1 Billion-Year-Old Water Tastes 'Terrible' | Hacker News Reader

1 Billion-Year-Old Water Tastes 'Terrible'

theatlantic.com

45 pointsantr27 comments

The 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.

In 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.

I 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.

I 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.

I find it amusingly ironic that an article about bad taste and billion-year-old water is in "The Atlantic".

Go figure.

I would be afraid of what might be growing in the water, but I guess that level of salt would kill most anything.

-as we know it.

In which case it would probably die upon entering the human body, as it would find us miserably hypotonic.

Which one of us would find the other more toxic?

I'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?".

Kudos 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.

So, 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.

I'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.

AFAIK most lifeforms are not known to cause terrible diseases in humans.

Posting in hopes that TheSOB88 happens to read this: You appear to have been hellbanned. I'm not sure why, but all your comments for the last month or so are auto-killed. It happens to a lot of people for reasons that aren't entirely clear. You could try writing pg about it, but it would probably be easiest just to make a new account.

Anything 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.

Agreed; 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.

Suddenly, 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

On the bright side, that outcome would be scientifically interesting!

I'd be much more concerned about heavy/radioactive metals in the water than I would be about any possible microbes.

I 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."

"When all you have is 1 billion year old water, everything looks like a glass."

"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.

I 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 ;)

That just means you'll see it again soon.

I'm pretty sure I've already seen a few X-Files episodes one could do a word-replace with.

This 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com