In the 1980s and 1990s, biologists found that microbial life has great flexibility for surviving in extreme environments—niches that are acidic or extraordinarily hot, for example—that would be completely inhospitable to complex organisms.
Nas décadas de 1980 e 1990, os biólogos atoparon que a vida microbiana tiña unha sorprendente flexibilidade para poder sobrevivir en ambientes extremos, por exemplo en nichos extraordinariamente quentes ou ácidos, que serían completamente inhabitables polos organismos complexos.