Before he had YouTube (or even television) to tickle his malformed fancy, bad science-fiction with ridiculous premises like molemen living beneath the surface of the Earth was a staple of the cretin’s library.  Fortunately, the staple remover of science fact soon crushed such ridiculous premises, leaving mostly just Star Trek to egg the ill-minded on  in their loserdom.

Yet strangely enough, while authors such as William Gibson and Neil Stephenson continue to write a bunch of bloated cyberpunk nano-crap, new findings in evolutionary biology would have us reconsider the possible existence of the moleman, and his potentially advanced civilization miles beneath our feet.

Our journey starts at the bottom of the sea in the hydrothermal vents, where we encounter the amazing Pompei worm. Surviving temperatures hot enough to boil water at the surface, and thriving in one of the few ecosystems on Earth that doesn’t rely upon energy from the sun, the Pompei worm is an example of the ability of life to adapt to the harshest of conditions.

Or is it?

Perhaps it is we who are the bizarre adaptations, with life on the cold and oxygen-caustic planetary surface owing its existence to a bacterial freak: that emperor of extremophiles, the chloroplast. So dependant are we on these strange yet ubiquitous creatures, that only recently did we even realize they were a separate animal from their host.

Much simpler  than photosynthesis – and thus likely preceding it – is the chemosynthesis performed by the archaea, which are now widely believed to be the direct descendants of the original form of life on this planet.¹

Not only have scientists come around to posit that these chemosynthesists occupy the mainspring of the river of life, but indeed it is speculated that there may likely be more biomass beneath the planet’s crust than exists on the surface and in the seas combined.

This hypothesis may be borne out by evidence obtained from the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest manmade incursion into the Earth’s crust, where – to the surprise of the geologists involved – the temperatures rose signifigantly more rapidly than expected, and the mud bubbled with boiling organic compounds, both of which could be the result of biological processes occurring miles below the surface of the planet.

Considering the tendency of life to incraese in complexity wherever it can get a foothold, and the abundant evidence of convergent evolution, it is not unfeasible that intelligent life alse evolved underground, perhaps millions of years before our own ancestors left Africa. We can hypothesize that such beings would have some features of hominids, such as large brains and grasping appendages; as well as some qualities of underground creatures, including perhaps sonar or heat sensing  organs in lieu of eyes. In other words: molemen.

With their likely head start, and a greater availability of unadulterated metals and minerals, these molemen could have a civilization far more advanced than our own, sending expeditions towards the Earth’s core as we aim for space, as oblivious of us as we are of them.

I’ve got a script about it that I’m shopping to the Sci-Fi Channel.

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1. Not in the sense, of course, that every living thing must be a descendant of the primeval ancestor, but in the sense of belonging to the branch of the tree of life from which all other limbs sprouted. (Though some would argue that topologically, there is no such branch, and that all limbs are equivalent.)