>>35728367It's fucking crazy to think about how different life down there has to be just to exist, really.
Think about the whole ecosystems that evolved around the hydrothermal vents. Up here on the surface where rational, non-abominations live, we get all of our energy from the sun. No matter how you spin it, every food chain has some kind of photosynthetic life form at the bottom.
Not down there. Down there, if you aren't a scavenger, picking the bones of whales or other animals that sink to the bottom after dying, you're living around a hydrothermal vent. These animals will never see sunlight, an were it not for bioluminescence (and the occasional deep-sea probe), probably would never SEE at all. The food chain is completely cut off from what we surface dwellers consider to be the bounds of the planet's biosphere, starting with bacteria that straight up live off of the heat and chemicals from the Earth's mantle and moving up to shrimp, crabs, and tube worms that can grow past seven feet long.
Because these animals live completely without energy from the sun, they're prime candidates for what life might look like, say, on the ocean beds under the ice of Europa, or hell, even proof-of-concept that life can exist somewhere without the presence of a star at all.