INTRATERRESTRIALS

Confronting the “shocking enormity” of all we don’t know.

In recent years we have discovered that most earthly life-forms do not derive their energy from the sun (photosynthesis). Most earthly life-forms are single-celled creatures dwelling below ground, where they derive chemical energy from inorganic compounds found there (chemosynthesis). Lloyd, a microbial biogeochemist, joyously notes that these preternaturally subsurface critters, which seem barely alive but can live for eons, are giving us hints as to how life first developed, leading us to change basic assumptions about life’s rules. The most hardy intraterrestrials, which dwell in extreme places like arctic ice or volcanoes, are upending our understanding of what life is—here and, perhaps, on other planets. Furthermore, intraterrestrials may even help us clean up our planet, given that one of the inorganic compounds that they can generate energy from is carbon, the main driver of climate change. Lloyd is one of those rare gifted writers who can be as broadly profound as she is precise, able to make science both come raucously alive and resonate with meaning. She does this via perfect metaphors, an effortless wit, and a massively infectious enthusiasm for the outsize significance of her very small subjects. This science book is, furthermore, part adventure story, as she travels to the ends of the earth to pursue her small subjects, and generally bears witness to “the shocking enormity of what we have been missing about life on Earth.”

A glorious gallop through one of the last, and possibly most important, frontiers of science.