Life found deep below Antarctic ice | Hacker News Reader

Life found deep below Antarctic ice

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113 pointsdsil30 comments

For some reason I always feel underwhelmed when they dig up a few microbes and their corpses from the deep. Where are those huge tentacle-ye monsters, we want so much to look at? Or at least find the Tesseract?

Huge tentacle-ye monster (or at least, close): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026950

I'm actually somewhat grateful that we don't live in a world where scientists dig up balrogs and Elder Things.

> The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum...

Is it not dangerous to do this? What if we bring to the surface new viruses or bacteria that are very harmful?

I don't see how this can be different than an ordinary expedition in this regard.

Why 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.

Yeah, 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.

As everyone knows, there are secret nazi-bases below antarctica, so those are probably nazi-engineered bio weapons. :)

Nazis are on the dark side of the moon. Duh!

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.

But which are the "outside" organisms -- us or them? ;-)

It's like you are trying to be deep, but didn't actually read your parent.

The 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?

The 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.

Probably 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.

Like John Carpenter's The Thing!

These 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.

That or the ones that were up here evolved.

If 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)

But 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.

If the bacteria are locked under the ice for thousands of years, that arms race doesn't occur, at least between humans and bacteria.

Well they were left in 1945 with state of the art V2 missiles.

You 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)

I wonder if they're archaea or bacteria. Does anybody have a guess?

ia ia cthulhu fhtagn!

Actually, it was the Elder Things that were in Antarctica. Cthulhu's in the Pacific somewhere.

Shoggoths. They've definitely found shoggoths.

Tikili-li! Tikili-li!

Se til helvete og kom dere vekk. Det er ikke en bikkje, det er en slags ting! Det imiterer en bikkje, det er ikke virkelig! KOM DERE VEKK IDIOTER!!

Ah, no love for The Thing. Oh well.

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