Do you ever stop to consider what an amazingly successful animal humans are?
We've out competed virtually every other animal on the planet for land and resources. We can change our environment to an incredible degree in order to suit our needs. We've expanded and settled virtually every continent on the planet.
Amazing evolutionary success.
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Now to be fair, imagine the success of just plain life. It makes us as a species very very small once again. No matter what, it seemingly seems that all life has no end. It adapts better than even us.
Whole massive asteroids have crashed into the earth and life still exists then, when we didn't exist, and now.
There's a brand new unseen before bacteria that looks like it survives in arsenic! Even eats it. It was discovered in California by NASA in 2010.
@DeWayfarer That may not mean the bacteria itself is dangerous to us as we are not its natural food. Its metallic food certainly is though, so perhaps it would produce arsenic compounds we'd not want in us!
There are already many bacteria known that can exploit the oddest places, thriving on only mineral-salts rather than hydrocarbons. (We need mainly hydrocarbons with limited doses of several metallic compounds.)
What of those wee beasties enjoying life in the hot metal-salts of deep-sea hydrothermal vents?
Or those curious stalactite-like growths on deep-sea shipwrecks like the poor Titanic? Those are clusters of bacteria feasting on all that delicious iron. Since ships built since the late-19C are mainly of steel not iron, I don't know what happens to its carbon. Do these micro-organisms either reduce the steel so the carbon just drifts away, or absorb the lot but excrete the carbon; or do they wait for the oxygen in the water to turn the iron into iron-oxide free of carbon, then sup on the oxide?
@ArishMell please reread the article. This bacteria is unique in the fact that it incorporates arsenic actually into it's own DNA. Until now this simply wasn't thought possible. Hydrocarbons and phosphorus yes, but none had arsenic actually in their DNA.
@ArishMell to my knowledge none have metals in their actual DNA. Only arsenic is poisonous to everything else. What they do is probably excrement the metal. They tolerate the metal. They don't metabolize the metal like this one does.
