New Scientist:  Microbes survive 30,000 years inside a salt crystal

Microbes can survive in outer space, extreme cold, saltiness and even a crash down to a planet when they hitch hike on an asteroid.

Now it has been shown that they can survive extremely long with little food – from the article:

Brian Schubert, a microbiologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and colleagues studied salt crystals in a sediment core taken from Death Valley in California. The crystals contained tiny pockets of liquid, and the team found that they could grow live colonies of archaeans from samples of it. The team dated the liquid at between 22,000 and 34,000 years old (Geology, vol 37, p 1059).

Colonies of archaeans were grown from liquid within salt crystals that was up to 34,000 years old

This is not the first time microbes have been cultured from pockets of liquid trapped inside salt; one team has reported doing so with liquid they dated as being 250 million years old. Their results were questioned, however, as the salt crystals could have dissolved and recrystallised over time, trapping modern microbes.

I think life started somewhere out there in the universe and our ancestors really came from the stars – as microbes on an asteroid!