Unlike what Hollywood would lead us to believe organisms cut off from the rest of the world don't become dangerous. In fact the opposite is more likely, organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem are more likely to be specialised and be at risk themselves from outside organisms.
The parent wrote: "Unlike what Hollywood would lead us to believe organisms cut off from the rest of the world don't become dangerous. In fact the opposite is more likely, organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem are more likely to be specialised and be at risk themselves from outside organisms."
So, the question the Smudge was genuinely asking (and I think it's a clever one) is are the "organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem" the microbes in the glacial lake, or are the humans the "organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem" for 100,000 years?
The only way to consider the rest of the world, with its 8.7 million species, to be the organism that was cut off from a few types of bacteria in a remote lake is to quibble over pointless semantics.
Probably they are very specialized to live in those conditions (I guess: low salinity, very low temperature, low light, high pressure, low nutrients). So the usual bacteria won't survive too long there.
I think that the biggest problem of the scientific is to ensure that the bacteria they got come from the lake and are not dew to contamination.
Why would those bacteria be adapted to infecting humans? The likelihood of a random bacterium being able to infect a human is very small unless there was evolutionary pressure for it to be able to.
Yeah, I think folks don't often realize how hostile an environment the human body can be to foreign invaders. Sure if you can sneak by the immune system, the human body is a microorganism paradise, but the immune systems of organisms are highly tuned to seek out and destroy foreign.
These bacteria are very old. If they were any good at surviving, they would still be around up here. The fact that they now only exist in a very isolated place means that they got killed off up here once before, so they're probably not too dangerous.
If you had a bacteria and its descendant thousands of years younger - the younger would wtfpn its predecessor.
The same applies to pests and their targets. There is a continuous arms race between attacker and victim. Any combination of older variations of same creatures would play out in favor of younger creature/plant.
I read somewhere that it is pretty much the same between sexes. A man of 2000 years ago would possibly be unable to impregnate todays woman (e.g.: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090908125137.htm)
But there may also be a rock-paper-scissors effect at play. We may be in a 'rock' phase of bacterial life; uncover some old 'paper' and maybe the younger strain would find itself in trouble?
There is no inexorable refinement force in effect in natural selection; simple organisms are selected for their current environment with no plan of building complex defenses against ancient enemies or any such.
For some reason I always feel underwhelmed when they dig up a few microbes and their corpses from the deep. Where are those huge tentacle-ye monsters, we want so much to look at? Or at least find the Tesseract?
