The 7 Most Mind-Blowing Places Science Has Discovered Life
Life is the whole point of the universe. Anyone who says different is either a robot or a hypocrite. Without living things, the vast celestial clockwork is an alarm clock in a cemetery: pointless and annoying even to think about. Sentient beings are by definition the only reason for existence, because we're the only ones defining that word. Everything from the elephant to the amoeba is a pile of atoms that decided not to just sit there forever, making them a lot smarter than most Internet commenters.
In a Lake of Boiling Asphalt
Scientists discovered millions of simplistic life forms trapped in a toxic hell of asphalt and oil fumes, but were too sophisticated to make a joke about traffic.
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Frozen in Ice and Time
Lake Untersee might sound like a comical foreigner's description of where you find fish. In reality, it couldn't be more hostile to properly evolved life if it were The Jersey Shore. The Antarctic lake has been iced over for at least 100,000 years. Its only inflow is from fresh-melted glacier water, which sounds lovely and expensive if you bottle it, but the lake receives less nutrition than a runway model.
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At 400,000 Times Earth's Gravity
Nature is pretty good at being insane, but when you absolutely positively have to pervert the laws of everything in awesome ways, you gotta go humanity. Possibly impatient at the continued lack of Godzilla, Japanese scientists threw a bunch of bacteria into an XL-80 ultracentrifuge and turned all the knobs up to 11. Then, they turned them way past that to 400 kg. That's not 400 kilograms, that's 400,000 times Earth's gravity. It's an acceleration of 3.9 million meters per second squared -- one second of which would take you to 1 percent of light-speed if everything in the universe (including the nature of the universe itself) wasn't getting in your way.And the life form they were testing didn't just survive. It grew. At this point you should be hearing ominous music and people ignoring a lone researcher's desperate warnings. The simpler the life form, the more it can adapt to survive things that would kill higher organisms. That's why reality shows still have thousands of applicants despite being fatal to the human brain.
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Irradiated Thin Air
In the time it takes you to get used to a new house, bacteria can evolve to suit it and spawn new species specifically tuned for your bathroom. Which you should probably clean, you filthy person. The most incredible examples of that are Bacillus isronensis and friends, which researchers found about 20 miles straight up by lofting a hot air balloon equipped with cryotubes. Which sounds like steampunk, except it's actually doing something useful.
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On the Titanic
It's impossible to overstate just how aggressively life evolves to suit new environments. It just keeps pumping out slight variations on the theme until something succeeds, no matter how many wither and die in the process (like pop music executives, but less soulless). An amazing example is Halomonas titanicae, designed for only one thing: eating Titanics. Which proves that either life adapts to new environments or an Intelligent Designer has one bastard of a sense of foresight.
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In Solid Rock
Scaremongers say it's only a matter of time before we destroy the ecosystem, and they give us way too much credit. We could vaporize the surface of the Earth to a depth of 2 miles and nuke what's left, and some species would say "Finally! Our time to shine!" Radiation-eating species live 3 miles straight down in a world without the sun, which means they live in an endless energy-deprived hell, but at least they don't have to deal with idiots painting themselves bright orange.
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The Chernobyl Reactor
The lesson of Chernobyl is that the most dangerous substance in the world is human stupidity. If everyone who whined about nuclear technology actually understood it, the world's average IQ would increase by 50 points. When idiots drink and drive and kill thousands, we don't ban cars. But when idiots run emergency shutdown tests with an untrained night crew without telling the designer of the reactor or nuclear authority scientists, then deliberately drive the reactor into the nuclear equivalent of "balanced on tiptoes on a stool perched on a stepladder on a table ... made of plutonium," suddenly all nuclear power is evil. Those responsible were so bad at planning that their driving tests all end with proctologists, and they're not allowed to undress themselves without three handlers and a fire extinguisher.
Luke also finds wonderful things in the most horrible environments, explaining the good side of the Vodkatini. He also tumbles and has a website.
Enjoy more incredible evolution with 7 Animals That Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes and more scientific madness with 7 (Stupid) People Who Sued the Scientific Method.