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ABSTRACT
There are strong indications that microbial
life is widespread at depth in the crust of the Earth, just as such
life has been identified in numerous ocean vents. This life is not
dependent on solar energy and photosynthesis for its primary
energy supply, and it is essentially independent of the surface
circumstances. Its energy supply comes from chemical sources,
due to fluids that migrate upward from deeper levels in the
Earth. In mass and volume it may be comparable with all
surface life. Such microbial life may account for the presence
of biological molecules in all carbonaceous materials in the
outer crust, and the inference that these materials must have
derived from biological deposits accumulated at the surface is
therefore not necessarily valid. Subsurface life may be wide-
spread among the planetary bodies of our solar system, since
many of them have equally suitable conditions below, while
having totally inhospitable surfaces. One may even speculate
that such life may be widely disseminated in the universe, since
planetary type bodies with similar subsurface conditions may
be common as solitary objects in space, as well as in other
solar-type systems