What are the upper and lower limits of temperature and pressure beyond which, life cannot survive?

Question

Out of sheer curiousity, I'd like to know about how cold and how hot would you have to make a place to make it unbearable for ANY sort of life form?

Is there a limit to life?

Or is it that in some far-off planet in a far-off galaxy, life thrives in climates which are beyond earthly limits?

Are the elements of periodic table just part of a narrow spectrum of the vast elements of universe?

I know the question cannot be answered completely but, I'd love to check out some facts of life.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

We have no idea, Batty, what the limits to life may be, because we are only aquainted with Terran lifeforms-Here, life can exist at temperatures as high as 140C, and can stay in a dormant frozen form as low, presumably, as absolute zero- for life to *function* however-there are lichen that exist in Antarctica which functionally live even though the area they live in has never been recorded to have temperatures over -10C...
Life is a highly locally organized environment, which can maintain complexity and reproduce- These definitions could apply to any number of different kinds of systems other than our carbon-based biology-Again, we are limited to speculation, but if you assume plasma-based life (highly charged gases at high temperatures) then that form of life could exist in very high temperatures.
The elements of the periodic table are not similar to the visible spectrum, in which there are a huge number of wavelengths that we cannot see. The smallest element, Hydrogen, is merely a proton and an electron. Hard to get much smaller than that! A hydrogen ion is just a naked proton!. At greater weights, the elements become very unstable....the nucleus is formed of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons-now, to shove all of these positive charges together takes a fair amount of energy, and the more positive protons you jam together, the harder the nucleus tries to fly apart, and the more neutrons required to hold it together...it becomes an unstable situation. Thus, the elements listed are likely all that exist in nature, plus the few we have produced. On the other hand, there are many different forms of *matter* that lie outside of elements-such as *dark matter*, Bose-Einstein condensates, plasmas, hypothetical exotic matter, etc.

Answer 2

Actually there is an upper limit, around 10^11 degrees Kelvin, but that was reached at the big bang. From then on it's been down hill. In the end, waaaaay after you are gone, the universe will snuff out like a candle when its background temperature reaches absolute zero (almost). Current thinking is that there will still be veeeeeeery long isolated energy waves in our snuffed out universe. And where there is energy, there is temperature. But the reminant waves will be so slow and consequent low energy, and so far between, that for all practical purposes, our universe will have reached absolute zero degrees Kelvin. Right now, as you sit and read this, the background temperature of the universe hovers around 2-4 degrees Kelvin depending on where you look and who you ask. PS: Brian is correct...I took my temperature snapshot a second after the BB, when the universe had already started to cool down...my bad. But the point made, that there is an upper limit, remains valid.

Answer 3

start with the elements: as far as we can see from spectra, and as far as we understand how elements appear in the universe, it seems that the elements we know are the same you'd find anywhere else in the universe. The periodic table goes from one proton, to 92, and includes some unstable elements as well. There are no gaps.

and again, the way elements happen is, two were created soon after the big bang, typically the two simplest ones, Hydrogen (which is why it is the single most abundant element in the universe at about 80% of total known mass) and Helium (which is close to 20% of the mass). Others were then created in stars, first generation stars creating some not so complex ones (such as carbon), and 2nd or even 3rd generation stars being required to form much heavier ones - all these elements are much less common.

Now, limits to life? Who knows. Even just here on Earth, bacteria have been found living at 40F and below (and been found able to survive dormant to much lower temperatures, down to the absolute zero). And bacteria have been found around submarine volcanoes living in water at higher than 212F (but it was not boiling, due to the huge pressure).

and that's just carbon-based life, and with water. Now there is not just one camp here. But one camp says, well the elements are the same wherever we look, hydrogen is the most abundant, oxygen is the 3rd most abundant (though far behind Helium), so combinations with H and O will be common, including H2O (since the bond is so strong), so if there is life somewhere it is likely that it is used to H2O / needs it. Ditto for carbon.

Some people have argued for life based on another tetravalent element, such as Silicium - but Si-based compounds hardly have all the nice properties of Carbon-based ones.

Then of course, you could imagine much more science-fiction like life, living superstrings, whatever, in which case these could exist even at the center of a star for all we know.


Hope this helps

Answer 4

There are some bactierium which can survive at incredible temperatures that would destroy all other types of life. However, at temperatures and pressures that start to break down molecules, I doubt even these could survive. These would be very high temperatures. On the low end of the scale I'd think you would have to be down near absolute zero.

Answer 5

Since all known life is water based, any heat/pressure combination that boils water will kill life. There are things living in volcanic vents that are hotter than 100C (I think I once heard 107C, but that was back in 1992 at a microbiology convention), but since that's deep on the ocean floor, the pressure is high enough to raise the boiling temperature well beyond 100C.

As for cold, it depends in part on how quickly something cools. At work, I have to freeze cells all the time, and to keep them alive, I have to ensure that the growth of ice crystals is minimized. If ice crystals grow, they will shred the proteins and membranes. The two things we do to prevent that are two rapidly freeze the cells, and to add a chemical called a cryoprotectant.

We usually regard 0C as the freezing point for water. But as I recently learned, totally pure water with no nucleation sites (eg sites of heterogenous particles upon which ice crystals can begin to grow) can be super-cooled down to -40C or thereabouts before ice will sponaneously form. Between -40C and 0C is the temperature where ice crystals will grow. Below -40C, ice crystals stay pretty well locked (although it depends on what's in the mixture). So cryoprotectants serve to create nucleation sites for crystals and also to cap growing crystals at some point so that they can't keep growing.

Once water is frozen in an organism, the processes of life are suspended, but that doesn't mean that they won't come back to life when thawed. So there's no easy answer there. I'm pretty sure that the colder it gets after a point, the better it gets, because cold means less movement, and that means less destruction. What you get is a probabilistic guess about the chance of survival for an organism held for a given amount of time at a given temperature. Many bacteria are pretty nearly impossible to freeze to death. Anything with vascular tissue that hasn't evolved to freeze would likely be killed if held just barely beneath the temperature where the water in them freezes for an extended period of time.

Answer 6

A very long answer from me and I hope it doesn't bore you or the readers.
Here goes:
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I guess at the lower end of the temperature, it could be close to absolute zero, because theoretically all motion stops at that temperature.
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(As per wikipedia Absolute zero is the point on the thermodynamic (absolute) temperature scale where the heat energy is at a minimum, that is, no more heat can be removed from the system. According to classical physics this temperature would correspond to zero kinetic energy of the particles of the system, in the reference frame of the system's center of mass; this, however, is now known to be false—quantum mechanics explains why the energy of a system can never drop below its zero-point energy.

By international agreement, the Celsius temperature scale starts at absolute zero with the value of exactly -273.15 °C)
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At the upper end of the spectrum, life as we can conceive would probably not be possible near or about temperatures in the plasma range, or in the fourth state of matter

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(here's a wikipedia take on plasma : a plasma is typically an ionized gas, and is usually considered to be a distinct phase of matter in contrast to solids, liquids, and gases because of its unique properties. "Ionized" means that at least one electron has been dissociated from a proportion of the atoms or molecules. The free electric charges make the plasma electrically conductive so that it responds strongly to electromagnetic fields.

Further

Plasma typically takes the form of neutral gas-like clouds or charged ion beams, but may also include dust and grains (called dusty plasmas). [5] They are typically formed by heating and ionizing a gas, stripping electrons away from atoms, thereby enabling the positive and negative charges to move freely. )

Plasmas are the most common phase of matter. Some estimates suggest that up to 99% of the entire visible universe is plasma[6]. Since the space between the stars is filled with a plasma, albeit a very sparse one (see interstellar medium and intergalactic space), essentially the entire volume of the universe is plasma
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And it's not temperature extremes, maybe some other energy extremes such as sound (I know sound requires a medium to tarvel, but humans can die due to extremes in pitches, matter can shatter too due to sonic extremes), but extremes in radiation, gravity, magnetism & electricity where normal humans and even our electroics get 'fried', extremes in vacuum and pressure, well there could be life forms that could survive those extremes too, who can really say with absolute and complete authority?

So I guess presently the above temperature limits could be the 'limiting' extremes, but, stranger things than man could conceive a few decades ago have happened, so who knows-you may have life forms that survive as pure thought (mind waves) alone at extremes beyond even current human conception.
Life's Lovely! Love & Live Life!

Answer 7

I took microbiology so long ago, and I remember having this discussion, but not what was said, but I think the concensus was there is no limit to life, cause there are microorganisms that thrive in extreme environments, and yes we agreed the elements were just a narrow spectrum and I think at the time a couple of new elements had been discovered, well they exist but our knowledge of their existense is limited to our human capabilities,