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Long-dormant bacteria and viruses in ice are reviving as climate warms

296 points by raulk 9y ago

kdsudac 9y ago
THE SKI IS FALLING!
graycat 9y ago
> "as climate warms" How much warming, in degrees F, C, or K, since when, measured how, by whom, published where, compared with what other measurements? Why ask these questions? For one, AFAIK "climate warms" essentially has not been happening to any significant extent for about 20 years and, really, since the coldest of the Little Ice Age -- apparently there was some cooling from 1940 to 1970 so some warming since then. On the Little Ice Age, there was ice skating on the Thames River in London. Reference for temperature over the past 2000 years? Okay: Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, ISBN 0-309-66264-8, 196 pages, National Academies Press, 2006, available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html In the Medieval Warm Period, did all the ice and permafrost melt and make everyone sick? Well, if it all melted, then what's in the ice and permafrost now is not so old and maybe safe. But I didn't hear that diseases released by the melting ice and permafrost made lots of people sick during the Medieval Warm Period. My guess: The BBC is pushing made-up, cooked-up, stirred-up, gang-up, pile-on, continually reinforced fake, nonsense scare stories to get continuing eyeballs, ad revenue, and British government subsidies. Not reading it. For some simple evidence: The Little Ice Age really was significantly cooler, but there is no evidence that it was preceded closely by lower concentration of CO2 -- the lower temperatures had some cause other than lower CO2. The Medieval Warm Period really was warmer, but there is no evidence that it was preceded closely by higher concentration of CO2 -- there must have been some cause other than higher CO2. It appears from ice core samples and more that the temperature of the earth has varied significantly over at least the last 800,000 years. Maybe CO2 has had something to do with warming since the Little Ice Age, and otherwise it looks like the causes of warming/cooling had little or nothing to do with CO2. It appears that people who talk about warming are blaming CO2, in particular from human activities, and from what I've seen in the temperature records for the past 800,000 years, the only time when CO2 might have caused significant warming was since the Little Ice Age -- even if we accept this, there's the problem of the cause of the cooling from 1940 -- 1970. Otherwise the temperature changes had other causes -- so, my guess is that the temperature change since the Little Ice Age also has some cause(s) other than CO2. Is CO2 a greenhouse gas, that is, absorbs Planck radiation from the surface of the earth? Yup, absorbs in three bands in the infrared; since we can't see CO2, it does not absorb visible light. So, is there a warming effect from that CO2 absorption? Well, maybe, but water is also a greenhouse gas so that maybe the radiation would be absorbed by water instead of CO2. But even if CO2 is the only way that infrared radiation can get absorbed, it's still not clear how much warming, net, all things considered, it would cause. E.g., lighting a match will also warm the earth. Is there more CO2 in the atmosphere now? Apparently the concentration someplaces is 400 ppm (parts per million) -- IIRC that would be in Hawaii, right, near a volcano, and volcanoes are supposed to be one of the major sources of CO2. Also there's CO2 in the ocean, and warm water absorbes less CO2 than cold water, so maybe recently some of the ocean around Hawaii is warmer and the source of the Hawaii CO2. I've seen no good presentations of CO2 levels over time with explanations of the causes. I've seen no good data on CO2 sources, sinks, or flows. E.g., first cut, how much CO2 is in the atmosphere now? Then, how much CO2 enters the atmosphere from human activity each year now? If the ocean warms a little, say, from an el Nino, how much CO2 is released into the atmosphere? At what rate do green plants take CO2 from the atmosphere? My guess is that CO2 from human activities is comparatively tiny, that the basic data would show this, and this is why we don't get the basic data. I see lots of articles on CO2 and warming, but I don't see articles with even this basic, first cut data. So, to me, the articles don't really have a case since if they did they would make their case. In the articles I see efforts to grab people emotionally but darned little data to convince people rationally. BBC: "as climate warms" is where you lost me. Or with this logic, we could write even more shocking articles: As the next galactic gamma ray burst hits the earth, all the atmosphere will be blown off the earth, and everyone will die. Moreover, since the gamma rays will come at the speed of light, we will never be able to see them coming. Now, get scared. Get afraid. Be very afraid. Watch the BBC for hourly updates 24 x 7 for the rest of your life to keep up on just what will happen as the next gamma ray burst hits the earth. Same for marauding neutron stars, highly magnetic neutron stars, and black holes. Read BBC tomorrow for the results as the next black hole hits the earth. For more, the expansion of the universe is slowing down, and we may be in a big crunch and all compressed to a point -- see the BBC next week for the details when this happens. Back home, see what will happen when Yellowstone blows again -- last time it put ash 10 feet deep (it's rock and enough to crush nearly any roof) 1000 miles down wind or some such. Remember, those bacteria are down there, fighting every second among themselves, evolving, just to come out and kill everything else, including YOU!!!
- tungnt620 9y ago
  Too long!
- orf 9y ago
  Your comment is absolutely huge and most likely not worth reading. All of the scattered sentences I skim read are just rambling fear mongering, doubt and general misinformation. The climate is warming. The permafrost is melting, more and more each year. You have to be living in an echo chamber to not understand this.
jondubois 9y ago
I'm not a microbiologist but when accounting for evolution, you'd think that a microbe which was locked away in ice for millions of years would be maladapted to modern animals - Particularly in terms of transmission between hosts. I would be more afraid of pathogens that were frozen more recently.
- GordonS 9y ago
  Doesn't this work both ways though, where modern animals would not be well equipped to defend against a microbe that has been locked away for millennia?
  - jondubois 9y ago
    Maybe, but in terms of survival, the onus is on the virus to fit into the new structure of the world not the other way around.
- Fomite 9y ago
  It entirely depends on whether or not the various receptors a virus would bind to, acceptable hosts for bacteria, etc. are highly conserved or not.
tomcam 9y ago
This has been happening for at least a couple of hundred years. Mammoth bodies have been exposed in Siberia since at least the 18th century and probably much further back than that.
jsz0 9y ago
This sounds like a very manageable threat. We already have systems in place to identify and control the spread of diseases. It's already equipped to deal with new or rare diseases. This will be an added burden but probably no more difficult than dealing with something like ebola. Likely easier due to the geography and population density involved.
whoisstan 9y ago
Read the 'Drowned World' by J.G. Ballard, humans start having ancient dreams. 'Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, Millennium 1999, p. 41.
thomasDuke 9y ago
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akartaka 9y ago
Pleistocene Park, the project to keep permafrost in Siberia, at Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-park-an-ice-age-ecosystem-to-save-the/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-p....
muninn_ 9y ago
I guess I prefer that they stay there... but can't help but to say that it seems fascinating that there are these dormant antique lifeforms just waiting to be discovered. Hope they don't kill us.
fhood 9y ago
I'll just add this to my list of things that I probably should give some thought, but won't because the top of the list includes refugee crisis, income inequality, and all the less Crightonesque consequences of climate change.
- easilyBored 9y ago
  The idea is that this might harm YOU, not a person in Libya or a poor person in Kentucky. If it materializes, I'm sure you'll set you priorities straight
  - crush-n-spread 9y ago
    That's if it materializes. What's already material is 410 ppm carbon in the atmosphere and rapidly thawing polar sea ice that regulates ocean temperatures. If you are scared about some ice germs then you might as well be reading USA Today for sensationalism. The truly scary stuff is not fun to read about like this.
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  I appreciate the irony of calling any consequence of climate change "Crichtonesque".
- zouhair 9y ago
  And the US government thinks all this is a hoax.
minikites 9y ago
Over the past 5-10 years I've gone from being mostly optimistic about our collective future to quite pessimistic. It's looking increasingly likely that we're unable to solve problems like climate change that require mass cooperation and that too many people are too selfish and short-sighted to allow for collective action. And in the (hopefully unlikely) event that industrial society collapses (from a pandemic, mass political instability, etc) any surviving humans won't be able to restart it because we've already used all of the "easy" fossil fuels. This is pretty much our only shot at making civilization work.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > any surviving humans won't be able to restart it because we've already used all of the "easy" fossil fuels. How much fuel do we need to restart a society, assuming we still have knowledge left over? Could a seed of a technological society start at hydroelectric dams, or in places where solar infrastructure still exists?
  - mrob 9y ago
    There's an interesting Youtube channel "Primitive Technology"[0]. Note how pretty much every technology involves fire. This is prehistoric tech-level, and it already won't scale to modern population sizes without fossil fuels. Trees aren't enough[1]. Modern technology is even more energy intensive. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Pre-industrial_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Pre-industrial_h...
    - xj9 9y ago
      why would you jump all of the way back to prehistoric tech? a lot of modern (and fairly green) tech would be pretty easy to salvage. manufacturing some of this stuff is pretty involved, but i don't think we will have to start all the way over. https://youtu.be/ZmHY9DkD1Hw https://youtu.be/ZmHY9DkD1Hw http://www.mikeswindmillshop.com/instructional-lessons/mikes-method-building-wind-generators http://www.mikeswindmillshop.com/instructional-lessons/mikes... http://www.techlib.com/electronics/amxmit.htm http://www.techlib.com/electronics/amxmit.htm
pizza2u 9y ago
Someone in this thread had to invoke a misinformed layman interpretation of the 3rd law of thermodynamics, especially given the melting ice.... Humans, like any species, will go extinct. Nothing lasts forever. The end. Now, get on with your "lives" and stop watching Hacker News. Life is short.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
raulk 9y ago
Revel with me in the thought that we —humans— think we are center of the world. That Earth is made for us and we have the power to shape it in whichever way we wish. That we own the planet. But, in reality, we don't. We are here only temporarily. There are powerful organisms hiding out there who are perennial. And they act like guards. If we push it too far, we set off the right conditions for them to spring to life, and restore balance on Earth by anhililating the threat — i.e. us. What a time to be alive!
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > restore balance on Earth Who's in charge of what constitutes balance?
  - glenda 9y ago
    Symbiosis? I don't think anyone is in charge of that.
  - raulk 9y ago
    If anybody had the answer to that...
  - raulk 9y ago
    Balance can be technically defined as homeostasis. In the biosphere, a well known concept is the Gaia Theory. More here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis
    - nyolfen 9y ago
      ecological homeostasis has been discredited for nearly half a century
- adrianN 9y ago
  We're the species with the best chance to ever leave the solar system, so that makes us pretty important.
DanBC 9y ago
> From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them We have antibiotics for plague, and vaccination / eradication for small pox. That doesn't feel like we evolved any resistance. A couple of thousand cases of plague are reported to WHO each year.
- raulk 9y ago
  In a way, we did evolve to acquire the brainpower —and invent the tooling and the methods— with which we managed to discover the vaccines and cures to effectively eradicate the diseases.
- pesfandiar 9y ago
  We have evolved to resist if we assume our intelligence is an extension to our body, and intelligently managing diseases is an extension to our immune system.
  - fhood 9y ago
    You are being pedantic on purpose.
    - castis 9y ago
      Which do you have an issue with, the idea, or the person expressing it? While we're at it, I can't recall the last time I met an accidental pedant.
      - fhood 9y ago
        The idea is neither novel, nor does it add to the discussion. It simply purposefully distorts the original commenter's intended meaning for "resistance".
    - pesfandiar 9y ago
      I'm only proposing an interesting and different way to look at it, as opposed to correcting DanBC.
bcaulfield 9y ago
Oh. Goody.
- bcaulfield 9y ago
  What, should I have made it clearer I was being sarcastic?
  - lolsal 9y ago
    I think that it doesn't matter if you were or not - it was a low-effort contribution to the discussion.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
A legit fear, but it could be a positive. When you consider, for example, the Zika virus and it's effect on the human brain, perhaps - on the other hand - we have a virus to thank for making homo sapiens more intelligent than our then "competition"? Bacteria, could be a positive well. Of course it's a roll of the dice either way. C'est la evolution.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Large parts of our genome do contain viral DNA, and we rely on symbiotic bacteria to digest food.
  - dualogy 9y ago
    > we rely on symbiotic bacteria to digest food All I know of are colon-dwelling bacteria fermenting and otherwise breaking down "indigestable residue" ("fibre", cellulose, seeds etc --- which certainly helps voiding such roughage and may furnish some butyrate and possibly a few B-vitamins to the colon mucosa in the process) and other refuse. Do you host bacteria in your small intestine, the prime site of digestion and absorption? Or do you count the colon as a site of "digestion"? Maybe I have the wrong understanding of the word..
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      For the most part the phrase "the gut" seems to be in fashion. I'm not so sure we know much about what's going on where, when and by what "third parties." From what I understand, we have bacteria on the skin as well. And that full body washing with soap might not be a great idea. Sure, get the obvious dirty bits ;) but the rest probably just need a water wash.
      - dualogy 9y ago
        Now that you mentioned it, I took a look and behold, TIL! There are microbes in the small intestine indeed: https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Small_Intestine https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Small_Intestine And among many other non-digestive contributions, they do contribute to furnishing short-chain fatty acids and K+B vitamins from incoming substances. Glad I looked that up then =)
enknamel 9y ago
There are quite a few sci-fi novels and one show I saw that feature nightmare scenarios based off of thawing ice. I seriously doubt we will see something catastrophic though. It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.
- arthurcolle 9y ago
  > It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells. Famous last words
  - klipt 9y ago
    IANAD, but I imagine modern bacteria that have evolved multi-antibiotic resistances are much more dangerous than ancient bacteria that are probably still vulnerable to most of our antibiotics.
    - Fomite 9y ago
      http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/09/bacterial-defenses-predate-antibiotics http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/09/bacterial-defenses-pr...
  - jerf 9y ago
    This falls under the class of things that if they could happen, they already would have. The global temperature is not a uniform scalar modifier on what the temperature "would" have been without the changes. There are already hot spots and cold spots every year, continuously. There are already places in the ice that thawed out last year, and ten years ago, and during the Medieval warm period, and whenever it was warm before that. And we have not witnessed mass dieoffs due to disease from those events either. It's like the concerns about high-energy collisions doing something terrible like forming micro-blackholes and eating the Earth. If that was a danger, it would be something Nature would already be doing and we'd be able to see it. The ability to "infect" something is not a natural property that all bacteria have. It is something that has to evolve. A bacteria popping out of cold storage from half a million years ago precisely adapted to infect a modern animal would be every bit as weird as seeing a bacteria pop out of that same cold storage that was precisely evolved to live on Mars, or live on vast quantities of plastic, or otherwise adapted to conditions it couldn't possible have witnessed during its previous life. It isn't absolutely, mathematically impossible. But it's not much worth worrying about. It's a science fiction storyline, not something that happens. Now, if there were humans in such cold storage, I would be somewhat more careful. But so far in those cases where that has occurred we still haven't been wiped out. I haven't even heard of anyone pinning so much as a cold virus on pulling a cadaver out of a glacier. Links welcome if anybody does have such a story.
stuffedBelly 9y ago
Reminds me of this horror flick I watched a couple of years ago The Thaw http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/
koolba 9y ago
Reminds me of the anthrax outbreak in Russia: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/488400947/anthrax-outbreak-in-russia-thought-to-be-result-of-thawing-permafrost http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/48840094...
rdxm 9y ago
we've already been de-seleceted. now it's just a matter of time....
- rdxm 9y ago
  ahhh yes, down-voted due to what, the pain of a reality check? interesting...
zbjornson 9y ago
Soil-borne anthrax is very common; there's in fact "anthrax season" when (usually small) outbreaks happen among wild and farmed animals, from North America to southern Africa, Russia to China and India. (Search for anthrax on https://www.promedmail.org/ https://www.promedmail.org/, there are 37 reports in 2017 so far.) That a thawed carcass was infected is an interesting anecdote as far as the mode of the transmission, but it isn't surprising. That is, it's not a disease that we've eradicated that is coming back to haunt us.
- autokad 9y ago
  yeah that seems like the normal cycle of anthrax, after all its optimized to be frozen and come back.
- downandout 9y ago
  Thanks for this. This isn't the first article I've seen that tried to make tenuous connections between climate change (née global warming) and all manner of horrible, immediate effects. The environmentalist crowd gets frustrated that most people consider their cause to be a far off problem that everyone currently living won't have to bear the burden of, and they use articles like this to try to create fear of immediate consequences in order to advance their agenda. I like to read facts, not speculation created by masters of fearmongering.
  - ChristianBundy 9y ago
    ideology.jpg
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    It may be true that this article is overblown, but let's not pretend that the science for climate change and global warming is not rock solid, even if we can't predict the exact extent of the damage. Russian roulette is a game for fools and those with no hope, not an intelligent species with only one habitable planet.
    - downandout 9y ago
arctangent 9y ago
I'm surprised that Fortitude [1] hasn't been mentioned yet. It's a fairly good TV show on this topic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series)
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  I was about to comment the same thing, but Ctrl-F'd for Fortitude first. It's a great show, and without spoiling is on-topic for this subject. Season 2 is a bit out there, but I really recommend people watch it.
cmdrfred 9y ago
Conversely modern bacteria and viruses are going to sleep in the Antarctic. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...
mickrussom 9y ago
My wife always bugs me about the cold. I tell her operating rooms are cold. Heat = entropy, disease vector increase. Any thawing of permafrost will start to revive dormant diseases, viruses and flora. We might as well complete the trifecta and start looking for ancient DNA and revive long gone species for the win. She always tells me cold and drafts = sick, but if you look where the percent of currently diseased - its never in the north - always in tropical places where diseases, worms, parasites have a field day. There will be a day where she'll be begging for the cold :)
- exhilaration 9y ago
  I've read that cold operating rooms are cold for the comfort of the surgeons, but the cold leads to more infections and slower recoveries: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/16/us/surgery-s-chill-can-be-risky.html http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/16/us/surgery-s-chill-can-be-... Here's a more recent article that cites some papers: https://www.verywell.com/are-operating-rooms-cold-to-prevent-infection-2549274 https://www.verywell.com/are-operating-rooms-cold-to-prevent...
  - derefr 9y ago
    Makes sense to me. A lot of bodily fluids sit right on the line between "gel" and "liquid" at room temperature. And gels promote biofilm formation. A few degrees too cool and all your externally-exposed fluids are now gels all the time. Thus half the reason for saunas (besides the Heat Shock Protein effects): they turn all the gels caught in your pores, your sinuses, your tonsils, your lungs, etc. to liquid, where your body can then much more easily flush them out. Though, freezing cold air isn't that bad, either: a lot of those liquids will become fully solid. Frozen snot grows no bacteria. I guess it's just the "danger zone" principle of food safety, applied to human tissue?
- hinkley 9y ago
  I believe they figured out that there is some truth to the idea that cold=sick at least for influenza. It doesn't live long while airborne but in a cold environment it can survive a bit longer, meaning in a warm room if someone sneezes you are less likely to be exposed than in a cold one.
dangayle 9y ago
Drilling in the frozen north and releasing an ancient monster is the subject of the first episode of the revamped Mystery Science Theater on Netflix.
- erickhill 9y ago
  And John Carpenter's The Thing.
  - strictnein 9y ago
    And "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft, more or less. Although at the other pole.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Minor nit, but I don't think they reveal that the creature in The Thing was cut out of the ice and revived until the much later 2011 prequel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(2011_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(2011_film) Edit: Looks like I'm wrong. Apparently the ice block is in the John Carpenter film, but things aren't spelled out in great detail. I need to watch both of these again...
marcgcombi 9y ago
Who cares.
btilly 9y ago
Diseases from early humans are an interesting point of worry. What tends to make a deadly disease deadly is that it is able to infect us, but is poorly adapted to us. A disease that is adapted to a close relative of ours is likely to both infect us and not be well-adapted to modern humans. Which could be really, really bad.
yourthrowaway2 9y ago
We're all gonna die!
ccvannorman 9y ago
I bet the CIA is sweating about that Winter Soldier that froze in the 60s.
rglover 9y ago
What a time to be alive.
zoom6628 9y ago
Nature has given us a whole CDC vault for free. Seems like a golden moment for science akin to corpse in the Alps.
franzwong 9y ago
No matter the climate change is due to human or nature. The fact is the temperature is getting higher and it is the problem.
- Profragile 9y ago
  Climate fluctuations will happen regardless of whether we do anything to cause warming/cooling. We need to focus on protecting ourselves from it by using more energy... because both heating and cooling our living rooms and cars requires energy... and make artificial heating/cooling accessible to more and more people... regardless of whether or not our activities warms up or cools down the earth. Why we are focusing on what happens to the overall earth's climate makes zero sense to me... I'm sure it is entirely political and it is a fight between few rich corporations and political powers where everyone has been dragged into. Climate will change very drastically like it has done in the past, with or without human activities. We should be working on how to save ourselves from changes in the future... not desperately trying not to breathe too hard which might cause some tsunami in another part of the world (butterfly effect)... specially because nobody can correctly predict if it will.
  - averagewall 9y ago
    People do lots of hand wringing about climate change but really we could and surely will just do what you say and protect ourselves from whatever comes. Air conditioners where it becomes too hot, sea walls where storm surges become too frequent, irrigation where rainfall is reduced, moving people around where arable land moves, etc. We already do all these things on a massive scale. They're nothing unrealistic.
secfirstmd 9y ago
The comments on this article are fascinating and why I love reading the HackerNews. Point vs point debates about interesting scientific theory but in a way that average person like me can understand. I used to read about this kind of conversation happening in the late 19th Century in the bars of Royal Science institutions in Europe - it feels a little bit like that. :)
- bendbro 9y ago
  Strange, I'm the exact opposite. Reading all this conjecture makes me cringe. I don't know yet if I should consider that a personal failing, or just accept it.
  - phil21 9y ago
    I'm somewhere in between. When an article gets posted about something you have deep up to date knowledge of, you realize how inaccurate the comments here are in the details. To the point of damaging in some cases. In this case I suppose I should take a more direct active role in attempting to mitigate FUD or verifiable inaccuracies - but those comments take a lot of effort and sourcing. Probably something everyone here should attempt to do more often though :) But overall the conjecture and discourse in topics I'm relatively read up on but not a deep subject expert I find quite enjoyable, even if I know some of the details are likely to be wildly inaccurate. It's usually more than enough information to get pointed in the right direction so I can start doing my own highly specific research. I've found out about all sorts of awesome technologies/tools/projects I never would have if I hadn't read the comments on interesting subjects. Overall I find that to simply be humans. Bar conversation was likely riddled with even less adherence to facts from otherwise scientific and principled people. It just happens, and is part of being human - you do it too and don't even know it. Most likely at least.
  - ScalaNovice 9y ago
    I'm with you. Educated comments are rare. The only good articles are HN are business advice. Rest, including technology is fanboyism, conjectures and one-upmanship.
Houshalter 9y ago
I'm not saying this isn't a threat. But it doesn't seem as scary as the title or comments are making it out to be. The article admits that most bacteria can't survive this long frozen. Only certain types that have adapted to serving in the cold long term by forming spores. It only mentions one bacteria that harms humans that can do that, botulinum. Which isn't contagious and is only a problem with improperly canned food. And anthrax which is deadly but fortunately not very contagious. Viruses are more of a concern, but the article doesn't make a great case there either. They mention that scientists found a smallpox victim but were unable to recover a complete smallpox virus. Just fragments of it's DNA. The scariest thing recovered was Spanish Flu. Which fortunately many people have already been vaccinated against: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-idUSTRE65E65S20100616 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-idUSTRE65E65S2...
Proven 9y ago
The world needs Obamacare !

296 points by raulk 9y ago

THE SKI IS FALLING!

> "as climate warms" How much warming, in degrees F, C, or K, since when, measured how, by whom, published where, compared with what other measurements? Why ask these questions? For one, AFAIK "climate warms" essentially has not been happening to any significant extent for about 20 years and, really, since the coldest of the Little Ice Age -- apparently there was some cooling from 1940 to 1970 so some warming since then. On the Little Ice Age, there was ice skating on the Thames River in London. Reference for temperature over the past 2000 years? Okay: Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, ISBN 0-309-66264-8, 196 pages, National Academies Press, 2006, available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html In the Medieval Warm Period, did all the ice and permafrost melt and make everyone sick? Well, if it all melted, then what's in the ice and permafrost now is not so old and maybe safe. But I didn't hear that diseases released by the melting ice and permafrost made lots of people sick during the Medieval Warm Period. My guess: The BBC is pushing made-up, cooked-up, stirred-up, gang-up, pile-on, continually reinforced fake, nonsense scare stories to get continuing eyeballs, ad revenue, and British government subsidies. Not reading it. For some simple evidence: The Little Ice Age really was significantly cooler, but there is no evidence that it was preceded closely by lower concentration of CO2 -- the lower temperatures had some cause other than lower CO2. The Medieval Warm Period really was warmer, but there is no evidence that it was preceded closely by higher concentration of CO2 -- there must have been some cause other than higher CO2. It appears from ice core samples and more that the temperature of the earth has varied significantly over at least the last 800,000 years. Maybe CO2 has had something to do with warming since the Little Ice Age, and otherwise it looks like the causes of warming/cooling had little or nothing to do with CO2. It appears that people who talk about warming are blaming CO2, in particular from human activities, and from what I've seen in the temperature records for the past 800,000 years, the only time when CO2 might have caused significant warming was since the Little Ice Age -- even if we accept this, there's the problem of the cause of the cooling from 1940 -- 1970. Otherwise the temperature changes had other causes -- so, my guess is that the temperature change since the Little Ice Age also has some cause(s) other than CO2. Is CO2 a greenhouse gas, that is, absorbs Planck radiation from the surface of the earth? Yup, absorbs in three bands in the infrared; since we can't see CO2, it does not absorb visible light. So, is there a warming effect from that CO2 absorption? Well, maybe, but water is also a greenhouse gas so that maybe the radiation would be absorbed by water instead of CO2. But even if CO2 is the only way that infrared radiation can get absorbed, it's still not clear how much warming, net, all things considered, it would cause. E.g., lighting a match will also warm the earth. Is there more CO2 in the atmosphere now? Apparently the concentration someplaces is 400 ppm (parts per million) -- IIRC that would be in Hawaii, right, near a volcano, and volcanoes are supposed to be one of the major sources of CO2. Also there's CO2 in the ocean, and warm water absorbes less CO2 than cold water, so maybe recently some of the ocean around Hawaii is warmer and the source of the Hawaii CO2. I've seen no good presentations of CO2 levels over time with explanations of the causes. I've seen no good data on CO2 sources, sinks, or flows. E.g., first cut, how much CO2 is in the atmosphere now? Then, how much CO2 enters the atmosphere from human activity each year now? If the ocean warms a little, say, from an el Nino, how much CO2 is released into the atmosphere? At what rate do green plants take CO2 from the atmosphere? My guess is that CO2 from human activities is comparatively tiny, that the basic data would show this, and this is why we don't get the basic data. I see lots of articles on CO2 and warming, but I don't see articles with even this basic, first cut data. So, to me, the articles don't really have a case since if they did they would make their case. In the articles I see efforts to grab people emotionally but darned little data to convince people rationally. BBC: "as climate warms" is where you lost me. Or with this logic, we could write even more shocking articles: As the next galactic gamma ray burst hits the earth, all the atmosphere will be blown off the earth, and everyone will die. Moreover, since the gamma rays will come at the speed of light, we will never be able to see them coming. Now, get scared. Get afraid. Be very afraid. Watch the BBC for hourly updates 24 x 7 for the rest of your life to keep up on just what will happen as the next gamma ray burst hits the earth. Same for marauding neutron stars, highly magnetic neutron stars, and black holes. Read BBC tomorrow for the results as the next black hole hits the earth. For more, the expansion of the universe is slowing down, and we may be in a big crunch and all compressed to a point -- see the BBC next week for the details when this happens. Back home, see what will happen when Yellowstone blows again -- last time it put ash 10 feet deep (it's rock and enough to crush nearly any roof) 1000 miles down wind or some such. Remember, those bacteria are down there, fighting every second among themselves, evolving, just to come out and kill everything else, including YOU!!!

tungnt620 9y ago
Too long!
orf 9y ago
Your comment is absolutely huge and most likely not worth reading. All of the scattered sentences I skim read are just rambling fear mongering, doubt and general misinformation. The climate is warming. The permafrost is melting, more and more each year. You have to be living in an echo chamber to not understand this.

jondubois 9y ago

I'm not a microbiologist but when accounting for evolution, you'd think that a microbe which was locked away in ice for millions of years would be maladapted to modern animals - Particularly in terms of transmission between hosts. I would be more afraid of pathogens that were frozen more recently.

GordonS 9y ago
Doesn't this work both ways though, where modern animals would not be well equipped to defend against a microbe that has been locked away for millennia?
- jondubois 9y ago
  Maybe, but in terms of survival, the onus is on the virus to fit into the new structure of the world not the other way around.
Fomite 9y ago
It entirely depends on whether or not the various receptors a virus would bind to, acceptable hosts for bacteria, etc. are highly conserved or not.

tomcam 9y ago

This has been happening for at least a couple of hundred years. Mammoth bodies have been exposed in Siberia since at least the 18th century and probably much further back than that.

jsz0 9y ago

This sounds like a very manageable threat. We already have systems in place to identify and control the spread of diseases. It's already equipped to deal with new or rare diseases. This will be an added burden but probably no more difficult than dealing with something like ebola. Likely easier due to the geography and population density involved.

whoisstan 9y ago

Read the 'Drowned World' by J.G. Ballard, humans start having ancient dreams. 'Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, Millennium 1999, p. 41.

thomasDuke 9y ago

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akartaka 9y ago

Pleistocene Park, the project to keep permafrost in Siberia, at Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-park-an-ice-age-ecosystem-to-save-the/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-p....

muninn_ 9y ago

I guess I prefer that they stay there... but can't help but to say that it seems fascinating that there are these dormant antique lifeforms just waiting to be discovered. Hope they don't kill us.

fhood 9y ago

I'll just add this to my list of things that I probably should give some thought, but won't because the top of the list includes refugee crisis, income inequality, and all the less Crightonesque consequences of climate change.

easilyBored 9y ago
The idea is that this might harm YOU, not a person in Libya or a poor person in Kentucky. If it materializes, I'm sure you'll set you priorities straight
- crush-n-spread 9y ago
  That's if it materializes. What's already material is 410 ppm carbon in the atmosphere and rapidly thawing polar sea ice that regulates ocean temperatures. If you are scared about some ice germs then you might as well be reading USA Today for sensationalism. The truly scary stuff is not fun to read about like this.
tomjakubowski 9y ago
I appreciate the irony of calling any consequence of climate change "Crichtonesque".
zouhair 9y ago
And the US government thinks all this is a hoax.

minikites 9y ago

Over the past 5-10 years I've gone from being mostly optimistic about our collective future to quite pessimistic. It's looking increasingly likely that we're unable to solve problems like climate change that require mass cooperation and that too many people are too selfish and short-sighted to allow for collective action. And in the (hopefully unlikely) event that industrial society collapses (from a pandemic, mass political instability, etc) any surviving humans won't be able to restart it because we've already used all of the "easy" fossil fuels. This is pretty much our only shot at making civilization work.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
> any surviving humans won't be able to restart it because we've already used all of the "easy" fossil fuels. How much fuel do we need to restart a society, assuming we still have knowledge left over? Could a seed of a technological society start at hydroelectric dams, or in places where solar infrastructure still exists?
- mrob 9y ago
  There's an interesting Youtube channel "Primitive Technology"[0]. Note how pretty much every technology involves fire. This is prehistoric tech-level, and it already won't scale to modern population sizes without fossil fuels. Trees aren't enough[1]. Modern technology is even more energy intensive. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Pre-industrial_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Pre-industrial_h...
  - xj9 9y ago
    why would you jump all of the way back to prehistoric tech? a lot of modern (and fairly green) tech would be pretty easy to salvage. manufacturing some of this stuff is pretty involved, but i don't think we will have to start all the way over. https://youtu.be/ZmHY9DkD1Hw https://youtu.be/ZmHY9DkD1Hw http://www.mikeswindmillshop.com/instructional-lessons/mikes-method-building-wind-generators http://www.mikeswindmillshop.com/instructional-lessons/mikes... http://www.techlib.com/electronics/amxmit.htm http://www.techlib.com/electronics/amxmit.htm

pizza2u 9y ago

Someone in this thread had to invoke a misinformed layman interpretation of the 3rd law of thermodynamics, especially given the melting ice.... Humans, like any species, will go extinct. Nothing lasts forever. The end. Now, get on with your "lives" and stop watching Hacker News. Life is short.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

raulk 9y ago

Revel with me in the thought that we —humans— think we are center of the world. That Earth is made for us and we have the power to shape it in whichever way we wish. That we own the planet. But, in reality, we don't. We are here only temporarily. There are powerful organisms hiding out there who are perennial. And they act like guards. If we push it too far, we set off the right conditions for them to spring to life, and restore balance on Earth by anhililating the threat — i.e. us. What a time to be alive!

pavel_lishin 9y ago
> restore balance on Earth Who's in charge of what constitutes balance?
- glenda 9y ago
  Symbiosis? I don't think anyone is in charge of that.
- raulk 9y ago
  If anybody had the answer to that...
- raulk 9y ago
  Balance can be technically defined as homeostasis. In the biosphere, a well known concept is the Gaia Theory. More here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis
  - nyolfen 9y ago
    ecological homeostasis has been discredited for nearly half a century
adrianN 9y ago
We're the species with the best chance to ever leave the solar system, so that makes us pretty important.

DanBC 9y ago

> From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them We have antibiotics for plague, and vaccination / eradication for small pox. That doesn't feel like we evolved any resistance. A couple of thousand cases of plague are reported to WHO each year.

raulk 9y ago
In a way, we did evolve to acquire the brainpower —and invent the tooling and the methods— with which we managed to discover the vaccines and cures to effectively eradicate the diseases.
pesfandiar 9y ago
We have evolved to resist if we assume our intelligence is an extension to our body, and intelligently managing diseases is an extension to our immune system.
- fhood 9y ago
  You are being pedantic on purpose.
  - castis 9y ago
    Which do you have an issue with, the idea, or the person expressing it? While we're at it, I can't recall the last time I met an accidental pedant.
    - fhood 9y ago
      The idea is neither novel, nor does it add to the discussion. It simply purposefully distorts the original commenter's intended meaning for "resistance".
  - pesfandiar 9y ago
    I'm only proposing an interesting and different way to look at it, as opposed to correcting DanBC.

bcaulfield 9y ago

Oh. Goody.

bcaulfield 9y ago
What, should I have made it clearer I was being sarcastic?
- lolsal 9y ago
  I think that it doesn't matter if you were or not - it was a low-effort contribution to the discussion.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

A legit fear, but it could be a positive. When you consider, for example, the Zika virus and it's effect on the human brain, perhaps - on the other hand - we have a virus to thank for making homo sapiens more intelligent than our then "competition"? Bacteria, could be a positive well. Of course it's a roll of the dice either way. C'est la evolution.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
Large parts of our genome do contain viral DNA, and we rely on symbiotic bacteria to digest food.
- dualogy 9y ago
  > we rely on symbiotic bacteria to digest food All I know of are colon-dwelling bacteria fermenting and otherwise breaking down "indigestable residue" ("fibre", cellulose, seeds etc --- which certainly helps voiding such roughage and may furnish some butyrate and possibly a few B-vitamins to the colon mucosa in the process) and other refuse. Do you host bacteria in your small intestine, the prime site of digestion and absorption? Or do you count the colon as a site of "digestion"? Maybe I have the wrong understanding of the word..
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    For the most part the phrase "the gut" seems to be in fashion. I'm not so sure we know much about what's going on where, when and by what "third parties." From what I understand, we have bacteria on the skin as well. And that full body washing with soap might not be a great idea. Sure, get the obvious dirty bits ;) but the rest probably just need a water wash.
    - dualogy 9y ago
      Now that you mentioned it, I took a look and behold, TIL! There are microbes in the small intestine indeed: https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Small_Intestine https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Small_Intestine And among many other non-digestive contributions, they do contribute to furnishing short-chain fatty acids and K+B vitamins from incoming substances. Glad I looked that up then =)

enknamel 9y ago

There are quite a few sci-fi novels and one show I saw that feature nightmare scenarios based off of thawing ice. I seriously doubt we will see something catastrophic though. It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.

arthurcolle 9y ago
> It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells. Famous last words
- klipt 9y ago
  IANAD, but I imagine modern bacteria that have evolved multi-antibiotic resistances are much more dangerous than ancient bacteria that are probably still vulnerable to most of our antibiotics.
  - Fomite 9y ago
    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/09/bacterial-defenses-predate-antibiotics http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/09/bacterial-defenses-pr...
- jerf 9y ago
  This falls under the class of things that if they could happen, they already would have. The global temperature is not a uniform scalar modifier on what the temperature "would" have been without the changes. There are already hot spots and cold spots every year, continuously. There are already places in the ice that thawed out last year, and ten years ago, and during the Medieval warm period, and whenever it was warm before that. And we have not witnessed mass dieoffs due to disease from those events either. It's like the concerns about high-energy collisions doing something terrible like forming micro-blackholes and eating the Earth. If that was a danger, it would be something Nature would already be doing and we'd be able to see it. The ability to "infect" something is not a natural property that all bacteria have. It is something that has to evolve. A bacteria popping out of cold storage from half a million years ago precisely adapted to infect a modern animal would be every bit as weird as seeing a bacteria pop out of that same cold storage that was precisely evolved to live on Mars, or live on vast quantities of plastic, or otherwise adapted to conditions it couldn't possible have witnessed during its previous life. It isn't absolutely, mathematically impossible. But it's not much worth worrying about. It's a science fiction storyline, not something that happens. Now, if there were humans in such cold storage, I would be somewhat more careful. But so far in those cases where that has occurred we still haven't been wiped out. I haven't even heard of anyone pinning so much as a cold virus on pulling a cadaver out of a glacier. Links welcome if anybody does have such a story.

stuffedBelly 9y ago

Reminds me of this horror flick I watched a couple of years ago The Thaw http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/

koolba 9y ago

Reminds me of the anthrax outbreak in Russia: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/488400947/anthrax-outbreak-in-russia-thought-to-be-result-of-thawing-permafrost http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/48840094...

rdxm 9y ago

we've already been de-seleceted. now it's just a matter of time....

rdxm 9y ago
ahhh yes, down-voted due to what, the pain of a reality check? interesting...

zbjornson 9y ago

Soil-borne anthrax is very common; there's in fact "anthrax season" when (usually small) outbreaks happen among wild and farmed animals, from North America to southern Africa, Russia to China and India. (Search for anthrax on https://www.promedmail.org/ https://www.promedmail.org/, there are 37 reports in 2017 so far.) That a thawed carcass was infected is an interesting anecdote as far as the mode of the transmission, but it isn't surprising. That is, it's not a disease that we've eradicated that is coming back to haunt us.

autokad 9y ago
yeah that seems like the normal cycle of anthrax, after all its optimized to be frozen and come back.
downandout 9y ago
Thanks for this. This isn't the first article I've seen that tried to make tenuous connections between climate change (née global warming) and all manner of horrible, immediate effects. The environmentalist crowd gets frustrated that most people consider their cause to be a far off problem that everyone currently living won't have to bear the burden of, and they use articles like this to try to create fear of immediate consequences in order to advance their agenda. I like to read facts, not speculation created by masters of fearmongering.
- ChristianBundy 9y ago
  ideology.jpg
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  It may be true that this article is overblown, but let's not pretend that the science for climate change and global warming is not rock solid, even if we can't predict the exact extent of the damage. Russian roulette is a game for fools and those with no hope, not an intelligent species with only one habitable planet.
  - downandout 9y ago

arctangent 9y ago

I'm surprised that Fortitude [1] hasn't been mentioned yet. It's a fairly good TV show on this topic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series)

Jaruzel 9y ago
I was about to comment the same thing, but Ctrl-F'd for Fortitude first. It's a great show, and without spoiling is on-topic for this subject. Season 2 is a bit out there, but I really recommend people watch it.

cmdrfred 9y ago

Conversely modern bacteria and viruses are going to sleep in the Antarctic. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...

mickrussom 9y ago

My wife always bugs me about the cold. I tell her operating rooms are cold. Heat = entropy, disease vector increase. Any thawing of permafrost will start to revive dormant diseases, viruses and flora. We might as well complete the trifecta and start looking for ancient DNA and revive long gone species for the win. She always tells me cold and drafts = sick, but if you look where the percent of currently diseased - its never in the north - always in tropical places where diseases, worms, parasites have a field day. There will be a day where she'll be begging for the cold :)

exhilaration 9y ago
I've read that cold operating rooms are cold for the comfort of the surgeons, but the cold leads to more infections and slower recoveries: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/16/us/surgery-s-chill-can-be-risky.html http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/16/us/surgery-s-chill-can-be-... Here's a more recent article that cites some papers: https://www.verywell.com/are-operating-rooms-cold-to-prevent-infection-2549274 https://www.verywell.com/are-operating-rooms-cold-to-prevent...
- derefr 9y ago
  Makes sense to me. A lot of bodily fluids sit right on the line between "gel" and "liquid" at room temperature. And gels promote biofilm formation. A few degrees too cool and all your externally-exposed fluids are now gels all the time. Thus half the reason for saunas (besides the Heat Shock Protein effects): they turn all the gels caught in your pores, your sinuses, your tonsils, your lungs, etc. to liquid, where your body can then much more easily flush them out. Though, freezing cold air isn't that bad, either: a lot of those liquids will become fully solid. Frozen snot grows no bacteria. I guess it's just the "danger zone" principle of food safety, applied to human tissue?
hinkley 9y ago
I believe they figured out that there is some truth to the idea that cold=sick at least for influenza. It doesn't live long while airborne but in a cold environment it can survive a bit longer, meaning in a warm room if someone sneezes you are less likely to be exposed than in a cold one.

dangayle 9y ago

Drilling in the frozen north and releasing an ancient monster is the subject of the first episode of the revamped Mystery Science Theater on Netflix.

erickhill 9y ago
And John Carpenter's The Thing.
- strictnein 9y ago
  And "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft, more or less. Although at the other pole.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Minor nit, but I don't think they reveal that the creature in The Thing was cut out of the ice and revived until the much later 2011 prequel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(2011_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(2011_film) Edit: Looks like I'm wrong. Apparently the ice block is in the John Carpenter film, but things aren't spelled out in great detail. I need to watch both of these again...

marcgcombi 9y ago

Who cares.

btilly 9y ago

Diseases from early humans are an interesting point of worry. What tends to make a deadly disease deadly is that it is able to infect us, but is poorly adapted to us. A disease that is adapted to a close relative of ours is likely to both infect us and not be well-adapted to modern humans. Which could be really, really bad.

yourthrowaway2 9y ago

We're all gonna die!

ccvannorman 9y ago

I bet the CIA is sweating about that Winter Soldier that froze in the 60s.

rglover 9y ago

What a time to be alive.

zoom6628 9y ago

Nature has given us a whole CDC vault for free. Seems like a golden moment for science akin to corpse in the Alps.

franzwong 9y ago

No matter the climate change is due to human or nature. The fact is the temperature is getting higher and it is the problem.

Profragile 9y ago
Climate fluctuations will happen regardless of whether we do anything to cause warming/cooling. We need to focus on protecting ourselves from it by using more energy... because both heating and cooling our living rooms and cars requires energy... and make artificial heating/cooling accessible to more and more people... regardless of whether or not our activities warms up or cools down the earth. Why we are focusing on what happens to the overall earth's climate makes zero sense to me... I'm sure it is entirely political and it is a fight between few rich corporations and political powers where everyone has been dragged into. Climate will change very drastically like it has done in the past, with or without human activities. We should be working on how to save ourselves from changes in the future... not desperately trying not to breathe too hard which might cause some tsunami in another part of the world (butterfly effect)... specially because nobody can correctly predict if it will.
- averagewall 9y ago
  People do lots of hand wringing about climate change but really we could and surely will just do what you say and protect ourselves from whatever comes. Air conditioners where it becomes too hot, sea walls where storm surges become too frequent, irrigation where rainfall is reduced, moving people around where arable land moves, etc. We already do all these things on a massive scale. They're nothing unrealistic.

secfirstmd 9y ago

The comments on this article are fascinating and why I love reading the HackerNews. Point vs point debates about interesting scientific theory but in a way that average person like me can understand. I used to read about this kind of conversation happening in the late 19th Century in the bars of Royal Science institutions in Europe - it feels a little bit like that. :)

bendbro 9y ago
Strange, I'm the exact opposite. Reading all this conjecture makes me cringe. I don't know yet if I should consider that a personal failing, or just accept it.
- phil21 9y ago
  I'm somewhere in between. When an article gets posted about something you have deep up to date knowledge of, you realize how inaccurate the comments here are in the details. To the point of damaging in some cases. In this case I suppose I should take a more direct active role in attempting to mitigate FUD or verifiable inaccuracies - but those comments take a lot of effort and sourcing. Probably something everyone here should attempt to do more often though :) But overall the conjecture and discourse in topics I'm relatively read up on but not a deep subject expert I find quite enjoyable, even if I know some of the details are likely to be wildly inaccurate. It's usually more than enough information to get pointed in the right direction so I can start doing my own highly specific research. I've found out about all sorts of awesome technologies/tools/projects I never would have if I hadn't read the comments on interesting subjects. Overall I find that to simply be humans. Bar conversation was likely riddled with even less adherence to facts from otherwise scientific and principled people. It just happens, and is part of being human - you do it too and don't even know it. Most likely at least.
- ScalaNovice 9y ago
  I'm with you. Educated comments are rare. The only good articles are HN are business advice. Rest, including technology is fanboyism, conjectures and one-upmanship.

Houshalter 9y ago

I'm not saying this isn't a threat. But it doesn't seem as scary as the title or comments are making it out to be. The article admits that most bacteria can't survive this long frozen. Only certain types that have adapted to serving in the cold long term by forming spores. It only mentions one bacteria that harms humans that can do that, botulinum. Which isn't contagious and is only a problem with improperly canned food. And anthrax which is deadly but fortunately not very contagious. Viruses are more of a concern, but the article doesn't make a great case there either. They mention that scientists found a smallpox victim but were unable to recover a complete smallpox virus. Just fragments of it's DNA. The scariest thing recovered was Spanish Flu. Which fortunately many people have already been vaccinated against: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-idUSTRE65E65S20100616 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-idUSTRE65E65S2...

Proven 9y ago

The world needs Obamacare !