to Gizmodo Lloyd, as it has been constant secrets and why they are trying to understand why in this world. The following conversation can be lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Ed face, gizmodo: First of all, what did this research path?

Karen Lloyd: I really entered chemistry as a bachelor, and a mysterious type of chemistry is honest where I started. But then I was directed to the Chemistry Grad School and just felt very narrow. I just need – I knew that this scientific is a way to do in nature. This is a place, because it was a discipline because it was oceanography. I chose the oceanography to not choose between biology, physics, chemistry and geology. I have to do it all.

Then there was only a laboratory looking at these germs, isolated from the deep sea. And I did not enter it, that there was a world of deep life. Obviously, no one knows until you are told. But when I knew I was there, I was like, ‘Okay, this is a place where I can use these basic fundamental means, I can use these basic fundamental tools to find new discoveries about biology.’ From there, I sat down.

Gizmodo: What makes this life more strange than the life we ​​used to see and learn the most?

Lloyd: One of the biggest things you immediately thrown to you is that this work is in the deep branches in the tree of life. Thus, a kitty of a slave can think that the tree of life as a kitty cat is in a very different goal. But we are talking about slag and kitty cats, all these new microbial types are collapsed in the same branch. I do not want to say that there are things that we can never guess – this life is like this, as it is on earth. All things we do with our eyes are just so different evolution.

Gizmodo: How do they change some rules we think we work on life?

Lloyd: We are always known to have something like life without oxygen. There are many rooms that are free from oxygen as life inside our bowels. There is no new. But the idea that can never be an ecosystem that never needs oxygen and never needs the effect of plant matter; It can be mainly only in new reactions of chemical reactions from the ground. This is what we study with children.

Gizmodo: It feels like this area just started with difficulty. What are the greatest questions to solve biology?

Lloyd: The biggest questions are still very basic questions.

I want to say that many things we know are assessed from these highly specialized techniques we need to use to reach them. You know, not real. You can only make a tree and “okay you can’t go to them until they have roots. I know what he is doing. ‘

So we still ask questions, who are all? And what do they do? What do they eat? What role do you play on earth? How do they interact with metals? What role do they play in the development of the Earth in the course of time?

Gizmodo: This is clearly the work of your life. But what is the latest project or research that you have started spear right now?

Lloyd: Yes, I came back from New Zealand. There is an incredible subduction zone. It is where the two tectonic plates are overlapping each other. And this process creates volcanoes, but it creates this kind of beautiful mixture as this kind of alcohol mixture caught in these underground communities. Thus, we walked every new Zealand, we chose many territory and worked with local nations. It’s really fun to do this work only at a human level.

Gizmodo: What would you like our readers to read the most books?

Lloyd: I hope people are hoping for hope and probability. You can imagine that all the sciences are known or solved all the great ones, because you can think that the questions are small because we solve all adults. There was nothing left to explore. We know where all continents are. There is a lot to have in the solar system how many planets are. But this is just the beginning.

For example, there is a world under our feet. There are no secrets in these other places, but we just touch this thing. Therefore, I hope that people are allocated here in all amazing things that we have left to learn about life.

IntratRestriers: Find the oddest life on the ground is set to be released On May 13, the University of Princeton.