Jimmy Akin

There’s a first season episode of Star Trek Enterprise (now out on DVD so I finally got to see it since I had the dinkiest cable in the world when the show first aired and didn’t get UPN) called "Rogue Planet," in which the crew of the Enterprise finds a . . . rogue planet–that is, a planet with no sun.

Surprisingly, this planet has life on it, its biosphere being fueled by heat from within the planet.

Now, we’ve seen Thomas Gold’s idea that there’s a "deep, hot biosphere" down in the Earth and that, in his view, one is likely to be found on any other planet possessing hydrocarbons and enough heat for liquid water, so what about . . .

FREAKY IDEA #5

From the WIRED interview (sorry for delaying the link, but I didn’t want everybody to go read all the freaky ideas before I could introduce them):

If meteorites can move material from one planet to another, do you think that life could have moved between the deep biospheres?

Yes. I also believe there may be a huge number of bodies that are
like planets that are not tied to stars. All we know is that we are
tied to a star. And we’ve seen a few other stars like ours. But that is
no reason for thinking that the formation of planetary bodies needs a
star. It’s only because that’s the only place where we’ve been able to
look. If you had an Earth-sized body floating by itself through space,
we would not have had any chance to observe it.

But its deep biosphere could keep ticking.

Ticking as it has here for billions of years.

So life could spread not just within solar systems but over greater distances?

Yes.

Now, I noted this in the first post in this series, but some may have missed it, so let me repost

THE BIG RED DISCLAIMER: I have no idea if
the abiogenic theory of the origin of petroleum is correct. I’m not
advocating this theory or any other theory of Thomas Gold. I’m
presenting interesting ideas for consideration. Nothing more.

And thus Freaky Friday draws to a close here on the blog.

(Except for the photo caption that’s about to go up.)

Y’know how on The X-Files they found a Martian meterorite (like the one in real life) that seemed to have traces of life in it?

The life lived in pores in the rock and was bound up with black oil. It later turned out to be an extraterrestrial life form inhabiting oil all over the Earth that was the reduced essence of an alien civilization bent on re-colonizing the Earth and wiping out the human race, which is in fact descended from the black oil life form, so we’ve all got its DNA in our DNA.

The name of the black oil life stuff was "Purity." And the human project to control it was called "Purity Control."

Purity was found on Earth but, as the Martian meteorite in an early episode showed, it was also found on Mars, and presumably other planets.

Earlier today we examined Thomas Gold’s theory that oil does not derive from decayed living matter but is instead a substance left over from the formation fo the Earth. We also looked at his theory that there are microbial life forms deep in the Earth feeding off the oil and forming a "deep, hot biosphere" that is the origin of the life living on the Earth’s surface, including us.

Kinder similar to what happened on the X-Files except that this is only here on Earth, not other planets.

FREAKY IDEA #4

Gold thinks this happens all over the place, including seemingly lifeless celestial bodies such as (possibly) the Moon.

From his WIRED interview (link forthcoming):

As I understand it, you think that any planetary body that’s warm enough for liquid water at some depth, and that has hydrocarbons in it, will have a deep biosphere. So there could be life inside the moon.

What we know about the moon is quite remarkable. The astronauts of the Apollo program left behind a gadget that measures molecular weights. There were a few deep earthquakes measured, and in association with those earthquakes there was always a molecular mass of 16 recorded by the instrument. Now the people who don’t know any chemistry then responded saying, Well, that’s oxygen. But it’s no good telling me it was oxygen atoms because an oxygen atom could not go a centimeter through cracks in the rock. What fairly stable molecule have we got that has mass 16? Methane.

So it is warm enough for life in the moon. Mars is undoubtedly a better candidate because it’s larger and has more internal heat. Then there are the satellites of the major planets, also Triton, Pluto, Charon, and the larger asteroids that have big black markings on them. Not Venus or Mercury – there the water would disappear altogether.

In my first paper on the subject I advised that one should go down the deep valley on Mars and to the landslides that have come off its walls in the hope of finding solid material residue that we have identified as coming from microbial action.

The current Mars program is focused on what are taken to be previously wet environments – lake beds and the like.

That is complete nonsense.

How did you feel when you first heard the claims about ALH 84001, the meteorite from Mars in which some people saw signs of life?

I think immediately the first information was that there were small grains of magnetite in there, and sulfides, and there was oil in there.

What they called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons?

That’s oil. Sulfides and magnetite were immediately reported, all close together. And there was a calcite cement. All these things are typical of what you find down boreholes. To my mind they have a much stronger case than the one they made for saying this is biological.

Okay, one last freaky shoe to drop.

In another of his stories ("Ubbo-Sathla"), Clark Ashton Smith describes a critterthing that is the source of life on Earth. It dwelt at the dawn of our planet’s history, and he named it "Ubbo-Sathla." Here is how he described it:

There, in the grey beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla
reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it
sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that
were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to
apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing.

In a previous post, I mentioned to you another of Smith’s oozy life-begetting masses, Abhoth. While Smith seemed to have a thing for oozy masses in his fiction, one thing that distinguishes these two is that Abhoth is not identified as the origin of terrestrial life, while Ubbo-Sathla is. Abhoth just sits down in his cave fissioning off weird, misshapen creatures.

But what if Ubbo-Sathla and Abhoth were the same thing?

FREAKY IDEA #3

Thomas Gold posits the existence of a "deep, hot biosphere" down in the Earth that out-masses the biosphere living on top of the Earth.

How did the deep, hot biosphere get down there? Did microbes seep down from the surface biosphere to colonize the Earth’s innards?

No according to Gold.

From his WIRED interview (link forthcoming):

And you believe that the oily depths where you found magnetite represent the environment where life on Earth began?

Yes. You can only suppose the origin of life in circumstances where there is no direct access to the source of at least one of the components that you require. If you have the common story of the warm pond on the surface, then all of the things that are needed will be accessible to whatever microbes there are. So they will multiply exponentially up to the limit of the food supply. That means that in a flash the whole thing is done and they are all dead. There has to be a process of metering out at least one of the components so it’s impossible to eat up everything at once. The hydrocarbons from the mantle provide that metered supply. If life developed down below, it could later crawl up to the surface and invent photosynthesis.

Now for the third shoe to drop.

Clark Ashton Smith was a friend of H. P. Lovecraft, though the two never met–they only corresponded by mail. Like Lovecraft, Klarkash-Ton (as Lovecraft called him) was a writer of weird fiction. He was also a painter and a sculptor.

In one of his stories–The Seven Geases–Smith tells the tale of a prehistoric and supremely overconfident hunter named Ralibar Vooz, who messes with a wizard and, for his trouble, gets himself put under a "geas" (a kind of magical bond or imperative; the term is taken from Irish folklore). The geas is to go to present himself to the furry toad god Tsathoggua and allow himself to be eaten as a sacrifice.

Fortunately for Ralibar Vooz, the furry toad god isn’t hungry at the moment and so puts a new geas on Vooz, sending him to another magical being. He is in turn sent to several more magical beings until he finally has a seventh geas put on him (hence the title of the story).

It’s a very creative tale!

I was particularly struck by the magical being Vooz encounters that puts the seventh geas on him. It’s a creature named Abhoth, which is a kind of squirming pool-like mass that fissions off from itself countless misshapen creatures that scamper about in the darkness of its cave, deep in the Earth. Here’s what Ralibar Vooz sees when he encounters it:

Here, it seemed, was the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination.
For the gray mass quobbed and quivered, and swelled perpetually; and from it, in
manifold fission, were spawned the anatomies that crept away on every side
through the grotto. There were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in
the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with fishes’ fins; and
all manner of things malformed and monstrous, that grew in size as they departed
from the neigbborhood of Abhoth. And those that swam not swiftly ashore when
they fell into the pool from Abhoth, were devoured by mouths that gaped in the
parent bulk.

Abhoth is thus a kind of primordial biosphere deep in the bowels of the Earth.

Fortunately, nothing like that exists in real life.

FREAKY IDEA #2

Maybe something does.

One of the concommitant theories associated with Thomas Gold’s abiogenic theory of the origin of oil is the idea that there is a "deep hot biosphere" down in the bowels of the Earth.

More from his interview (link forthcoming) with WIRED:

In his nineties, Gold is championing the idea that the creatures living on or near the surface of the Earth – plants, people, possums, porpoises, pneumonia bacilli – are just part of the biological story. In the depths of the Earth’s crust, he believes, is a second realm, a bacterial "deep hot biosphere" that is greater in mass than all the creatures living on land and swimming in the seas. Most biologists will tell you that life is something that happens on the Earth’s surface, powered by sunlight. Gold counters that most living beings reside deep in the Earth’s crust at temperatures well above 100 degrees Celsius, living off methane and other hydrocarbons.

Wired: You published your ideas about the deep hot biosphere in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. What evidence since then has confirmed your beliefs?

Gold: A large number of people have found more microbial life in deep boreholes.

And in deep caves?

Yes, that’s important.

So the buildup of evidence and interest must be gratifying.

Oh yes, it’s certainly nice. But what I find a little distressing is that even though I published that article in ’92 – I’d already submitted it to Nature in ’88, but they wouldn’t publish it – a lot of people describe their work as if they had made the discovery of a deep hot biosphere and it had never been thought of before.

You saw what you thought was evidence when you drilled in Sweden and found signs of life 6 kilometers down in the form of sludge and tiny grains of the mineral magnetite. What was the significance of that finding?

Magnetite is a chemically reduced form of iron oxide, which means it has less oxygen bound to the iron than more common iron oxides. The whole story of the deep hot biosphere is that oil coming up from below, without biology, will be food material for microbiology when it gets to a relatively shallow level where the temperature is not too high. For the microbes to use that oil as food when there’s no atmospheric oxygen, they have to find oxygen in the rocks. There is plenty there, but there is not all that much in an easily removable form.

But what is easily usable is in common iron oxides – and when that’s used, magnetite gets left behind.

Yes.

What first made you think that there might be life at such depths?

It was in response to the long debate over how helium, which is concentrated in oil, could be associated with petroleum and biological debris. Helium has no affinity chemically with biological stuff. My argument was that the helium must have been swept up from below by petroleum from deep down, and that led me to the whole notion of the deep biosphere.

Pretty freaky, eh kids? We may have a layer of life down there that’s more massive than all the life we see up here–if Gold is right about things, though as usual, his ideas are sharply criticized by mainstream folks.

MORE ON THE DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE IDEA.

Now wait until the other shoe to drops.

Let this post serve to introduce Freaky Friday here on the blog.

FREAKY IDEA #1

Y’know how oil is made from decaying plant and/or animal matter rotting deep within the Earth, where it’s subjected to heat and pressure?

Maybe it’s not.

The theory that this is where oil comes from is known as the biogenic ("created from life") theory of the origin of petroleum.

But there’s this other theory, too: The abiogenic ("not created from life") theory.

BASIC INFO HERE.

This theory has been around for a while, but it seems to be attracting more attention of late, even though most western petroleum geologists totally diss it. (This is not the case in Russia, where the theory gets a lot more respect.)

Astronomy has found lots of hydrocarbons in space–on other planets in the solar system–and so it seems that there was a lot of hydrocarbon floating around the area where the solar system coalesced. It’s part of the planets. That would suggest that there’s a lot of hydrocarbons down in the Earth, too. Maybe some of those hydrocarbons take the form of . . . oil.

If so, what are the implications? According to one of the leading western exponents of the abiogenic origin of petroleum theory–the noted physicist Thomas Gold–it would mean that we’ve got a lot more oil on our hands than we thought. In other words, we ain’t nowhere close to running out. Here’s what he told WIRED magazine (link to come in a post later today):

WIRED: Perhaps there was little interest in your idea in the 1980s and ’90s because oil prices stayed low.

GOLD: But that made it clear that the geologists’ [biogenic] theory [which predicted a rapidly diminishing supply] and its predictions were wrong.

Maybe they were off by only a little – after all, the price is now rising steeply.

But that’s only because of the OPEC cartel, which is held together still by the information that the oil is going to run out.

If it’s clear that the fields are refilling, then of course the cartel greatly weakens, and the individual nations will try to outsell the others. So it’s very important economically who is in the right.

How much more oil is there in your view of the world than in the view of traditional petroleum geology?

Oh, a few hundred times more.

A few hundred times more! Only he goes on to point out that it ain’t all accessible right now. The reason has to do with the refilling oil fields he mentioned.

On Gold’s theory, the near-surface reservoirs of oil–which we’re tapping into–are sitting on top of lower reserves, which are under pressure. By sucking the oil out of the top reservoirs, we’re creating a low-pressure area, and the oil down in the high-pressure reserves is siphoned up into the reservoirs we’ve been emptying, thus refilling the oil fields.

And there’s evidence that that’s happening, as even folks who disagree with Gold admit.

Gold cites other evidence for his theory, such as the fact that he was able to drill down through six kilometers of granite in Sweden and find oil. Granite is an igneous rock, so it shouldn’t have oil under it, especially at those depths, if the biogenic theory is correct. You’d expect to find oil on that model in sedimentary rock since sedimentary rock is made from compressed dirt (etc.) just as the biogenic theory of oil holds it to be made from compressed biomatter.

He also points to where in the world we find a lot of oil as evidence for his theory:

What led you to think the liquids holding open these pores [in rock way deep in the Earth] might be hydrocarbons left over from the Earth’s creation?

Probably reading Arthur Holmes, who had written so many things that were egocentric expressions of opinion. He was the great father of geology – and still is – but I found his work quite shocking.

Shocking in what way?

Whenever he discussed some facts that were inconvenient, he would say that they should not be taken seriously, that it was purely due to chance. He far exceeded his information with the opinions that were mixed in – statements like, "Oil is not found in association with coal except accidentally, and not found in volcanic areas except accidentally." Look at the arc of Indonesia, from Burma to New Guinea: It’s far more earthquakey than any other place we know. It makes lots of small, deep earthquakes, it’s along exactly that belt that you have volcanoes – and you have petroleum along the whole of the line. "Never found in association with volcanoes except accidentally" – that’s a hell of an accident.

So I spent years having these problems with geological texts. And then in the 1970s I had some discussions with King Hubbert, the leading American petroleum geologist, whose word counted as God’s. I remember having lunch with him in Washington and saying, "Well, how can you account for the fact that we have oil-producing regions that are so large, that can go from Turkey to Iran to the Persian Gulf and under the plains of Saudi Arabia and on into the mountains of Oman, and the whole of that stretch is oil?"

Why would that be unlikely, given the traditional view of oil forming from organic matter in buried sediments?

Because the oil is all the same, while the sediments in that region are completely different: different ages, different materials. There’s no sedimentary material that is uniform throughout the region, that has any coherence. And this just never struck him. His response was, "In geology we don’t try and explain things – we just report what we see."

Hubbert’s views changed the wealth of nations. The belief that oil would run out, and that those with a source could always increase the price, caused the early-’70s oil crisis. That, to my mind, is a completely stupid attitude that shifted many billions of dollars away from some countries and toward others.

If Hubbert’s view is wrong, it may have bequeathed to us a significant chunk of the Middle East problem, which created super-wealthy corrupt Middle-Eastern states, which may not have ended up super-rich otherwise.

On the other hand, if Gold is correct then the influence of the Middle East may diminish–not because they run out of oil but because we’ve got a lot more oil available around the globe than we thought.

==============

Now, one operations note: I’ve gotten a bit tired of late putting disclaimers into posts only to have folks not register them and fire off criticisms based on their assumption that I was advocating something I wasn’t. For example, I didn’t claim that Newsweek literally lied, I didn’t say RealID was a good idea, and I most certainly didn’t say that the needs of an employee should be ignored in determining his wages. In fact, I had disclaimers of varying sorts in each of the posts to indicate that I wasn’t saying these things. But some folks apparently didn’t attend to the disclaimers and got bent out of shape, so allow me to add a big red disclaimer to this post. It also applies to the other Freaky Friday posts I’m about to make.

THE BIG RED DISCLAIMER: I have no idea if the abiogenic theory of the origin of petroleum is correct. I’m not advocating this theory or any of Gold’s theories. I’m presenting interesting ideas for consideration. Nothing more.

Time will tell whether or not it is correct.

More to follow.