Science

Life Under Ice

54 Comments

Just when we had completely forgotten about its vast potential for holding deep mysteries, Antarctica’s sub-glacial Lake Vostok is back in the news. And I find nothing in this new information that will change the deep concern that grew out of our previous encounter with this topic.

Arctic_Ice_2

The news that Lake Vostok, hidden under ice for 15 billion years, is teeming with life, should give us pause. This is another step down the path originally imagined for this scientific story – the cinematic tale of research gone wrong where curiosity runs out ahead of prudence and rips the top off a container holding a monumental amount of trouble.

Already we have discovered that the story includes many of the stock characters from a standard sci-fi disaster – the researchers who are genuinely EXCITED to find that 95 per cent of the 3,500 some-odd DNA sequences found in the lake are associated with bacteria.

In case you’re wondering where we will find the dialog for this horror film, it is being written in the labs where they examine Vostok’s ice cores. For example, someone has already said this about the DNA findings ” … that doesn’t necessarily mean the unrecognized sequences are exotic forms of life.”

That line will be given to the first scientist to be engulfed and dissolved by the plasma-like creature that bubbles up out of his beaker while he has his back turned on it. Guaranteed.

Aside from all the obvious reasons NOT to take a big drink out of a chilled bottle of Vostok Spring, there is this – the scientists who found loads of bacteria in the submerged lake acknowledge that they only found recognizable life forms because that’s the only type of life they know how to look for.

Ergo, the life forms we have never encountered (if there are any) would still go undetected. They remain invisible until their effects become known!

And what of the more complex life forms living in the dark, slushy Vostokian bottoms? When we withdraw them from their chilly surroundings and introduce them to the modern world, there is no assurance that they will be grateful to us for doing it.

Much like the character in this James Taylor song, “The Frozen Man“.

You have been frozen in ice for one million years. Assuming your vital organs are intact (you didn’t donate them to science, did you?) would you want to be thawed out and re-introduced to the world?

54 thoughts on “Life Under Ice”

  1. Good morning. I had a little trouble getting all the words that James Taylor sang. I think his basic point is that it would be very difficult to reconnect to the world after 100 years frozen in ice. I think he is right about that. On the other hand it seems to me that a person brought back to life after 100 years would be of great interest to the people who brought that person back.

    What about all the attention and hopefully kind treatment that might be given to someone revived after being frozen that long? I wouldn’t be too quick to want all the attention a person like that might get. However, if I was given good treatment I think it might be a very interesting experience. I do hope that the world will be a better place 100 years from now.

    Like

    Reply

  2. heck yes, to stay frozen rather than come out and play seems like a choice to be a bit reclusive. I used to travel around the us in the old vw bug and expect other places to measure up to minneapolis on minneapolis’ terms. it eventually dawned on me that new orleans , santa fe and yellowstone were not very good mineapolis knock offs but very good new orleans santa fe and yellowstones. when i first begand traveling overseas it was amazing to me tha the folks i traveled with liked to drink corona and eat and mc donalds and kfc. its good to have something familiar but its good to experience the world too. the line :they only found recognizable life forms because that’s the only type of life they know how to look for.
    isnt that true of us all? in europe its obvious youre not in kansas anymore and you tend to open yourself up to new stuff. in the afternoon shuffle its easy to forget there are options. its a choice.
    fun looking back at the blog from feb 2012 and the past but its more fun trying to decide how to go forward.
    just because its freezing cold and wet and dark doenst meant its a bad thing. hawaii is really bad a cold and dark but that doenst mean one is good and the other bad. just different. remember how much gaugan liked haiti ? that doesnt make france a bad place its just different. i think coming out of a hundred year thaw would be interesting. certainly different form antarctia in 1913 but its worth a shot.

    Like

    Reply

  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I just realized I never really answered yesterday’s question. Since I cannot relate much to the question today, I will answer the one from yesterday. I am an organ donor. I don’t want to donate my organs to science.

    My mind cannot even envision the possibility of this question today–would we even be the same humanoid species as we are now?

    Sometimes I play the game “What would Thomas Jefferson and John Adams think of our lives today? What would they think of President Obama and his wife who is descended from slaves? What would my Great Great Grandfather think of his female descendant running a therapy business? Could he understand the concept of therapy at all? ” And that is only a livetime seperated by 150 years. How do you even conceive of coming back 1M years later?

    Like

    Reply

      2. I believe in some cases, Jacque, you can do both. The recyclables go to recipients who can use them and the rest goes to research. This, of course, has to be well set-up and documented ahead of time.

        Like

        Reply

    2. I missed the part about a million years. I had it as 100 years. I think my answer is the same for a million years provide there are still some people around to greet me when I thaw out. However, you are right Jacque, in a million years things would no doubt be extremely different from what they are presently. James Taylor’s frozen man was in ice for 100 years.

      Like

      Reply

      1. 100… a million … when you sit down for coffee with a new group of folks you go where the conversation leads dont you? talking about the good old days is a big part of it no matter how long ago it was. at least you’d have different stories from the other guys

        Like

        Reply

        2. But could we communicate? My native tongue probably wouldn’t exist any more, and would my unevolved brain be able to telepathically connect to their more advanced one? I think I’d be better off frozen.

          Like

  4. Yesterday I wrote that I have an older friend who is increasingly feeling like she is ready to move on, having lived plenty long on this world. I wondered as I wrote that if some baboons found that curious or unpleasant. Today’s topic gives me more chances to explain. My friend feels something close to what anyone would feel after being frozen 100 years and then thawed out. That is, the world she lives in now is not the world she loved so much once. The biggest change is that her husband of 60 years is dead . . . and has been for 14 years. The two of them formed a unit that was vastly happier than either could have been living alone. Almost all of her friends are dead. And like a person who is thawed out after 100 years she has trouble recognizing the world she finds herself in now. Today’s music, art, literature and dance all seem weird and off-putting to her. When she turns on her television she has to keep seeing a Cialis commercial that she regards as pornography. A committed liberal, she is appalled by today’s Republicans and she is even hurt more by what she finds strange in the values of Democrats. A survivor of the Great Depression, she is stunned by the free spending ways of her baby boomer children. She is shocked by climate change and the inability of our society to respond to it appropriately. She isn’t even sure she recognizes America any more, as the values that served her so well in the Depression and WW II don’t seem to be present. She wishes people could show more compassion for each other and would pull together as they did in her generation, but she fears those values mark her as hopelessly old fashioned.

    And all of that is to ignore all the changes going on with her body. I can’t write of them.

    I don’t mean to exaggerate. My friend is a passionate reader who still reads several hours a day and even underlines key passages. She has TV shows she loves. Can anyone guess her favorite? My friend adores Bill Moyers, recognizing in him the values she has clung to throughout her life. She loves her sons and can still enjoy them (the daughter is another story!).

    All in all, she is a time traveler who has traveled too far, like the poor guy who gets stuck on the MTA. It becomes harder and harder for her to recognize and feel at home in the world she has traveled into. So, returning to Dale’s question, I am quite sure I wouldn’t want to be thawed out after 100 years and then dumped in a world I could not recognize. I think that kind of time travel would be deeply threatening and confusing. It is tempting to say it would be intellectually fascinating to have such an experience, but that isn’t how we live. We need to be at home in our world. I just don’t know how it is possible to be at home in a catastrophically changed world.

    Like

    Reply

    2. I understood where you, and she, were coming from right away. None of my family members lived quite as long as your friend has, but they all experienced culture shock as they aged. Although some changes, such as the expansions of civil rights, have been for the better, those current cultural expressions based on conspicuous consumption, extreme individualism, and “shock value” will eventually prove to be counterproductive, even destructive. Eventually our culture will have to cycle back to a more communitarian attitude, or collapse. Tell your friend she’s not “hopelessly old-fashioned,” tell her she’s ahead of the cycle by about 50 years!

      Like

      Reply

  5. I would be afraid that my heart would break at what I saw. Leave me where I am planted, with hope, not certainty.

    Like

    Reply

  6. It would be interesting if only to see what the world has become in such a long time, but they probably would get tired of me saying, “That’s not the way we did things back in MY day!” all the time and toss me back into the freezer.

    Chris in Owatonna

    Like

    Reply

      1. Plus, the candy bars were a lot bigger back in the day! And you could buy dozens of things for five or ten cents at Woolworths. They really were “five and dime” stores.

        Like

        Reply

  7. Morning all. I have lots of parameters for this one. First, I have to know ahead of time that I’m getting frozen and will be thawed way in the future. Almost every sci-fi with freezing in it has the freezing/thawing as a surprise and it never goes well. (Just finished a book in which the character was aware of the passage of time when she was frozen – ICK!) And it has to be my choice… e.g. I have some awful disease that will kill me now but they can fix in the future. Like Renee, I don’t want to give up my current life if I don’t have to. Oh, and there has to be money involved… I want to have means when I’m thawed.

    Like

    Reply

  8. I think it might depend on whether there were others of my kind thawing out with me. If so, I could imagine in to be a very interesting experience. Not sure, though, if I’d want to be the only one thawing out in an unknown future.

    Like

    Reply

  12. I have to admit to intense curiousity to know if humanity will still be around in a million years, or if another species will have filled our niche if we have gone extinct. I don’t know if I could resist the urge to know for sure what will happen; it’s the science fiction fan and storyteller in me. Like Barbara, I’d prefer to have others along for the journey–even if there were recognizable homo sapiens around, their languages would have evolved, and English would not even be a memory to them. Of course, there are other issues to consider. If there is still an intelligent species, would they have science and want to study us? Would they consider us monsters, or we them? Would we immediately keel over from exotic diseases we have zero immunity to, or be allergic to their food? It’s a question with a lot of ramifications; visiting the far future is not something to take lightly!

    Like

    Reply

  13. I’m afraid I’ve seen waaaayyyy too much sci-fi to contemplate this question with any sort of objectivity. Every episode of Star Trek in which this occurs does not end terribly well for the recently thawed, and I trust Gene Roddenbury implictly.

    Another thought-given that the human community seems perpetually challenged to provide justly and amply for all its currently living members, I can’t justify the expenditure of energy and technology on keeping me going (albeit in a frozen state) when in fairness, my time is up.

    There are far too many people right now who are living as if they have all the time in the world to make the necessary corrections in their lives. I don’t think I would be a better person if I thought my life was not finite. I’m already finding that the speed with which time seems to be passing is giving me pause.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Forgot to add, the part of this story that I find particularly interesting (again, thank you all sci-fi writers of my experience) is the whole “life, but not as we know it”.

      Like

      Reply

        1. That is still the late, great, Our Fair Twixie. New Kitten still needs a real name and is an orange tabby. We really should take pictures, but he has had a bad tummy bug and is looking a bit scrawny these days. Had an interesting evening taking him to the new kitty ER in our neighborhood.

          Not taking any chances with a 10 week old kitten who is looking dehydrated, they have no reserves to speak of. Much better today. phew!

          Like

  14. Perhaps I already have a severe case of what Steve refers to as “old fartism,” but I have no desire whatsoever to be frozen, and thawed a million years from now. Considering how much our world has changed in just the last 50 years, I have no doubt that everything would be unrecognizable in a million, everything.

    Like

    Reply

  15. No way. This present time is difficult enough for me to understand – I would be totally overwhelmed by whatever it would be like a million years from now.

    Like

    Reply

  17. Only if I could be frozen and thawed with a copy of “Winnie the Pooh/House at Pooh Corner” and a few photos of loved ones. I would want some frame of reference of “life as I knew it.”

    Like

    Reply

      2. maybe the world would be the united kingdom of pooh and have the christopher robin national monument circling in a planetary orbit that watched over us all with a honey pot in every home and banner saying sometimes ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart. in a world where priorities may be different than now. you never know. it could happen

        Like

        Reply

  18. testing, testing 1,2,3….check, check, check… is this mike on?
    wonder if this does anything
    how about this?
    or this?

    Like

    Reply

      1. also, a u in place of the i will not underline, and will not reduce the font size.

        But in the name of science, I had to try.

        Like

        Reply

    2. Very good, MIG. In fact – excellent!

      Now I wonder if you put both an i and a b in there, if it would be italics and bold?

      Like

      Reply

  19. As I transition from middle-age into later middle-age, I’m almost relieved that I won’t be here to witness some of the dramatic changes threatening our planet’s existence – like sea levels swallowing up coastal real estate due to ignorance about global warming, crazy right wingers taking to the streets with guns, women’s rights being wholly rolled back, another assassination, or having to buy another car. I really don’t want to see things in this country get even worse in terms of the Tea Party wielding even more minority party power or obstructing all progress. It’s hard enough as it is to witness the dark forces at play AND still maintain my innate optimism. Having long since given up on adapting to ever-changing technology, I really don’t want to learn how to beam my body into some other location or control every household device via voice-command.

    Hell, I still have my kids birthday gift of a GPS in its box after five years. And so, I applaud myself for at least having learned how to do basic things with my Mac laptop! Ipads, Smart phones, aps for everything imaginable, even convection ovens are all beyond my skill set and will remain so. I’m no where near being caught up with the present to have any desire to be in the future. I’m not even sure that I want to be here a whole lot longer if it means incurring the loss of health, vitality, friends, or my ability to live independently. The march of time may have its way with me, but I’m going kicking & screaming.

    Like

    Reply

    1. I would hope that in the distant future they will have computers or their replacements that can be operated with no effort needed to learn how to run them. I can do simple things and learn a few new things, but I never seem to be able to really master all of the things I really should know. My granddaughter fooled around with my computer and now I have a bunch of stuff that works awkwardly and which I have not managing to straighten out. I’m always closing stuff that I don’t want opened.

      Like

      Reply

Leave a reply to Jim in Clarks Grove Cancel reply