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Antarctic Lake Actually Two in One
Scoria writes "USA Today reports: Scientists have discovered that Lake Vostok, a liquid freshwater lake which has been isolated from the world beneath 4 km of ice for approximately 500,000 years, contains two separate basins. They believe that the basins, which are divided by a ridge that limits water exchange, may host individual ecosystems that are home to ancient microbes."
Just becaus something is a microbe doesn't make it harmful to humans. How exactly would they have evolved to spread by or do damage to humans if they've been separated from us for that long?
ResidntGeek
We humans aren't going to have any immunity to these microbes that have been isolated for 500000 years.
1 - What tells you these microbes are necessarily harmful to humans? lack of contact with them for half a million years suggests humans may not be their carrier hosts of choice actually.
2 - There are already thousands of deadly yet-unknown diseases lurking right here on the surface, in remote rainforests, waiting to be released by idiotic poacher. One or two more from the bottom of an underice lake won't make much difference.
3 - So what? humanity will either evolve natural defenses, or science will help the natural process, and there are way too many humans on this planet already. I can't remember who said that Gaia (the planet Earth considered a complex living entity) has a form of AIDS disease that's running amok and depleting its resources from within, and it's called Humanity.
Is that in human terms (thousands of years) or microbe terms (billions of years)?
All I got reading the article was that the fresh water has been isolated for 500,000 years and the ridge that separates them limits water exchange, resulting in isolated environments in which two different biomes may have formed.
Isn't the wording of the post a bit along the lines of NASA polit-speak? Unique environments, geothermal heating -- voila NEW LIFE FORMS! Let's submit a budget request for a probe to an ice world to look for life!
And those isolated microbes have been isolated from contact with us as well, so they wouldn't know what to do with us. Organisms and their parasites & diseases co-evolve.
And terrorists? Come on! What terrorist would go out to freakin' Antarctica, drill a couple of kilometers down, just to get what basically amounts to mineral water someone left in a fridge for 500000 years? If you're actually scared of that, you should probably live in fear of terrorists raiding your fridge.
Jeez, some people will see a terrorist connection in everything... no wonder laws like the PATRIOT act can be passed without public uproar.
The conditions in a near-freezing lake at high pressure are very different to those in the human body. So, although it's possible that such microbes would thrive in the human body AND cause lethal illness, it is very unlikely. Then again, there's Murphy's Law (anything that can happen, will)...
I've studied creation science (science without evolutionary assumtions) and I'm just wondering how many other /.'ers are skeptical about the determination that the two basins haven't been touched for 500,000 yrs.
How do the scientists determine this in a way using the scientific method?
Someone explain
Thank you Dave Raggett
drive 100 miles toward the center of whatever continent you live on and you'll find that the earth is no where near over-populated.
Over-population isn't defined by the lack of personal space between two human beings, it's defined by the sustainability of their exploitation of the planet.
As of today, there are 6+ bn people on Earth, about a third of which (the rich ones) already manage to over-exploit most of the planet's resources and destroy parts of it. I let you imagine what it would be if all 6 bn would start consuming even a third of what an average westerner consumes.
This planet should host about 1 to 1.5 bn people comfortably and sustainably. Any more than that is too much.
They should use this lake to test ideas for drilling into the ice of Europa.
2 - There are already thousands of deadly yet-unknown diseases lurking right here on the surface, in remote rainforests, waiting to be released by idiotic poacher.
Really? Can you substantiate this?
3 - So what? humanity will either evolve natural defenses,
Not in time we won't. The success of a selective force requires that unfit organisms not replicate, which implies that the soonest evolution will have an effect is the next generation.
There's a lot of stuff any given individual doesn't have immunity to. That's why we have an amazingly effective immune system, to create such immunity.
Nice Fearmongering. Hmmm Let's see, story about possible unknown microbes. Nope not scary. Oh I know add terrorism to the mix.
Sheesh get a life
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
"This planet should host about 1 to 1.5 bn people comfortably and sustainably. Any more than that is too much."
On what do you base this? Idiot.
Technology is always improving. Before agriculture there must have been simpletons like you saying that the known earth could support 1 to 1.5 k people.
This planet should host about 1 to 1.5 bn people comfortably and sustainably. Any more than that is too much
I put the estimates closer to 100-500 billion. Yes, I pulled that number outta my ass just like you did yours.
I can live on about 1/10th of the food I currently eat. Just in the US alone that would feed an extra 2.9 billion people.
Multiply that times every other Westerner and you could feed pretty much everyone else on the planet with no problem. If you count the food being wasted on this planet, that's another 5-10 billion right there. Efficiency and irritation-style technology improvements would take care of the rest.
We currently waste a lot of space and resources so we don't have to live in the boring parts of the planet.
There's more known nasty viruses and bacteria that have yet to be used in any harmful way. What makes you think a terrorist organization would be interested in visiting the Antarctic in the very remote hope that there could, possibly, be some kind of ancient bacteria... maybe?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Sez you. Who gets to die?
This has huge scientific potential but not for the reasons most slashdotters are positing. For scientists studying the genome, it's largely about calibrating their evolutionary rulers, and less about super alien organisms.
Unlike large animals which can be geographically isolated and evolve undisturbed, free living microbes (as opposed to those that need a specific animal or plant host) probably range freely and easily by the fact that they carry easily on the wind or the skin of migrating animals or move with the major currents that circulate the globe. Even if only one microbe makes it to a local it can begin to reproduce, since it doesn't rely on sexual replication, it isn't inconvenienced by having to find a mate also flung into some far foreign environment.
All of this is to say, these microbes will have had what in microbe evolution is something fairly rare, an environment completely free from competition from other global varieties seeking to fill the same ecological niche. I doubt they will have mutated far from their other global cousins, but the rate of change of DNA is probably what really matters to scientists, as for long time periods we would only be making guesses about genomic drift in microbes.
Given the extreme environment these microbes inhabit, there may also be some extreamophile surprises for cold adaptation.
Another possible study will be how quickly the isolated community looses defenses to protozoa and other microscopic predators that may not now be present in their extremely isolated pocket of liquid water beneath the ice.
Letter To Iran
The water may contract as it gets colder, but because it is under so much pressure from 2 miles of ice above it, the water freezes at a lower temperature. As pressure increases, the freezing point of water decreases. I just don't know how much pressure would be needed to keep the water a liquid at whatever the temperature is at that depth. It is most likely a combination of geothermal heat and the effects of pressure on the freezing point of water.
No I'm not going to flame you for being religious.
What I am going to say is that Creation Science is in no way scientific. However, creationism is a theory of how things happened, just not a scientific one. (Science has become used to describe anything these days whether or not it uses scientific methodology (e.g. Political Science)).
The reason why creation can not be science is that it cannot be proven (or disproven). The theory of evolution focuses why it's true. Creationism tries to "prove" itself by disproving evolution rather by by its own merits (and thus win by default). Creationism is also extremely broad (every logical world could have been created with creationism, so it fails to explain why the world is this way and not some other way).
Let's get historical. A lot of people bash Darwin and haven't bothered to even read his books or know his arguments, so I'll use one he used. Darwin found that throughout his travels in the world there were never amphibians on islands surrounded by saltwater, unless introduced by humans (in which case they thrived). Darwin also knew that the amphibians died when they tried to swim in salt water. The most likely explanation was that since no frogs were there when the island formed, no frogs could ever be on the island since they couldn't swim. Creationim's explanation would be that God created amphibians on large land masses but not small ones because it was part of his plan. From there, I'd like to know how or why this is part of God's plan.
I don't see a good way of explaining why God decided that amphibians shouldn't be on oceanic islands.
There's many more examples like this. Let's not forget the theory of Gravity fails on the quantum level, but no one's about to discard it. Evolution isn't perfect, but without it, biology wouldn't exist (why would we believe that experiments on other animals would be relevant to humans? God could've created all the animals completely differently...but also could not have.)
Creationism is too broad and is compatible with any state of the world. As such, there's nothing one can find in the world to disprove it. Since it cannot be disproven, it's not a scientific theory.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
This is a childish post and obvious troll/flamebait. Please stop moderating such worthless posts up. And yes, I had mod points before posting this.
I don't know how this got a 4 Insightful... Evolution cannot be proved or disproven by the scientific method either. We have no way of knowing what happened in order for the universe as we know it to come into existance, we weren't there. We can make educated guesses based on scientific evidence, but in my opinion, evolution is still a hyphothesis, and should never have gained theory status. Also, Creationism in itself does not contain any kind of anti-evolution agenda, its just different way of explaining how the universe came into existence, and in my opinion, is actually a more complete theory, as it takes into account how not just how the universe was formed, but how the underlying laws which govern those systems came to be.
Evolution is too broad and is compatible with any state of the world (through scientific guesses based on circumstancial evidence, which is what evolution amounts to at this point). Evolution is not a scientific theory, because it cannot be verified through use of the scientific method.
They might be excited at the idea of two isolated environments with a known time of divergence from a common base. It provides a very nice test bed for various observations about evolution, if they really have been seperated for an extended period of time from each other and the outside world both.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
There are those who would argue that teachings that have 'an a priori commitment to naturalism' are just as religious as those who have an a priori commitment to supernatural creation.
Steven Jay Gould communicated the idea above - an affirmation of Lewontin's assertion. Gould concluded that Macroevolution has a strong foundation in naturalism - a philosophy that specifically excludes anything supernatural - and therefore excludes God. This seems to me to be as much of a religious belief as that of creationism.
In case you are not aware, ther recently deceased Gould (May 02) was one of the most intelligent and eloquent proponents of evolution in the present day. He developed the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution to compensate for the gaps in the fossil record. He was not on the fringe of evolutionary theory. I believe that his view is consistent with the majority of scientists who are evolutionists.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
First, In America, there are a lot of individuals that are putting on airs, and they have this idea that acting like foreigners (mainly European) makes them better than the rest of us. Second, we have Corporate America selling us that idea that to be more sophisticated, we must drink bottled water (once again, gross generalization, like the Europeans). These corporations then take the water from their tap, put it in a bottle and sell it to us at 50% more than what they charge for taking that same water adding a lot of extra chemicals (in addition to what is already in the water when it came out of the tap) and a bunch of sugar and then carbonating it. So, by preying on peoples self images, these companies are taking that cost them almost nothing and making a mint on it instead of actually putting forth the effort of actually making something and selling it. Thanks for helping Corporate America make another sale.
Folks, if you want to look sophisticated and put on airs, buy a bottle of water and refill it from your sink for the next 6 months.
If you really want water without the chemicals, buy a filter for your tap, they look expensive, but they are a lot cheaper than bottled water.
I will not argue that 'water' is good for you, but I will argue against 'bottled water' (in general) being better for you than tap water. Over here it's the same thing for the most part. Oh, and the 'shit' with sugar in it, well, at least they are doing something that might actually justify charging for the product.
'And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo Every day you meet quite a few...'