Product Description

In their search for "dark life", Michael Ray Taylor and his team are confronted by lakes whose purity is beyond the measurement of technology. Penetrating up to a mile underground while lugging as much equipment as an Everest assault team, they discover the oldest life on the planet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #532023 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Oh this wicked science! (Apologies to Nietzsche)
This book is not really about life within the earth's crust per se, it's about the meteorite ALH84001 originating from Mars which, it was claimed in 1996, contains fossilised lifeforms. The relevance to "dark life" is the attempt to prove the existence of "nanobacteria" on Earth. Such lifeforms, if they do exist, would be a magnitude of scale smaller than the smallest known bacteria, and on the same scale as the supposed Martian "fossils".

This book talks as though the existence of nanobacteria is proven and therefore, that the features in the Martian meteorite are indeed fossilised life-forms is incontrovertible fact, case closed (and anyone who says otherwise is a flat-earther).

But, as Blackadder would say, there is one tiny flaw in the argument: it's b*ll*cks.

Despite increasing evidence, the case for nanobacteria is still far from proven. There is also plenty of evidence to argue against the meteorite containing life (see for example Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology, which, while being as the title suggests very "pro" life being widespread in the universe, is at least even-handed in the ALH84001 debate, discussing evidence for and against and leaving the reader to make up his own mind), despite this book simply dismissing the dissenters as being "bad scientists" and even portraying them as deliberately manipulating data, without even explaining what the objections are.

The narrative concerning intern Anne Taunton (who performed some of the analysis on earth samples on behalf of the NASA team to try to provide evidence of nanobacteria on earth identical to "Martian" ones) reads like a hagiography. There's even talk, ostensibly in jest but undoubtedly in all seriousness, of who will play Taunton in the film adaptation of the "Eureka" moment (actually, being Americans, the "Ohmigod" moment) - Jodie Foster or Julia Roberts? That's how up their own backsides these people seem to be. In contrast, people who dissent from the Martian life hypothesis, such as Taunton's supervisor, are presented as evil ogres.

The truth is, the jury is still out on the whole matter and there is evidence both for and against. Quite simply, this book is bad, and very biased, science.