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I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

hose who named the Yeti crab must have enjoyed coming up with a way to describe its odd conjunction of features. The outsized front arms (strictly, pereiopods) do look a little like those of the Gigantopithecus, a huge and now extinct ape which some cryptozoologists claim as the still-living original for the Tibetan wild man of the snow. And the body is unmistakably that of a crustacean. As for the animals scientific name, which combines the Maori oceanic creator god with the Latin for hairy, this too is resonant and precise. Still, those who coined these names missed a trick because this crab has about it something of Janus, the god of thresholds who gazes into both past and future. The Yeti crab was discovered in 2005 in a place just about as far from human habitation on Earth as it is possible to get: the sides of a black smoker some 2,200 metres (almost a mile and a half ) beneath the sea surface on the PacificAntarctic ridge about 1,500 km (900 miles) south of Easter Island. Black smokers are chimney-like hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor through which water and minerals that have been superheated inside the Earth are forced up at over 300400C (570750F) into surrounding ocean water that is typically about 2C (35F). The smoke, which is actually a super-hot fluid, is black because it contains mineral particles which absorb most of the

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light beamed from any submersible that has plumbed these lightless waters. Amongst these particles are sulphides, and if you could smell it this place it would have a sulphurous smell, like a medieval hell. Vents of this kind were first discovered on the Eastern Pacific Rise in 1977 eight years after humans first set foot on the Moon (and the same year in which Elvis Presley died, The Clash released their first album and How Deep is Your Love made the charts). Their discovery amazed oceanographers and biologists. Not only was there abundant and diverse life where none had been expected but it took forms of which no one had dreamed. This life drew its energy not from the Sun but from the heat within the Earth, using it to drive chemosynthesis, a process whereby microbes convert carbon and nutrients into organic matter by oxidizing hydrogen or hydrogen sulphide. These microbes in turn supported a range of organisms all the way up to Giant tube worms, which grow up to 2.4 metres (7ft 10 in) tall and are topped by blood-red fronds. They have no mouth, no stomach and no digestive system but live in symbiosis with bacteria inside their bodies that make up half their mass. Smaller in size than the Giant tube worm but more extreme in its hot-tub habits of living is the Pompei worm, named for the Roman city engulfed in a volcanic inferno. This animal anchors itself close to the hot vents where the temperature may be as high as 80C (176F) while its feather-like head sticks out of a tube into water a little further away that has already cooled to around 22C (72F). A fleece-like covering of bacteria on its back, with which it lives in symbiosis, probably insulates the Pompeii worm from the most extreme temperatures. In the decades since the first discovery of black smokers, many more have been found at about fifty locations along the 64,000 km (40,000 mile) mid-ocean ridges that run around the seabed of the world ocean like the seams on a tennis ball. But only a fraction of the ridge and other possible locations have been explored. Future investigations could reveal even more and on them creatures at least as strange as the Giant tube worm and the Yeti crab. It has only

Another seminal event in 1977 was the classification, by Carl Woese, of archaea as a separate domain of life from bacteria.

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recently been discovered, for example, that bacteria floating in the water at some distance from hydrothermal vents are able to perform the equivalent of photosynthesis by harvesting the very dim light from the infrared glow of the vents. The Yeti crab is a creature of the threshold in several senses. First, by dint of its very presence on the black smoker, it inhabits the interface between the two worlds of scalding magma and cold water. Exactly what function its long hairy limbs serve was not, at first, completely understood and it was thought that they might enable the animal to straddle a boundary between the very cold surrounding water and the extremely high temperatures and noxious gases of the vent. The hairs which are actually bristles, or setae, like those found on moths or bumblebees would provide insulation (as do those of a Pompeii worm) when the crab reaches through scalding water in pursuit of prey. Another idea was that filamentous bacteria covering the hairs would either neutralize gases emitted from the vent or serve the crab directly as a food source. And this last idea received support when a second species of Yeti crab was discovered on cold seeps on the deep-sea floor near Costa Rica: Kiwa puravida harbours colonies of bacteria on the bristles of its claws which it scrapes off with its comb-like mouth. A loose analogy would be you or I sprouting cress seeds in the hair on top of our heads. Somewhat less hairy than K. hirsuta, it derives the second part of its name from a Costa Rican phrase for the good life, for K. puravida seems to spend much of its time in what its discoverers described as an extraordinary and comical dance as it waves its claws through the water, presumably in order to expose the bacteria to as much of the nourishing gases escaping from the seep as possible. Like shrimps, lobsters and other crabs animals with which many of us are broadly familiar, at least on a plate the Yeti crab is a decapod: that is, a ten-limbed crustacean, and as such a member of the class known as Malacostraca. The five thousand or so species in this class, which has been around since the Cambrian, have played an almost endless set of variations upon the crustacean body form, diversifying into sixteen different

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Kiwa hirsuta, the Yeti crab.

orders of being that include everything from the delicate Harlequin shrimp, the Google-eye fairy crab and the Violet-spotted reef lobster to the terrifying Giant isopod of the deep sea and its diminutive terrestrial cousin the Woodlouse (not to mention Gonodactylus, the genital-fingered stomatopod, described in Chapter 7). The Japanese spider crab, a Malacostracan, is the largest crustacean in the sea, growing to 3.8 metres (12 ft 6 in) across. And the Coconut crab is the biggest arthropod on land. Nearly a metre across, it climbs trees and crushes coconuts with its massive claws. Even diminutive krill are Malacostracans. In Western culture there is a lingering sense that crustaceans are ugly and alien. This may be down to the fact that, as arthropods, they are, loosely speaking, very large bugs and therefore versions of organisms which, in many cultures, are associated with dirt and disease. For Jean-Paul Sartre they evoked a disturbing mixture of disgust and kinship. The narrator in Sartres novel Nausea starts to feel revulsion towards all of existence but particularly towards himself and other humans, whom he begins to see as crabs: slimy and hard on the outside and soft and formless on the inside. (Sartre, who set great store by puns, noted that the French for lobster, homard, from the Latin homarus, is a homonym of homme-ard the word for man with a pejorative suffix, meaning something like nasty little man, or shit.) Sartres attitude may have been

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Other creatures, even stranger than the Yeti crab, lurk at depth. This is a Deepsea arcturid Isopod from a coral seamount in the Indian Ocean.

unusual, even extreme, but it is on a continuum with something that is still present in Western culture. Marine photography in recent decades has shown something that Sartre and other crustacea-phobes never knew: that crustaceans can be creatures of beauty. Porcelain crabs dress in polka dots of purple on white, white on red and a dozen other combinations. Hermit crabs sometimes sport anemones on their shells as if wearing wild medieval hats. Its also the case that we now understand that many species of crustacean have if not feelings exactly then at least an exquisite tactile sense, facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace. In his meditation on the lobster the novelist David Foster Wallace quotes from a standard guide to the fishery: although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin. And yet they remain so alien to us. Watching the twitching arthropod mouthparts of a crab pushing food particles into itself I cannot shake a gut feeling, however irrational it may be, that I am looking at an obscenely voracious machine. This, then, is a second way in which a Yeti crab, along with its many

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Malacostracan cousins, is a creature of the threshold. It bridges over a distinction we are used to make between living and non-living things. I think there is a parallel here with robots and our attitudes towards them. For most of the ninety years since they were imagined by Karel apek in 1921, robots in the real world have either been crude or only able for narrow and specialized tasks. Over the last decade or so, however, we have entered what appears to be the start of a mechanical Cambrian explosion, in which mechanical entities with capacities hitherto possessed only by humans and other animals agility, awareness, and adaptability proliferate. There is, for example, a snake-bot that can worm its way into your heart to perform a medical procedure. There is a robot that can adjust delicate mechanical parts on the International Space Station better than any astronaut can. There are robots that can climb trees like caterpillars, robots that perform traditional Japanese dance forms, bipedal robots fast enough to run us down and others that, one day, will outclass us at football. Although robots are still strikingly limited in many ways, some of them already surpass us in a range of physical and information processing tasks. From squishybot (soft and bendy forms that resemble the arms of cephalopods) to microinsectoid drones networked to intelligent systems, robots are starting to evolve forms and uses that we can as yet barely picture. Does this mean we are crossing a threshold into new ways of perceiving and being in the world? Sherry Turkle, a sociologist of science and technology, is concerned that the ability of robots to provide nurturance (that is, care for human needs) will prove to be the killer app. We are, she points out, vulnerable to new attachments, and risk emotional seduction by machines that either care for us or, in the case of robot pets and companions, ask for our care. These machines will pretend to converse, but will not really understand what we say. Engrossed by sociable robots, we experience what we imagine to be a new sense of intimacy, and yet because this contact is not with other humans, Turkle fears, we will

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be diminished. (An extreme, sexualized vision of human dependency on machines appears in Fritz Langs 1927 film Metropolis, in which a machinehuman shaped like a beautiful women turns men into slavering beasts.) For Peter Singer (not the Australian philosopher but the American writer on military affairs), the killer app for robots is, well, the killer app. Increasingly, he says, wars will be fought by robots, and these machines are creating new dimensions and dynamics for human wars and politics that we are only now just beginning to fathom. The technologist Rodney Brooks, by contrast, says there is nothing, really, to worry about. Sentient robots with high capabilities will be no problem; we just have to get used to the idea that its one less way in which we are special. A third way in which the Yeti crab is a creature of the threshold relates to the first one mentioned in this chapter: its presence at the interface between two different worlds. For although black smokers are a feature of the modern ocean, where the chemistry is quite different from what it was billions of years ago, and no single smoker is particularly old (like Japanese wooden temples, they are constantly being renewed), they may stand as a token for something much older: the kind of place where life may have emerged from non-life. The creation myths that people invent are dazzling in their variety. Many of them are complex and violent, but some are relatively simple and gentle. In a story told by the Ainu people of Japan, the creator sends down a wagtail which flutters over the ocean, splashing little areas of waters aside with its wings, stamping on the mud below with its feet and beating the mud with its tail until it becomes firm. In this way the islands where the Ainu live were made. Chinese tradition, by contrast, holds that mountains, rivers, trees and grass are parts of the body of the first being, Pangu, after he falls exhausted from the task of separating Heaven and Earth. According to the Mand people of Mali, the creator tries to make life from the seed of a particularly tough and thorny acacia but fails, and has to start again using four

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pairs of grass seeds with contrasting properties in each pair: a West African yin and yang. And in a version of a story told by peoples of the Pacific Northwest of America, the trickster Raven mates with a giant clam shell. Nine months later Raven hears voices coming from inside and opens the shell to find little men. Later, he finds female companions for the men inside a chiton and is greatly pleased at how the two interact. Scientific hypotheses regarding the origin of life are not as numerous and diverse as creation stories but they are, arguably, more intriguing because they are based on observations of processes in the actual world and are, in theory, testable (even if such tests are beyond present abilities). One of the first Aristotles idea that life (or at any rate the primitive forms such as worms and maggots) generated spontaneously from mud and ordure was put into doubt as early as 1688 when the Italian physician Francesco Redi showed that no maggots appeared in dead meat when flies were prevented from landing on it, and all but dismissed for good when, in 1861, Louis Pasteur showed that bacteria and fungi never grow in a sterile, nutrient-rich medium sealed from the outside world. But Charles Darwins idea, outlined in 1871, that life might have begun at a warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present proved to be more productive. This was an intellectual ancestor of the primordial soup hypothesized in the 1920s by Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane a world in which relatively simple organic molecules known as monomers (that is, amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins), lipids, sugars and bases (the building blocks of RNA and DNA) were spontaneously generated by the reaction of even more simple chemicals on the early Earth in the presence of lightning. An experiment undertaken in 1952 by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, in which they produced many amino acids by zapping a mix of chemicals believed to be present in the early atmosphere with electricity, appeared to support this idea. And yet, as was recognized, the mere creation of monomers from which life is made was

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not in itself enough. You can keep on zapping the soup but beyond a certain point all you get is a sticky mess. Chicken soup does not give rise to a chicken, however long you cook it. The apparent intractability of this problem led some scientists to suggest that life on Earth may have been seeded by microbial forms arriving on meteorites from outer space. Panspermia is not, as it may sound, the name of a distant planet in the 1974 softporn shlockfest Flesh Gordon but a perfectly serious scientific idea. The trouble with panspermia, however, is that rather than explaining how life originated it just pushes the riddle elsewhere. All we can say with reasonable certainty is that many of the building blocks of life were already present in space, and that a large proportion of some elements and compounds essential to life probably arrived on the young Earth from space. Carbon, for example, the backbone of every organic chemical, is actually quite rare on Earth it is the fifteenth most common element, and 0.046 per cent of Earths crust and may largely originate from a rain of extraterrestrial particles. Much of our water, without which life as we know it is impossible, might first have arrived in meteorites and other matter that smashed into the Earth up to and including what is known as the late heavy bombardment 3.9 billion years ago. Some meteorites have been found to carry dozens of amino acids including at least six proteins employed by life. They also contain sugars and fats that are common in living cells. Study of outer space, then, turns up ingredients for a soup but still (or as yet) no chicken. But there is another way of approaching the riddle of life and its origins that casts more light. That is to consider what life does rather than what it is. For, much as life depends on ingredients, it is also a process. And fundamental to that, as Erwin Schrdinger saw in the 1940s, is lifes capacity to concentrate a stream or order upon itself to harness an external flow of energy and so resist the universal tendency for things to tend towards randomness and chaos. This insight leads to the idea that life is likely to originate where

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there is, among other things, a steady flow of energy a gradient that can be captured by a complex but non-yet-living system, rather as a waterwheel captures energy from a stream. The largest and most obvious flow of energy on Earth comes, of course, from the Sun a fact that makes our star a god and the father (or mother) of life in many cultures. But the discovery in the 1970s of black smokers hidden in darkness far from the Sun and yet covered in strange and primitive life forms led scientists to ask whether it was in these conditions a steady flow of heat, reliable chemical gradients that life could have first arisen. The idea looked promising. Growing up (more or less) in the last decades of the twentieth century I recall it being widely discussed. After the initial excitement, however, experimental work cast doubt on this explanation. The nucleic acids thought likely to have been involved in the formation and replication of early cells would have been destroyed in the harsh conditions at black smokers. Then, in 2000, a quite different type of deep-sea hydrothermal vent was discovered with no black smoke. Releasing large amounts of methane and hydrogen which react with seawater and rock, the vents create towering white pinnacles. The first site to be studied, rising from the sea floor in the mid Atlantic, was named, rather predictably, the Lost City, although its formations resemble the crazed landscapes of Dr Seuss or the tsingy (eroded limestone needles in Madagascar) more than the church spires to which they are often compared. Although they are not rich in life these structures create what some scientists believe to be ideal conditions for proto-life. They are full of tiny chambers that concentrate life-friendly compounds bubbling up from the vent inside ideal reaction vessels. In addition, differences between the chemicals that seep out of the vents and those in surrounding waters create an electrical potential that could have provided energy to drive the chemical reactions taking place inside. Some scientists have expressed a high degree of confidence that such were the right conditions for the emergence of life. The last common ancestor of all life was not a free-living

As Oliver Morton put it in 2007, Life doesnt just form out of things; it forms out of processes. Scientists trying to create chemical systems capable of autonomous evolution in laboratories today suggest that such systems must have three basic characteristics. First, there must be a library of related molecules whose structures represent encoded information that can be transferred between generations. Second, these molecules must support a metabolism, a set of chemical reactions that produces useful energy. Third, the molecules must be able to form enclosed spaces where this metabolism can proceed undisturbed.

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cell at all, but a porous rock riddled with bubbly ironsulphur membranes that catalysed primordial biochemical reactions, suggests the microbiologist Nick Lane. Powered by hydrogen and proton gradients, he argues, this natural flow reactor filled up with organic chemicals, giving rise to proto-life that eventually broke out as the first living cells not once but twice, giving rise to the bacteria and the archaea. Not everyone accepts this alkaline vent hypothesis. Quite a few researchers continue to make the case for other explanations, arguing that life may have originated far closer to the interface between the planets surface and incoming solar energy; shallow freshwater lagoons on tropical volcanic islands, for example, could provide conditions in which proto-living systems assembled inside the first carapaces primitive cell walls made from lipid membranes. Perhaps Darwins vision of a warm pond as the location of lifes origin will turn out to be close to the truth after all. In my lifetime, creatures of the deep-sea vents such as the Yeti crab have gone from being completely unknown to being seen as denizens of the kind of place where life itself may have originated. From there they have become just another part of our expanding knowledge of the world of beings. In 2011 a third species of Yeti crab was discovered on the hydrothermal Dragon Vent in the southwest Indian Ocean. The as yet unclassified species has shorter claws than its Eastern Pacific cousins, and bristles all over the underside of its body, but it is very likely related. What was an astonishing, one-off discovery in 2005 may prove to be just a pinpoint in a global distribution of animals of which we previously knew nothing. In an old book, Yahweh asks Job: Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed unto thee? Had Job been given a chance to answer, he would of course only have been able to say no. Some twenty-five centuries after his story was written we are approaching something like yes. We can travel to the bottom of the sea and are close to making testable hypotheses about the origins

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of life, if not already there. And we know that baring intervention by an intelligent agent life on Earth will become insupportable in about 1.1 billion years from now as a hotter Sun causes the oceans to evaporate. Long before then, however, life may transform in ways far beyond our current imagining. We may look as primitive to the beings that come after us as deep-sea crabs, scuttling in darkness, look to us today.

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