this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Saw that movie at a drive-in when it was released and it freaked the shit out of me.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

We have to be subjected to another run of that Cavemen show that GEICO did, based on that commercial.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Encino Man.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stargate already covered this one; we all die from newly exposed bacteria/disease that is was previously locked away in ice

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Talos Principle, as well.

[–] Bakkoda 2 points 1 year ago

How High We Go In The Dark

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

The methane and CO2 are pretty bad, too.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

X-Files theme

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can't wait for those old plagues to make a come back.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Most of those should be bacteria, not a virus. I would speculate that they would be much easier to treat with common antibiotics. After all, they haven't had time to adapt and become drug resistant.... Yet.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Micro-evolution is fucking wild.

In the linked experiment, it takes bacteria 11 days to evolve resistance to 1000x the concentration of antibiotics normally needed to kill it. This is basically the concern with overuse of antibiotics in healthcare, hygiene products, and livestock - that 0.001% of bacteria your soap doesn't kill is basically the Superman of bacteria, and you just killed all its competition, leaving it free to replicate into its own little army.

A high enough dosage of literally anything is toxic / eventually fatal for humans, so we can't just keep upping the concentration of antibiotic medication. There's even a term for it - "post-antibiotic era", which we're already knee-deep into.

Anyway, yeah most ancient microbes would be absolutely destroyed by all the modern natural and artificial means that have developed to kill it... the catch being that if the microbe is old enough, things haven't developed to kill it, so the current state of our immune systems and medical tech could amount to an all-you-can-eat-buffet for something that didn't develop adjacent to us. Combine that with a few weeks of petri-dish-experiment of ancient microbe incubating in some immunocompromised old man who decides he's tired of staying home sick and wants to go out christmas shopping for his family... and now we have a problem.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

0.001% of bacteria your soap doesn't kill is basically the Superman of bacteria

I have jokingly said that for years about the marketing on soaps and nobody believed me. :)

Micro-evolution is absolutely crazy though. I started learning about that with fungi; mycelium specifically. Those little things can shift their genetics lightning fast. If they are exposed to different nutrient sources or growing conditions, life.. uh.. finds a way. There is a debate that is going on right now about the whole naming convention of fungi being broken since fruit characteristics aren't telling a complete enough picture. While most strains of, say, pink oyster mushrooms can produce the exact same fruit they might have wildly different genetic markers while still behaving like they are from the same strain.

I think this was discovered when mycologists tried to import some mycelium into New Zealand. Different batches of mycelium were comming from the same exact strain and lineage but when it was tested for import, the genetics were too far off to match to a "legally importable" strain.

Genetic "drift" is well known. After duplicating the same strain over a number of years from petri dish to petri dish, the mycelium just adapts to a cheap and easy agar food source and its fruiting tendencies may suffer as a result. What is new, is how fast it can actually happen in the wild without it going through the genetic lottery of spore combination.

(Disclaimer: I am horrendously tired right now and I tend to jumble factoids in this state. Slap me if I got something horribly wrong.)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We saw it in real time, accidentally, in a microbiology class I took.

Lab final was basically "swab this mystery petri dish, run some tests, and tell me what it is". So, start running different stains and indicator tests, result was eventually pretty clearly S. Aurius. Except it wasn't. The thing that gave it away was a manitol digestion test, which S. Aurius pops positive for, but the other strain of S. ___ we tested for pop negative.

Everyone's manitol test was positive, but the correct answer should have been S. Epidermidis.

Prof thought the test sample was contaminated, so he did an isolation swab on his own time... still a pure sample of S. Epidermidis, it just evolved under our nose to digest manitol and fucked everyone's lab result.

He had to change everyone's grade. :D

[–] starman2112 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I ain't afraid of old plagues. A 100,000 year old bacterium infecting a human is the equivalent of someone bringing a spear to a gunfight

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You mean "ancient plagues". It's scarier that way, because of the 'implications'

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Are these women in danger?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Want to make it scarier, say "Biblical plagues". Gotta get those evangelicals really riled up.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I’m pretty tired. I welcome the end of the world.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hope it releases the end of capitalism

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

It will, but something tells me it won't be the way we would hope.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'd be down for that. I dunno why people hate on the xenomorph babies so much though. They just want a kiss.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Ennio Morricone soundtrack intensifies

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Literal metric fucktons of ancient dog poop.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

A bad stink.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I hope the end of this post title is meant to be "good dogs who have been tied up too long."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Can't wait to all die out and leave behind an AI playing god to make another AI that plays human to get tetrominoes and stars.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

... The Kraken

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yugothians?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nah. Not worried about microorganisms. The way our immune system works is that it stores the "fingerprint" of pathogenic bacteria and viruses and this data is passed down to our progeny. So, we already have built in immunity to 1000 year old pathogens. In addition, vaccination has also "side loaded" many pathogen's fingerprints.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That... doesn't make any sense. If what you said was true, every baby alive would magically have immunity to everything any human has faced ever and would never get sick. Kids are CONSTANTLY sick.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's actually better than what OP said. We have a T cell for every antigen. Period. Even the ones that nobody has ever encountered. That's because T cell receptors are proteins, that is, combinations of amino acids. Random combinations of T cell receptors are produced by the immune system (if it does not harm the host).

The caveat is that it takes a while for the T cell of an unknown antigen to be activated, enough time for the sickness to appear and even become critical.