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1 Billion-Year-Old Water Tastes 'Terrible'
- beat 13y agoI find it amusingly ironic that an article about bad taste and billion-year-old water is in "The Atlantic".
- joezydeco 13y ago"Now onto the bigger questions: Is there life in this billion-year-old water?" I'm guessing a Hollywood screenwriter is already working on the answer to this question.
- cclogg 13y agoI can already see the trailer: loud Inception-esque BRAAAHHM sounds, black/desolate landscape, shot on Red in 3D, weird syrupy water turns out to be alien goop... etc... Oh, and throw in a robotic Fassbender! ... wait... I think I saw this movie last summer ;)
- mikeash 13y agoThat just means you'll see it again soon.
- trentlott 13y agoI'm pretty sure I've already seen a few X-Files episodes one could do a word-replace with.
- clarkmoody 13y agoThe headline gets your attention, but after reading the article, it makes perfect sense that water soaking up minerals from a rock for a billion years would taste pretty bad. A very interesting find for the sake of scientific inquiry though.
- sukuriant 13y agoSo, she drank some of the water and is now postulating that it might have life in it? Uhm... well, I assume this article has been written so long since the event happened that we know she didn't contract some terrible disease that mutated in there.
- takluyver 13y agoAnything able to live in there has never had a chance to infect any vertebrate, so it's unlikely that it would be able to infect a mammal. Mutation alone won't do the trick with no selective pressure for virulence.
- sukuriant 13y agoAgreed; though I could imagine some unfortunate situation where the cells of the creatures themselves are unusually sharp, for some selective-pressure reason, and able to withstand more acidic pH (it was in salt for a long, long time), and combined, those cause problems in a person, like asbestos but for the intestines. More biologically minded people would probably roll their eyes at my idea, but it's what went through my mind and wanted some input.
- Apocryphon 13y agoSuddenly, I am reminded of the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts. Available free to read thanks to Creative Commons: http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
- bmelton 13y agoI'm waiting to determine which comic book publishing house first co-opts this as the origin story for a new character. It's a toss-up right now between Dark Horse and Vertigo.
- TheSOB88 13y agoDoubtful it would have the proper proteins to invade a human body, considering nothing at all back then would need anything close.
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- untog 13y agoIn the UK, there is an old Roman Bathhouse available as a tourist attraction. Along with your ticket, you get a chance to taste the water that comes from the same hot springs that powered the baths. It is unbelievably disgusting. But watching the reactions of the people trying it is a source of endless fun.
- scrumper 13y agoI grew up near it (it's in a city called Bath, appropriately). It was a regular on the school trip circuit for us. Calling it a 'bathhouse' is accurate but sells it a bit short: it's an almost perfectly preserved complex: if you put a towel rack up you could open it for business tomorrow. To my mind, it rivals Pompeii in conveying an impression of Roman life. It's well worth a trip for any non-Brits finding themselves in London on business: just a 2 hour train ride from Paddington station.
- greghinch 13y agoI will add, if you have access to a car, a great overnight trip (stay near by the night before) from London is to do the early morning, pre-opening Stonehenge visit (book it a bit in advance and you can get right up to the stones with hardly anyone around) and then head over to Bath for lunch and the afternoon.
- mathattack 13y agoGo figure. I would be afraid of what might be growing in the water, but I guess that level of salt would kill most anything.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y ago-as we know it.
- jdpage 13y agoIn which case it would probably die upon entering the human body, as it would find us miserably hypotonic.
- mathattack 13y agoWhich one of us would find the other more toxic?
- snorkel 13y agoKudos to her. Whatever makes science interesting, go for it. Maybe combine this with a gross-out reality show concept called "Eating the Earth" where competing geologists dare each other to eat that.
- magic5227 13y agoI love how that as smart and scientific as we are as a civilization, we're still just primates deep down. "We found 1 billion year old water! ... I want to drink it so bad."
- joshguthrie 13y ago"When all you have is 1 billion year old water, everything looks like a glass."
- diggan 13y agoI'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who like to taste different things that other people would see as weird. I mean, if I found something extraordinary like water on Mars, my first though would be "How does it taste?".
- mesozoic 13y agoThis reminds me of a sci movie about zombie infection or some such. This is always how it starts, finding some strange liquid, tasting it, spreading a plauge our bodies aren't adapted to etc.