Drilling for Life’s Extremes
How do we find the limits of life on earth and in the universe…
The thin emerald veneer…
Ron Milo puts numbers on nature for a living. He is a systems biologist and Professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot Israel. Before joining the Weizmann Institute, Milo was the first Fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Milo knows numbers and nature. His calculations show that the Life we know and love exists as a thin emerald veneer draped over the surface of the Earth, and that, for example, the weight of all the greenery far exceeds that of all other life combined.
Milo’s numbers also show that animals are among the smallest fraction, by number and by weight, of all the Life that exists on Earth. But more importantly, it’s the Life we don’t see or love that dominates those we do. Insects and their chitin-crusted cousins out-weigh us humans by twenty-fold. And in turn, the microbes — bacteria and archaea and single-celled eukaryotes — dominate insects and their kin by almost 80-fold. Even viruses are so numerous, their total mass exceeds the mass of all humans by three- to four-fold.
But for our story, we are interested in the microbes. They are the ur-Life. They have dominated the planet since Life began, and unbeknownst to most of us…
