> At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere... Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals or Antarctic ice have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing without so much as a cup of coffee.
> The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars.
This is the most shocking takeaway for me from the article. Is it true?
There are lots of citations attached but they're all to individual papers, and the "99.999%" figure appears to be hyperbole, not any kind of actual calculation. (Nor is it remotely clear whether it's attempting to refer to percentage of life by mass, by organism, or by species.)
If this is true, shouldn't there be some mainstream news articles? At least a mention on Wikipedia? Wikipedia describes the existence of extremophiles [1,2], but nothing about any recent discoveries that they make up nearly all of the life on earth.
It's probably true by species. Life in mile-deep rock is gonna be quite isolated - you're not wafting miles a day in the breeze - and that's gonna lead to quite a bit of speciation.
> The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars.
This is the most shocking takeaway for me from the article. Is it true?
There are lots of citations attached but they're all to individual papers, and the "99.999%" figure appears to be hyperbole, not any kind of actual calculation. (Nor is it remotely clear whether it's attempting to refer to percentage of life by mass, by organism, or by species.)
If this is true, shouldn't there be some mainstream news articles? At least a mention on Wikipedia? Wikipedia describes the existence of extremophiles [1,2], but nothing about any recent discoveries that they make up nearly all of the life on earth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microorganism#Extremophiles
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile