Creatures living in boiling water, full of poison: Clues to alien life

Creatures inhabiting a boiling lake full of acid and toxic metals near the Poás volcano in Costa Rica could be the guide to future alien life-hunting missions.

We're still looking for planets that possess the right conditions for life on Earth common - like us and the common animals around us. But new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) shows that it seems we are narrowing our search behavior.

A scientist wears a gas mask while doing field research at the "death" volcanic lake, where a swarm of monstrous creatures is alive and well.

According to the Daily Mail, in a volcanic lake next to the Poás volcano in Costa Rica, scientists have found colonies of healthy bacteria in . highly acidic boiling water, full of toxic metals. These monstrous creatures show that the concepts "suitable for life", "environment suitable for life". are only relative.

Researcher Justin Wang, lead author, says the extreme organisms they found have evolved a range of adaptive factors. Not only can they survive in a deadly environment, they also "eat" in an impossible way: creating energy using sulfur, iron and arsenic!

Such toxic lake environments have been identified on Mars, which are ancient lakes that appeared when the planet was very early. So finding Martian fossils doesn't seem like fiction. One of those places is Jezero Crater, where NASA's durable Mars rover roams.

The study also revealed that these extreme creatures cleverly "evacuate" to the edge of the lake when an eruption is occurring, as well as develop a series of genes that help them adapt to what most living creatures do. things on earth can't stand it.

This discovery will expand the search for alien life for future missions: it seems to limit the Goldilocks "habitable zone" of star systems to a range of temperatures suitable for Earth organisms. is a mistake, it is also a big mistake to search only for the chemical signatures of things suitable for common life forms.