Last week, humanity made contact with something that hasn't seen the light of day for 14 million years.

Russian engineers, working in the most extreme of physical climates in Antarctica, have drilled down 3768m to an underground lake that has been isolated from the rest of the world for that long.

Lake Vostok is a marvel of science and potentially holds the key to understanding a lot about the universe in which we live.

Its life conditions are considered similar to two moons, Europa and Enceladus, that orbit our celestial neighbours, Jupiter and Saturn respectively.

Lake Vostok's environment is called oligotrophic, my favourite new word, meaning it is oxygen rich - some 50 times more than we surface dwellers are used to.

It has been isolated since it was covered in ice and trapped all those millions of years ago.

What is so significant is that such oxygen richness allows organisms to survive in those harsh extremes.

Such organisms are known as extremophile - my other new favourite word - and would have to survive in a high-pressure environment, extreme cold and lack of nutrition and sunlight, while being able to live on, perhaps, only oxygen. Sounds not too dissimilar to space, doesn't it - except for the oxygen.

This is the stuff of science fiction - except that it is science fact.

There are no Autobots or Transformers, or sexy Hollywood-created analogies for life.

This is the real, life-on-another-planet stuff in all its unsexy, but pragmatic, life-in-harsh-environments reality.

That is, if the scientists find them in time. Due to the nature of the Antarctic and its very short summer, scientists are rushing to complete the drilling, which has been going on for years, to find such proof. If they don't, they will have to wait until next summer to return to the surface above Lake Vostok and try again. Remote-controlled deep sea robots will be used to explore the lake, and collect samples.

It is like an expedition to the moon, as it were.

Lake Vostok is just one of some 200 underground lakes that have been out of touch with the rest of the planet's atmosphere, but may harbour extreme forms of life.

A Nasa probe, called Cassini, discovered evidence that there might be a similar saltwater lake deep beneath Enceladus, a moon that circles Saturn. Should Russian scientists find life in Lake Vostok, there is a good chance such life might be on Enceladus.

It's not little grey men from Area 51, but it is potentially life on another planet. That alone is worth getting excited about.

• Shapshak is the editor of Stuff magazine