- What do we humans need to survive?
Well, we need food, oxygen,
water, and living space.
All those things are normal for us,
but did you know that there are organisms
living on Earth right now
that don't need the same things we need to survive?
These organisms live in places like this one.
That would be terrible for us, but perfect for them.
Because they live in such extreme conditions,
scientists call them extremophiles.
Extreme!
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Well, not like that.
Let's refocus.
But what exactly is an extremophile?
- So an extremophile is an organism
that can thrive in extreme environments.
And what I mean by that, it's environments that you or I
would find to be very inhospitable or hostile
to what we need in order for us to thrive.
So an example is an organism that would live
in extremely warm or extremely cold temperatures.
And that could be an organism in Antarctica,
it could be organisms that are thriving in the middle
of a desert that's extremely hot with lots of sunlight.
There are many extreme environments
that would be damaging to us, as humans,
but there are microorganisms that just love living there.
So we study extremophiles because they tell us
the limits to life here on Earth.
And it turns out that almost
every possible environment on Earth
has an organism living in it.
So one of the most interesting extreme environments
that I've learned about is environments
that have very low pH.
So we typically live in an environment
where the pH is somewhere around seven.
That's called neutral pH.
Some organisms can live in pHs all the way to zero,
really acidic.
And just for perspective,
battery acid that comes out of the batteries in your car
are pH of one.
Soda is actually pH of about two.
If we were to try to live in a can of soda,
our bodies would start to dissolve
because low pH, or acid, will break apart our skin.
But an organism-- a microorganism can actually
live at that pH.
It can get nutrition from the soda,
as well as survive that very low pH environment.
- Who knew these microscopic
and often very creepy-looking organisms
could give us so much information
and mean so much to NASA?
Curious as to where we can find these extremophiles?
Tune in for part two on our world.
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