Hundreds of Ancient Viruses Discovered Deep Inside Tibetan Glacier
Hundreds of Ancient Viruses Discovered Deep Inside Tibetan Glacier
Scientists have unearthed the remnants of more than 1,700 viruses from deep inside a glacier in western China. Most of these viruses are new to science.
With this discovery, the number of ancient viruses recovered from glaciers has grown fiftyfold.The viruses, gathered from a 1,000-foot ice core taken from the sprawling Guliya Glacier on the Tibetan Plateau, date back 41,000 years and span three major shifts from cold to warm.
The optimist in me wants to think that maybe one of those viruses can be used to cure some other diseases via genetic modification.
The pessimistic part of me wonders if this will be the start of a pandemic cycle that never ends until most people are dead.
I want it to be the first one please.
The world could use the second one.... I also want to live and I don't want people to die but the earth could use less humans.
As we saw with the COVID pandemic, even in "1st world countries", poorer people were disproportionately affected. Fewer humans won't help when the majority of harm to the Earth is perpetuated by a small fraction who would be disproportionately represented in a world where the majority of people died.
I sympathise with your sentiment, because it often does feel like humans are the problem, but the reality is that we're not. Although it can feel weirdly comforting to think of humans as inherently and innately destructive, thinking this way is a pipeline to eco-fascism, which doesn't offer productive ways forward.
This is one of those headlines that feels like it should be in the opening montage of a disaster movie.
We've got the perfect global pandemic movie post-credits section.
- Accelerating climate change and also the denial
- Economic recession and increasing wealth gap
- Myopic leadership both in government and corporate, rise of fascism
- Misinformation campaigns, science and history denial becoming fashionable
- Harambe
We're truly fucked.
those only infect Windows 3.0 on i486
It's cool covid prepped us to do nothing, lose, and declare victory between coughs. We got this 💪
So they are "retro" viruses
Bringing back the classics!
These viruses used to be so cool back in the day
Cool we were running out of new ones.
New to us.
time to get reacqaaaaainted
new meaning to retrovirus
There's a voice inside me that says, "Do it."
Bring lemonade.
Hey how about we put those the fuck back where they were and just make pretend viruses in Plague Inc. We don't need to unleash the ancient virus that'll make us shit our own brains out
Ancient viruses?! We’re all gonna die!
Tap for spoiler
Most viruses are completely harmless to humans. There are millions of species, of which only a few hundred are medically significant. I doubt these frozen viruses will have any noticeable impact on anything.
True, but all it takes is one.
The fun is just starting. Only a matter of time until the glaciers melt even more and release untold hell upon us!
Oooh oooh! I remember this X Files episode!
Great episode. Also, the movie The Thaw.
So, the Andromeda Strain was a documentary?
So, when do we start building robots to preserve humanity?
Can't wait for us to figure out one of them is still virulent, and it's out in the world now being passed around.
Well, they were discovered in China, so it won’t take long, but they won’t tell anyone until it’s been spread to other countries.
Permanently Deleted
Leave. Them. Alone.
I mean …
For the love of god, DON’T!
There is no god, so I'll just go ahead then.
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