The prevailing view is that a mass extinction occurred on earth 65 million years ago, and that the main cause of this extinction was the impact of an asteroid on the earth, which raised so much dust that the sky was obscured and the earth's plants could not photosynthesise and died, and with the death of the plants, a large number of animals also gradually disappeared for lack of food and oxygen. Without the sun's light, the earth's ecosystem would have collapsed and life would not have survived. However, there are some studies that show that there are some organisms that can survive without the sun's rays.

Hordes of creatures found in the ocean under the ice

Never mind that the earth is in the habitable zone of the solar system, receiving just the right amount of solar radiation, with the average temperature of the earth's surface in the mid-teens, there are areas of the planet where the temperature is actually warmer, others where it is cooler, and even places where there is no sunlight all year round. In those places where the environment seems extremely harsh, there are actually a large number of unknown creatures, for example, under the antarctic ice cap there is a world full of small crustaceans that are so resilient that they change our perception of life.

Scientists from new zealand's national institute for water and atmospheric research (niwa) melted the ross ice shelf, the largest ice shelf in antarctica, with a hot water tube, opening a 'portal' in the antarctic ice cap to a depth of about 1,600 feet (about 487 metres) below the ice cap, and found a world of small crustaceans about 10.4 kilometres long, 300 metres wide and 2,400 metres deep. A river under the ice was found to be about 10.4 km long, 300 m wide and 2400 m deep.

Niwa oceanographer craig stevens said that in this subglacial river, which lies 480 metres below the ice cap, it is completely dark, really dark, because the sun's rays cannot reach these areas at all, and the temperature in these areas is very low and extremely cold. It is not, by definition, an ideal habitat for life to survive in such conditions. But when they put some filming equipment down, they were surprised to find that the river under the ice was full of lamellipeds and there were many shrimp-like crustaceans swimming around in the river under the ice. There was no sunlight, so the light from the camera was the only source of light as these marine creatures swam around the camera.

Although scientists have been visiting the antarctic region for a long time to carry out scientific research, the world under the antarctic ice cap is still a very mysterious place. Because the antarctic is such a harsh environment, these ice caps are so thick that we need to drill through the thick ice cap before we can get the camera to the ocean beneath the ice to film. And once we break through this barrier of the antarctic ice cap, we will see the unseen world underneath it.

These discoveries have come as a shock and a surprise to scientists. Under the thick antarctic ice cap, the temperature is so low and there is no sunlight, so there should be no life under such conditions. Because no light means no photosynthesis and no source of energy. But these findings suggest that even without sunlight, there are some extremely hardy organisms in extreme conditions.

Extraterrestrial life or existence?

Previously, we generally believed that alien life should survive in the same environment as most of our creatures, such as the need for liquid water, oxygen and a suitable temperature, but these findings suggest that our human knowledge of the ability of living things to survive may be rather limited. Deep in the vastness of the universe, there may be some extremely hardy alien life that may be able to survive deep in a very low or relatively high temperature environment, possibly without oxygen or without light.

From this point of view, not to mention distant exoplanets, there are actually many potentially living planets within our solar system, such as titan, europa and mars. One of these is europa, a moon of jupiter. Although it is farther away from the sun and has a cooler surface temperature, the heat inside europa is enough to allow a huge liquid ocean to exist under the planet's ice cap, which contains even more water than earth, thanks to tidal locking. There is a huge amount of life under the ice cap of earth's antarctic, which is not exposed to sunlight and has very low temperatures, so scientists also believe that similar life may exist in europa's subglacial ocean, and there may be some fish swimming around in the water.

Titan, a moon of saturn, does not have a huge subglacial liquid water ocean like europa, but this planet also has a large number of lakes and oceans on its surface that are not liquid water, but liquid methane. Its atmosphere is also filled with gases like nitrogen and methane. Some scientists believe that there may be some alien life on this strange alien world that is very different from life on earth, and that they may get the energy they need directly from the methane oceans or methane gas. If this is indeed the case, it would be incredible. Such life does not seem to exist on earth, and if there is alien life that uses methane or other organic matter as a nutrient, what would they be like?

If all these planets have a variety of extraterrestrial life, then mankind's "Status" May be in jeopardy. So far, we have not found any other intelligent civilizations, and we are the only known intelligent life. If there is a wide variety of alien life in the vast universe, then strange alien civilizations should exist. This is because humans have only been around for a few million years, while the universe has reached an age of over 13 billion years and the galaxy is about 10 billion years old. In other words, the universe and the galaxy existed long before we humans and our planet, and there are a large number of alien planets deep in the universe that are billions of years older than earth. On these "Old" Planets, there was plenty of time for alien civilisations to develop. If alien civilisations originated a million, 10 million or hundreds of millions of years earlier than we humans, they would have developed at a level beyond our imagination.