Fortean Slips: In the Oily Days of Evolution

In the Oily Days of Evolution

by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com

When I was growing up during the energy crisis of the early '70s, one of the big oil companies used to run a TV commercial in which a cute, animated dinosaur morphed into liquid form and flowed into a car's gas tank. That was very disturbing imagery to me, for some reason. I was too young to fault the ad for depicting an inaccurate metaphor for fossil fuels, which come from microscopic plankton instead of gigantic reptiles. I just couldn't deal with the idea that gasoline was made out of dead prehistoric animals. It was too scary to be true.

But much to my surprise, it may yet come to pass that my juvenile deliberations on the origins of petroleum will have some shred of merit. A revered scientist has proposed that petrochemicals did not come from any type of decayed organic material -- instead, in what may be the single most dramatic oil discovery since Jed Clampett's, he believes that all life on Earth originated from petrochemicals.

Among the ramifications of that monumental reversal of scientific orthodoxy are these shockers: our oil reserves would be nearly endless, life on our planet would have begun deep underground, and it would be much more likely for extraterrestrial organisms to exist in places previously judged uninhabitable.

That's a whole lot of apple carts for a scientist to overturn all in one go, but if anyone is qualified to cause this much of a ruckus, it's Thomas Gold. The Austrian-born emeritus professor of astronomy at Cornell University is a fearless Renaissance man who has done pioneering work in a diverse range of scientific disciplines. Gold helped to invent radar, and identified the composition of pulsars, and made a vital discovery about how hearing works. He also co-developed the "steady-state theory" of the universe, which eventually lost out to the Big Bang in one of Gold's rare defeats. But if Gold was wrong about how the universe began, maybe he will fare better with his iconoclastic theory of how life began.

The conventional view of biologists and geologists has been that areas deep beneath the Earth's surface are virtually lifeless, because of the lack of sunlight and air, and the extreme temperatures and high pressures. In recent years scientists have discovered subterranean bacteria that are anaerobic and can produce energy chemically, without needing light. These "extremophiles" are seen as hardy offshoots of surface bacteria which evolved to live underground. Likewise, the organisms that developed into today's oil and natural gas supplies were once surface creatures, buried deep underground by various geological cataclysms. In short, science says there are no forms of life native to the Earth's interior. Anything organic down there must have dug its way down from topside.

But according to Thomas Gold, that ain't necessarily so. As he argues in his recent book The Deep Hot Biosphere, science has fallen victim to "surface chauvinism," presuming that since we live above the Earth's crust, this must be where the party started. Gold believes that the world's first organisms came into existence far below the surface, and just by chance these critters leaked up out of the ground and evolved into us. The best evidence for Gold's mind-blowing theory can be found in our planet's subsurface supply of complex hydrocarbons. Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea.

Accepted knowledge of petrochemicals dictates that they can only be found for about four miles down, in a relatively thin layer where biological sediments once settled. Gold's contention is that oil is not biogenic in origin, and hydrocarbon deposits were sealed away inside the Earth back when it was still a newborn planet solidifying out of the primordial molten sludge, eons before any life appeared. Thus, he believes that the Earth's innards are brimming with practically limitless hydrocarbons, and the "fossil fuels" that we have drilled out of the ground actually seeped up near to the surface from unimagined depths.

Gold finds his proof for this in a riddle about petrochemicals that has long puzzled scientists. Helium is almost always found in underground deposits of petroleum and natural gas, and no one has ever been able to explain why. There is no known chemical process that would cause helium to be produced in the same vicinity as hydrocarbons. The best explanation has been that underground helium gets trapped in the same geological formations that cause oil and natural gas to collect. But that would mean that helium should sometimes form in pockets by itself, and it has never been found that way.

Gold's explanation is that helium gets carried along with oil as it has traveled upwards toward the surface. Trace amounts of helium are produced by radioactive decay in certain types of underground rocks, but the gas never would have accumulated in appreciable quantities without some kind of intervening medium scooping it all together. Oil would have to travel over massive distances of more than 100 miles to gather up the observed amount of helium. This is why Gold sees the otherwise baffling helium as evidence that oil is not biological in origin.

Okay, so what does that have to do with the question of whether life began above or below the ground? Basically, petroleum is an excellent source of sustenance for microbes of the extremophile variety, which are thought to have been living at enormous depths for billions of years. If Gold is right about the origins of oil, that would mean a huge, hospitable environment for these primitive organisms existed for a vast period of time before there was life on the surface. It all adds up to strong circumstantial evidence that these subsurface microbes were the great-grandaddies of all creatures great and small, literally turning the earliest stages of evolution inside-out.

To take the weirdness one step further, Gold suspects that we have only begun to scratch the surface (pun intended) of identifying the ancient organisms inhabiting the inner Earth. He predicts that we will find forms of subterranean life completely unlike anything ever before known to science, even suggesting that the science-fiction chestnut of silicon-based life might be a reality down there. After all, the environment underneath the planet's crust is pretty much an alien world.

Which brings us to the most dramatic consequence of Gold's well-oiled hypothesis. If he is right, his discoveries would drastically lower the bar of minimum conditions required for an extraterrestrial environment to sustain life. No atmosphere? No sunlight? No moderate temperatures? No problem! Suddenly, the number of potentially habitable places in the cosmos increases exponentially, and the odds that we are alone vanish into mathematical impossibility. Microbes comparable to the ones detected in the controversial 1996 Martian meteorite might live today on some or all of the planets in our solar system and populate the universe.

"As long as you think that life is possible only on planetary surfaces, the Earth is uniquely suitable," Gold said. "But when you talk about life deep below, the Earth is not unique at all. The deep, chemically supplied life may be common, not only in the solid bodies of the solar system, but throughout the universe."

Now that's one heck of a theory. But can it really be the truth? Gold has tried to confirm his beliefs by drilling for oil in Sweden, definitely a pertroleum-deficient country. If Gold is right about the true abundance of hydrocarbons, then you should be able to strike oil just about anywhere on the planet, provided you drill deep enough. And indeed, Gold did find some Swedish oil, about 84 barrels' worth from a depth of about four miles -- but these results are inconclusive. The amount of oil was not considered enough to be very significant, and oil found at a much lower depth would be more convincing. Detractors accused Gold of fudging the test by having diesel oil poured down the hole, but analysis proved that the oil was not diesel, and a second drill site 7 miles away from the first also produced the same kind of oil.

Still, until more extensive tests can be done, Gold's scenario will remain a peculiar theoretical possibility. Thomas Gold has racked up an excellent batting average with his scientific breakthroughs, with just the one major fumble in that Big Bang debate, and there's lots of reasons to hope that he's right again this time. Just about all of us want to believe in alien life, and this seems like it might be a solid, scientific reason for doing so. There's also the paradigm-smashing, Earth-is-round-not-flat appeal of the theory, and a hint of conspiratorial undercurrents (Are oil companies and the government covering up the planet's unlimited secret stash of gasoline? Is the military-industrial complex devising germ-warfare measures as a preemptive strike against the galaxy's possibly hostile microbe armies?).

But even better than all those qualities, the most poetic thing about Gold's theory is the notion that life on Earth began underground, which is where we're all destined to return. Death may be nothing more than a cure for the subterranean homesick blues.

	Click Here for More Fortean Slips!
	Fortean Slips message board: Share your views