Microbes are single-cell life forms visible only through microscopes. It has only been discovered recently that 90% or more of microbes live underground. That may not be surprising, except that those underground microbes may compose as much as 20% of all biomass — the stuff that lives.

Did you catch that? One-fifth the mass of all life on this planet lives underground — underneath soil and bedrock — and until the middle of the 20th century we didn’t know it. Humans didn’t even believe life could exist down there.

Down there is thousands of feet, miles even, below the surface. There are microbes that eat and breath rock! Microbes that excrete metal! Microbes that eat, drink, and excrete in such quantities that they have and are changing the shape of the surface of the planet we live on. And yet elevated science didn’t know they existed, and even when we........

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