When we talk about the search for life, it usually means that we are looking for life on other worlds. The type of life we are searching for is not necessarily what is known as intelligent life. I think that the scientific community would settle for even a germ right now. They just want to know that life exists anywhere other than Earth, but does this mean that we have exhausted the search for life on Earth? I am not talking about life on the surface of the Earth, for the most part, but life that might exist inside of the Earth or at the deepest levels of our oceans. We know that new species of marine life are being discovered all the time as we penetrate deeper and deeper into that vast undersea world of mountains and trenches, some of which are taller and deeper than anything on the surface of our beautiful planet.

We can almost be sure that there is a lot more types of marine life down there, than we ever suspected and by our standards it would have to be classified as sometimes bizarre. There is an important fact that we have to realize and that fact is that it has only been in recent times that we have started to penetrate these massive bodies of water and it is still not practical to explore all the areas at the bottom of the oceans of the world. The tremendous pressures at the bottom of our oceans make the task truly a formidable one. You have to remember that the deeper you go into the ocean, the more water is pushing down on top of you. If you go too deep with a vessel such as a manned submarine, you will be crushed. The sub will not be able to maintain its integrity and will be squashed. It is hard to realize the pressures from the weight of the water at extreme depths. The Marinas Trench is one of the deepest parts of the ocean and it is 6.8 miles deep and yet there is life down there. This is the same area where a robot submarine was sent down that had a tiny window made of incredibly hard glass that was over 3 inches thick and yet it cracked under the pressure. The Marinas Trench is believed to be the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.

We look in space for life forms and to a lesser extent we look into the deepest parts of the ocean, but do we ever look into the deepest parts of the Earth? There are some people that believe that there could be another race of intelligent beings living inside this Earth of ours. Some people would say that this is completely ridiculous and would wonder why anyone would ever think this. If you were to ask one of the people that think that this is a possibility you would get answers that were something like this, ufos have been seen coming out of places in the Earth, or artifacts have been found so far down that the only way they could have gotten there is if people lived down there somewhere. These are the kinds of answers that you could expect. But wait, the Earth is solid, isn't it? Well that depends on who you believe. Again there is a group of people that believe that the Earth is not what we think it is, that is a crust on top of a shallow mantle which is over a transition region, over the lower mantle which rides over the D layer, which rides over the outer core which encircles the inner core. Instead these people believe that the Earth is hollow in spots. If this were true than wouldn't it reduce the Earth's mass? Maybe, except for the fact that they believe that there is a tiny star in the center of the planet and this makes up for the loss of mass and generates the heat to keep the planet alive. This is based on the fact that some people claim to have seen flashes of light coming out of open areas on the other planets, which suggests to them that the same may be true for several planets in this solar system.

If these people are correct in their assumptions, there might be room inside the planet for another race to have developed. They might have become more advanced than us and who knows, they may have been able to tap into unlimited amounts of thermal heat and energy. If life forms do exist inside the Earth, they might be completely alien to us. We are based on carbon, they might be based on something quite different. When we talk about the hollow Earth theory, we find that one of the giants of astronomy, Edmund Halley, proposed this in the late 1600s. Halley's Comet is named after him. In the 1700s, Leonhard Euler, a famous Swiss mathematician also proposed this theory. An American named John Symmers convinced a newspaper editor named Jeremiah Reynolds to push the US Government to send an expedition to Antarctica in 1838. They were to look for a passage that led inside the Earth. They didn't find one. They did, however, discover that Antarctica was not just a polar cap, but a continent. The theory began to advance and in the 1840s a theory was put forward by Cyrus Read Teed that the Earth was hollow and that there were people living inside of it. He also stated that a sun existed in the center of the Earth. Teed changed his name to Koresh and founded a cult.

Hubble Telescope

A book was published that stated that when World War II was about to end, some Germans boarded submarines, including Hitler, and headed for Argentina and then on to a hole in the Earth they had found that led to the South Pole, where they are living today. I guess they didn't run across anyone else living in the Earth, or they killed them along the way. There is a famous photo showing a black hole over the North Pole that many claim is the entrance to the center of the Earth. This photo was taken by NASA, who claims that the reason that this area looks like a hole, is that the photo is a composite of all photos of the area taken in a 24 hour period and the black area is where no daylight was ever received. In other words, it is a dark area not a hole. Does this mean that the hollow Earth theory is incorrect? Not exactly, what it does mean is that there is no large entrance that we have been able to find, that leads to the center of a hollow world, if such a thing exists.

Scientists believe that there might be a chance that traces of Methane gas could mean that life exists both on Mars and inside the Earth. Why do scientists believe this? An experiment was conducted that produced methane. It was produced in an area that resembled the deep interiors of the Earth and Mars. This was an indication that the gas might be supporting microbes. Why are scientists so excited over this? Because there is a flip side to this, it may indicate a vast supply of petroleum products also. The search for life might just lead to the search for oil in an ironic twist. Why do they think that they will find oil? Oil is laced with biological molecules, because it is composed of the remains of plants, dinosaurs and other dead things, all of which gave off methane. Not all scientists agree with this theory however. A famous scientist from Cornell University stated that petroleum products are created from gaseous hydrocarbons, like methane and have been there since the creation of the Earth. If this is true, how do biological molecules get into oil? He proposed that the microbes that are in the Earth, eat the oil. We know that such microbes exist today, because they are used to help clean up oil spills, but they are usually of mixed microbial cultures when used here.

Will we dig a well someday, that is so deep that it breaks into a huge hollow portion of the Earth? I guess that anything is possible, but the bigger question is, will we find some intelligent life living down there? It may turn out that life is everywhere on this planet and far more abundant on other planets than we expect. This time period where we don't know if life exists anywhere else may become known as the age of life search on Earth. People in the future may say things like, "well that was in the age of the life search" or something similar. Will we discover life in the center of the Earth, let alone intelligent life, who knows, but it doesn't look too promising? If we ever do find other intelligent life in the Earth, it could change our entire perception of life in the universe.