Nature Knows 06 - Extremophiles Poem by Unnikrishnan Sivasankara Menon

Some scientists conclude
that life may have begun
on Earth in hydrothermal vents
far beneath the ocean's surface.

spores and cocooned bacteria
have been dormant, still live
for forty million years or more
that are hardened to radiation.

bacteria have been found in a lake,
cold and dark, half-a-mile deep
under the ice in Antarctica and
in Marianas Trench, the deepest
spot on earth, with pressure over
a thousand one hundred bars.

microbial life has great flexibility
for surviving in extreme environments
like niches that are acidic, too hot,
with too high pressure etc.
that are completely inhospitable
to complex organisms like man.

(2)
the sun may run out of its fuel, hydrogen
in five and a half billion years,
though its brightness increases by
ten per cent every billion years

in a billion years from now,
the earth will be so hot that
oceans would dry up and of course
no liquid water remains on its surface

man would be extinct, with most
other species, much before that
but extremophiles, the microorganisms
discussed above, would survive.

with all the technology we have now
and that will be developed further
man may not find another planet
habitable and within reach,
but the extremophiles will.

Nature knows!

Notes:
1. hydrothermal vents= naturally occurring hot springs on the ocean floor that are created when seawater is heated by magma and released onto the surface. Temperature about 700 degrees F and pressure 250 atm.
2. Bar= (a unit of pressure) 100,000 pascals. ‘pascal' (Pa) is the International System of Units (SI) of pressure. One pascal is equal to one newton (N) of force applied over an area of one square meter.