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Is it not dangerous to do this? What if we bring to the surface new viruses or bacteria that are very harmful?
by xk_id 14y ago
Is it not dangerous to do this? What if we bring to the surface new viruses or bacteria that are very harmful?
- Panoramix 14y agoI don't see how this can be different than an ordinary expedition in this regard.
- jules 14y agoWhy would those bacteria be adapted to infecting humans? The likelihood of a random bacterium being able to infect a human is very small unless there was evolutionary pressure for it to be able to.
- grhino 14y agoYeah, I think folks don't often realize how hostile an environment the human body can be to foreign invaders. Sure if you can sneak by the immune system, the human body is a microorganism paradise, but the immune systems of organisms are highly tuned to seek out and destroy foreign.
- _quasimodo 14y agoAs everyone knows, there are secret nazi-bases below antarctica, so those are probably nazi-engineered bio weapons. :)
- JanezStupar 14y agoNazis are on the dark side of the moon. Duh!
- hartror 14y agoUnlike what Hollywood would lead us to believe organisms cut off from the rest of the world don't become dangerous. In fact the opposite is more likely, organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem are more likely to be specialised and be at risk themselves from outside organisms.
- Smudge 14y agoBut which are the "outside" organisms -- us or them? ;-)
- sliverstorm 14y agoIt's like you are trying to be deep, but didn't actually read your parent.
- ghshephard 14y agoThe parent wrote: "Unlike what Hollywood would lead us to believe organisms cut off from the rest of the world don't become dangerous. In fact the opposite is more likely, organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem are more likely to be specialised and be at risk themselves from outside organisms." So, the question the Smudge was genuinely asking (and I think it's a clever one) is are the "organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem" the microbes in the glacial lake, or are the humans the "organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem" for 100,000 years?
- sliverstorm 14y agoThe only way to consider the rest of the world, with its 8.7 million species, to be the organism that was cut off from a few types of bacteria in a remote lake is to quibble over pointless semantics.
- gus_massa 14y agoProbably they are very specialized to live in those conditions (I guess: low salinity, very low temperature, low light, high pressure, low nutrients). So the usual bacteria won't survive too long there. I think that the biggest problem of the scientific is to ensure that the bacteria they got come from the lake and are not dew to contamination.
- muratmutlu 14y agoLike John Carpenter's The Thing!
- sp332 14y agoThese bacteria are very old. If they were any good at surviving, they would still be around up here. The fact that they now only exist in a very isolated place means that they got killed off up here once before, so they're probably not too dangerous.
- rosser 14y agoThat or the ones that were up here evolved.
- JanezStupar 14y agoIf you had a bacteria and its descendant thousands of years younger - the younger would wtfpn its predecessor. The same applies to pests and their targets. There is a continuous arms race between attacker and victim. Any combination of older variations of same creatures would play out in favor of younger creature/plant. I read somewhere that it is pretty much the same between sexes. A man of 2000 years ago would possibly be unable to impregnate todays woman (e.g.: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090908125137.htm)
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoBut there may also be a rock-paper-scissors effect at play. We may be in a 'rock' phase of bacterial life; uncover some old 'paper' and maybe the younger strain would find itself in trouble? There is no inexorable refinement force in effect in natural selection; simple organisms are selected for their current environment with no plan of building complex defenses against ancient enemies or any such.
- sliverstorm 14y agoIf the bacteria are locked under the ice for thousands of years, that arms race doesn't occur, at least between humans and bacteria.
- JanezStupar 14y agoWell they were left in 1945 with state of the art V2 missiles.
- 0003 14y agoYou should read the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts[1]. He explores a potential scenario for how this could come about and its implications. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Watts_(author) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Watts_(author)