The bacterial populations found in the deep levels of the mud and sediments of the oceanic bottoms have recently been studied.
At the deepest sedimentary levels the microenvironments of the fluids in the pores have very low oxygen levels, practically nonexistent (generating anaerobic environments) and minimal presence of nutrients of oceanic origin. (one)
When the bacteria of the deepest levels were cultivated in Petri dish, they were not able to survive or reproduce.
The hypothesis is that due to the shortage of nutrients and oxygen and the stability of the environment your metabolism is extremely slow.
It is indicated that the energy necessary for each of these microorganisms to live is very small, calculated at 10-21 watts (or 0.000000000000000000001 watts). This level would be the daily energy needed by a bacterium inhabiting the deep levels of oceanic sediments.
On the contrary, a bacterium on the surface of the planet, for example a bacterium that live in human throats requires 10-10 watts, that is, it needs 1,000,000,000 times more energy than an ultra-deep bacterium on the seafloor. That's because on the surface the bacteria and other organisms that live there use the energy of the sun that they obtain directly through photosynthesis or indirectly through the process of biological and chemical decomposition. This source of energy depends on the cycles of diurnal and annual variations with very fast periods of time, to which organisms have had to adapt. This did not happen in the deep biosphere, where there is a situation of great stability.
That means that its metabolic time scale is millions or billions of times faster in the surface biosphere than in the ultra-deep biosphere.
To compare we can remember that a human being to live needs approximately 100 watts a day.
By relating the bacteria of ultra-deep marine sediments with the hyperthermobacteria that inhabit the pores or fissures of rocks (which were defined by Thomas Gold in The Deep Hot Biosphere) we can come to a similar conclusion.
These bacteria, which are inside deep rocks (up to several thousand meters), receive their nutrients from the alteration of minerals or intergranular or interfisural fluids. These fluids circulate very slowly (millimeters per year or per century) and therefore very slowly provide their compounds or nutrients that allow the life of these organisms from the depth. For that reason, having adapted to this environment, they probably have a metabolic energy expenditure similar or even much lower than that of the deep ocean mud bacteria. This may mean that some metabolic functions (eg reproduction) can occur over very long periods, tens, hundreds or thousands of years.
In other words, in depth there is a different flow of time,
As life on the surface receives its energy directly or indirectly from the sun, metabolic functions have been accelerated by factors of millions, hundreds or billions of times.
The life in depth, both in the oceanic sediments and in the fissures and pores of the deep rocks, would be quite similar to what we imagine in the vital diffusion through the panspermia in comets, asteroires or meteorites. For these phenomena to transport life between star systems would require organisms (bacteria) that had an extremely slow metabolism, measurable in millions or hundreds of millions of years so that dispersion can actually be realized.
(1) (1) Theory originally developed by John Parkes, British microbial ecologist.
References: https://www.ted.com/talks/karen_lloyd_this_deep_sea_mystery_is_changing_our_understanding_of_life
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/living-long-beneath-sea
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