Okay, they named a newly discovered worm ‘Halicephalobus mephisto‘? That is too cool. And why shouldn’t the Lord of the Underworld come in worm-form? Are worms not the symbol of death?
What am I talking about, you ask? They’ve discovered multicellular roundworms living up to two miles below the surface of the Earth. I also found it interesting that scientists now think that more than half of the biological mass on Earth is not actually on Earth but below the surface.
I guess this makes life of other planets and moons much more likely, but also possibly much harder to find.
Anything that can live two miles below the surface of Earth can probably survive almost anything that happens up here. They even found a bacteria down there that feeds on decaying radiation from rocks. Good luck killing them off with nuclear weapons.
If not for the high amount of suffering that will take place due to climate change, I wouldn’t care about it for this very reason. Biology has a tendency to correct itself, and the instinct to survive rings strong. Of course, that occurs over millions of years; time we obviously don’t have.
My geologist wife often says nothing we do matters on a geologic time scale. I counter that we, and our daughter, live on a biological time scale where things we do matter quite a lot. Sometimes it sucks to not be a rock.
Hopefully one day we will amass enough power and knowledge that what we do WILL matter on a geologic time scale.
Well, I for one am interested in protecting complexity in life.
Personally I’m for keeping the planet livable and comfortable for human life. And for a decent standard of living for human beings, that means livable and comfortable for large mammal and bird life as well. “Don’t shit where you eat” is a good mantra for any individual of any species to live by.
But I don’t kid myself – even with the devastation we could bring about with a nuclear holocaust, in the grand scheme of things complexity would re-emerge. You would have to seriously scour the Earth completely to prevent complex life from re-emerging on the gelogical timescale. My interest is solely in keeping the planet livable for human beings – if I were only worried about general “Earth life” I’d stop worrying about climate change at all.
Where I live, worms don’t symbolize death at all. They symbolize compost.
Absolutely! Worms are about transformation and regeneration.