IRAGAN GUNE

Published in DEIA, Nov. 4, 2010

WHERE do we come from? Where do we go? Personally, I am more

interested in the first one than the second. The future is still to decide
and to become. I feel more attracted by the past because it is tangible,
demonstrable. Our history is a succession of success and errors, of
calmness and tempests that work in a cyclic way. But there is something
in the past that impassions me. Where do we place the beginning of life?
And who were their true main characters? Little by little, one realizes
that the answers to all these questions are right in front of us. Just as to
every disease supposedly has its own cure, just the same, every mystery
has its explanation if we know how to look for it well, in the most
unsuspected corners of our own planet. In an article of the National
Geographic discovered that the Geomicrobiology Lab of the department
of Geoscience of the University of Pennsylvania, USA, Jenn Macalady, is
analyzing the chemical compounds and the ways of life that populate the
so-called Bahamas Blue Holes. They are submarine caves in the
Bahamas that simulate what could have been the land before the
invasion of oxygen. It is believed that life on earth began 4 billion years
ago and only 2.5 billion years that oxygen appeared on the planet.
During the next 1.5 billion years the life on earth was based in lathe
beings that were ignorant of the use of the oxygen as a source of energy
itself. Because of conditions, these Blue Holes are the perfect ecosystem
to study how life could have existed without oxygen and to solve many
doubts of the beginnings. But it also opens a wide door to possible
explanations to assume that the absence of oxygen does not limit the
existence of life for us, not even in each and every one of the million
planets that exist in the universe. At the end studying the past we create
our future. What's magical of all this is carrying out an investigation
over something we do not know, because it brings us closer to the true
mystery, which is at the end what we feel attracted to, to the unknown.

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