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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

This is so exciting. I've been waiting on the results of the opening of Vostok for YEARS! It's one of the few "untampered" natural subterranean lakes left on Earth and arguably the oldest. If there's DNA in there, it has existed in an anaerobic environment for a very long time, and, as the scientist said it's unlike anything on Earth because these conditions are essentially unique on Earth.

Really exciting times :). Can't wait for some more confirmation and the eventual photos!!!

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Agreed. I'm more excited about Vostok than just about anything. Even just the development of the technology to get in there, explore, it, etc. has been thrilling. Not to mention the politics and international intrigue. This is a phenomenal bit of early news on what they'll hopefully find.

It's very exciting if it passes peer review.

There are of course two questions - first of the initial evolutionary path and then the path of long term survivability following its isolation beneath the ice. Still even if all this does is provide credibility to the latter long term survivability case it makes me excited about the potential for life in the sub-surface-ice oceans of Europa.

Is it possible for life in Vostok to be genealogically isolated from life elsewhere on Earth, so that life evolved from nothing multiple times?

I suppose it's possible, but the fact that it is, in fact, DNA is enough to suggest it's from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA). If it shares the same ultra-conserved ribosomal etc sequences, then it's even more likely from LUCA.

I believe the estimates for how long Lake Vostok water has been isolated cap out at around 25 million years. Although that is an incredibly long time, it isn't anywhere close to long ago enough to ensure a sterile condition when it was first isolated (It would need to be several billion years to proceed life as we know it already blanketing the planet).

As I understand it, the prevailing notion is that abiogenesis happened only a single time, or at least only a single time that stuck. The life that already exists does a pretty good job of ensuring that any primitive re-developed life never has a chance to actually get started. You would need to completely sterilize the environment to have a shot at witnessing abiogenesis again. Maaaybe all life in the lake died, rendering it sterile, and then new life formed, but that seems super unlikely to me. Why would the existing life die if there was enough nutrients/energy to allow new life to form? (Also, 25 million years is probably far too short of a timeframe to see abiogenisis bootstrap DNA based life)

Agree with that, but would also like to throw in a scenario where there wasn't a sterile environment, but conditions were harsh enough for all present life to die, leaving you with a 'sterile' thin soup containing the building blocks of DNA based life.

That might shave a bunch of time off of the time needed.

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