September 27, 2002

• A few weeks ago I was reading a magazine called Wild Earth. The issue was dealing with the concept of ‘deep time,’ which attempts to understand the current biological experience in terms of ancient, ancient, ancient pre-history.
  
  One of the articles was about the various species of mammals that have occupied North America and gone extinct, or migrated off to other continents. One of the survivors on this continent: Pronghorns. We have on this continent an elk-like animal that evolved the ability to out-run its predator, a cheetah.
  
  Yes, the Cheetos mascot isn’t the only North American cheetah. The theory is that both the pronghorn and the cheetah co-evolved in North America in a prey/predator relationship.
  
  The ice age of ~13,000 years ago wiped out the cheetah (not before the genus migrated to Africa), but left the pronghorn behind, still possessing its ability to run wicked fast. An ability it possesses to this day, even though it’s been able to out-run all it’s predators for 13,000 years.
  
  With that in mind, here’s a news story I found today on blogdex:
  
  
  

  Tough Earth bug may be from Mars
  
  A hardy microbe that can withstand huge doses of radiation could have evolved this ability on Mars.
  
  That is the conclusion of Russian scientists who say it would take far longer than life has existed here for the bug to evolve that ability in Earth’s clement conditions. They suggest the harsher environment of Mars makes it a more likely birthplace.
  
  The hardy bugs could have travelled to Earth on pieces of rock that were blasted into space by an impacting asteroid and fell to Earth as meteorites.

  
  
  Essentially, there’s no way this microbe could have evolved its ability to withstand radiation on Earth. It came here from somewhere else, much like the African cheetah.
  
  There’s another article linked from the Mars microbe one, which says that the mysterious red color of Jupiter’s moon Europa is, essentially, red tide. It’s a bacterial bloom.

  • 5:54 pm
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