[SolemnGolem]

Originally Posted by William

I think it's neat to give you bacteria photosynthesizing from lava, right in the vicinity of black smokers in the deep ocean. No sunlight -- just the red glow of hot rocks.

I seem to recall reading that this is now a competitively acceptable theory of how life on earth got started: an energy gradient between the lava smokers deep underwater from geologic sources, and the much cooler water medium. The first self-replicating chemical reactions that eventually became "life" may have developed there and lived off of a sulfur-based chemistry, before undergoing a massive extinction event after too much of the poisonous oxygen waste gas filled the atmosphere.