Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Yep, sounds like "thriving" to me!
They are very common underground. IIRC the mass of all the "weird" extremophiles is bigger that the mass of the usual life forms that we usually meet.
Why were they trapped in the first place? And is it a good idea to let them out?
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a crystal or jewel erected to contain an ancient being. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the danger this being poses; let us release it." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don’t see the danger, I certainly won’t let you release it. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the danger, I may allow you to release it."
I don't know, this seems pretty obvious to me.
My working hypothesis, though, is that this is mostly funny because of the conjuction between the familiar and the unfamiliar. There is then a second layer of funniness to do with absurdity.
So, Chesterton's Fence is a bit of a meme (in the original sense) on HN now. I've seen it come up a few times, as something people consider obscure, but are eager to share, because it's interesting. I assumed that people would recognise it. The re-formulation as a piece of Kryptonian philosophy (Zal-Tar is the scientist guy from the 1984 Supergirl film) about something fantastical and over-the-top like an ancient evil trapped in a crystal, on the other hand, is unfamiliar. There's something about the superposition of the two that is funny.
However, that feeds immediately into absurdity, because my re-formulation is rubbish; it's entirely unconvincing, and fails to disguise the origin of the quote. But that makes it more funny, because now you think i'm an idiot. Except you know i'm not really an idiot (well, something like that), you recognise that i'm playing at being an idiot. That isn't a universal element of all comedy, but it's something i personally lean on a lot - if you can make a really obviously silly statement the right way, either deadpan or hyperbolic, it can be funny.
I'm reminded of "You've not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.":
I'd imagine they were engulfed by the growing crystals.
> And is it a good idea to let them out?
Extremophiles don't tend to do all that well outside of their extreme conditions. We're extremophiles to them.
Is it just because English isn't my first language, or does that sentence sound weird to native speakers too? Like the extremophiles contain "caves as large as cathedrals"
Here's how I would word it:
Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years looking for extremophiles in the Naica Mine. The mine, located in Chihuahua, Mexico, contains caves as large as cathedrals.
The punctuation - or more specifically, the commas, their placement or absence in certain places - is the last thorn my brain hurts over when reading and writing English. I read a sentence, and I feel like I'd trip each time I see a comma where there shouldn't be any. Like walking a rocky road or something.
Quotation marks differ because the transition from handwriting to printed letters solidified different shapes like ", «, „ or “, depending on how the strokes were jotted down in handwritten text.
There's a popular meme about it:
(I think so, at least. Not too sure.)
But yeah, the sentence is too long, with too many modifiers.
Edit: grammar
Geology has a certain reputation for its vocabulary https://xkcd.com/1829/
Should be "...team have spent years looking for extremophiles, exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua, which contain caves as large as cathedrals."
Or split into two sentences.
It should rather be "Looking for extremophiles Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua, which contains caves as large as cathedrals." and even then it's quite cumbersome to read because there are too many modifiers.
Sentences like that should simply be split up in order to avoid such problems and to be more comprehensible. Unfortunately, many writers seem to equate long sentences with sounding intelligent (speaking from personal experience here ... school and academia can teach you bad writing habits that take some time to unlearn).
A pointer to some credible source as to why it's not dangerous might be interesting.
Even being somewhat reasonable, scary things like prions do exist.
"It is assumed that such life would be hardy - to survive the trip to Earth; not easy - and precautions taken would provide a very high degree of containment."
So yeah, what could go wrong?