Water Isolated for Over a Billion Years Found Under Ontario

ananyo writes "Scientists working 2.4 kilometers below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life. Micrometer-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals' formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth's crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years (paper abstract)."

Comments

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

No, no whoosh today—you'll recall that Slashdot users made jokes about the LHC black hole thing, too. I even used the word "joke" in my post!

The thing is, culture (especially Western culture) is full of paranoid anxieties about science. From Frankenstein to Terminator, there's always some cynical writer somewhere creating dystopias because pain sells. The longer these ideas remain embedded in culture, the more chance they have to affect public opinion. Eventually this causes a distrust in science to fester, and that's something we need to stand against if we're ever going to survive the next century. I'm generally fine with making young-earth creationism jokes (I've had more than a few myself) because people here are sufficiently well-informed to be able to recite the truth.

But after a certain point it gets worrying that the first response to "look, a glimpse into the ancient past!" is "quick, call CEDA!" What experience does Sparticus789 actually have with biology? If he(?) encounters someone who genuinely believes a George Romero-style outbreak could happen at any moment, what would he say to rebuff them? Would he even have the confidence to speak up? Enough parroting of a meme can kill knowledge of the truth, and at the very least, that must be guarded against. With biology this is particularly sensitive because most people know only a very little amount about it, and yet embracing or rejecting biological research stands to affect us immensely in the future.

So +1 for speaking up, but -1 for reducing that to "whoosh."

Re:It is time

[Penguinisto]

The thing is, culture (especially Western culture) is full of paranoid anxieties about science. From Frankenstein to Terminator, there's always some cynical writer somewhere creating dystopias because pain sells. The longer these ideas remain embedded in culture, the more chance they have to affect public opinion.

Well, to be fair some dystopia novels do serve as a good hard warning. As a non-scientific political/ideological example, I present 1984, written precisely at a time when all the intelligentsia were eager to create a global socialistic (albeit not quite communist) utopia.

Same with science, really. I'll set it up to explain why:

75 years ago, scientists were handling radioactive elements like they were as harmless as lumps of play-doh, and every 'good' mother was out there bathing their kids' feet in X-rays for shoe-fitting, at dosages/levels that today would get your kids snatched away by Protective Services if they found out. Eventually, we learned about things like radiation poisoning (though TBH it took a freakin' atomic bomb or two going off before anyone outside of a few select physicists even knew what that was). In other news, during that same time period Eugenics was once considered a solid (and even respected) science... and we all know where that went. The sad part is, that's nothing compared to the almost countless examples of treating science as panacea, without an eye towards ethics or morals, or even caution.

While no, you're not going to spawn a black hole at LHC (the laws of nature are rather resilient against that, and the entire Earth hasn't enough mass to make one), there are some good, hard uses for dystopian fantasy-type warnings. Human genetics stands out as a pretty good one - while I certainly wouldn't expect a 60-foot-tall man-slaying homonculus to come out of it (hell, it wouldn't survive gestation), I can see how genetic mucking-around can open whole populations up to pathogen immunity problems** and eventual congenital defects, among other things - and I haven't even touched on the ethics of the situation.

Besides, some damned good sci-fi has come out of dystopian views of hard science, and yet somehow hasn't retarded scientific progress in spite of it.

Overall, I guess the only reason I'm defending the dystopian genre isn't because I like the topic matter (let's face it, there's a lot of crap novels out there that try to use it), but because it does serve an important watchdog function. Sure, we think we've evolved beyond superstition, but honestly? It doesn't matter how frickin' much we've evolved, because we have yet to evolve beyond human failings: greed, avarice, lust, hatred, etc. So unless your name is Mother Teresa, you suffer from these as much as I do (and she likely suffered from it too, just that she was really good at controlling them).

** note that such problems would likely require many, many generations to surface.