Gold suggested otherwise. He believed hot, dark, high-pressure depths are where life fundamentally belongs and where it originated. Not necessarily in the deep, smoking sea, although that is another popular theory, but in the rocks, deep underground. We who live at the surface, in the light and the cool and the fresh air, we are the anomalous aberrations! He pointed out that ‘hopanoids’, organic molecules made in bacterial cell walls, are ubiquitous in rocks, quoting an authoritative estimate of between 10 trillion and 100 trillion tonnes of hopanoids in the rocks of the world.
