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Comment by yawnxyz | Hacker News Reader

Are there more of these undetected/undetectable entities out there?

E.g. are there more "life" like obelisks and similar out there in genome samples?

Probably. There’s a whole category of organisms that can’t cultured in a lab or effectively studied called microbial dark matter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_dark_matter

These kinds of DNA and RNA studies are the only ones that can realistically pick up evidence of these organisms outside of an extraordinarily lucky electron microscope slide.

If you want the real mind-trip, try to think about how little we know about detecting "life" that is not based on nucleic acids.

There’s a biological detective story out there about someone figuring out how to culture the black soot near distilleries. This isn’t the version I read but it’s the same microbe:

https://www.wanderingspiritsglobal.com/whisky-fungus-baudoin...

It doesn’t culture in agar. Unless you add alcohol to the Petri dish and then it does. Things like this are why I still have my fingers crossed that we will have one or more helicobacter pylori (the bacteria that causes 90% of ulcers) moments for intestinal ailments. These obelisks may turn out to be one of them, and understanding could lead to better treatments and prevention.

Probably. This is a good illustration of just how hard it may be to conclusively find life on other worlds; we don’t even know what exists here on Earth yet.

This is basically the core plot device (and foregrounded assertion, for its ramifications) of a recent scifi book, which for spoiler reasons I rot13:

Xvz Fgnayrl Ebovafba'f Nheben

Which book?

The reason these things are so hard to find on Earth is because it's teeming with other life. If it wasn't and these things were isolated on Mars it would be relatively easy.

Nope. Still tough.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/planetary-science/...

That's not looking for life. It's looking for fossils.

Which, physically in hand, still took years to determine they were naturally occurring rock. It’s hard.

I should certainly hope so.

Don't know. They're undetected =-)

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