Lars Behrendt

What can we learn from the life that you've discovered about possible life out there far away around exotic stars on exotic rocks and things like this?

If we go back to the caves, my understanding is the microbes you're discovering and studying that are absorbing this darkness, if that makes any sense, have been untouched for many millions of years, approximately 49 million years.

It's kind of wild that these microbes have been isolated for that long, isn't it?

I personally have.

I try not to though.

Bad joke.

What does that kind of isolation do to life as it evolves?

Is there anything we can do to potentially look at planets far off or detect what's in the atmosphere of planets far off to try to see if there's life like this?

Maybe narrowing it down to like a few dozen candidate planets at stars that might provide light like this and then shooting James Webb at it to take a closer look?

Now, I feel like half a century ago, the list of things that we thought life needed to thrive, like direct sunlight, oxygen, like it was very narrow.

And then as we discover more and more, I think a lot of these species are called extremophiles, like at the bottom of the ocean, in these caves with no sunlight, doing photosynthesis.

It seems like life thrives wherever we look, even if it doesn't follow the rules we thought it did.

Now, are there any other exciting facts or anything about this cave and the bacteria you found there that you want to share?

Well, Lars Behrendt is a microbial ecologist at Uppsala University and the Technical University of Denmark.

Lars, thanks for sharing your cave research with me.

I really appreciate you coming on the show.