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Comment by enknamel | Hacker News Reader

There are quite a few sci-fi novels and one show I saw that feature nightmare scenarios based off of thawing ice. I seriously doubt we will see something catastrophic though. It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.

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The Red Queen hypothesis suggests that the struggle between organisms and their parasites involves a constant reshuffling of offensive and defensive strategies, so it may be entirely possible that, if one of the bacterial/viral species released were originally adapted to infecting mammals or even our ancestral primates, they could target a pathway that humans (or more likely, some subset of humans) have stopped defending because modern parasites don't currently target that pathway.

It'd be sort of like airport security letting through someone with a blowgun because they're trained to look for modern guns.

Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite or there would sell be some subset of humans with a resistance that they could spread to the rest of the population, but that's not always a given.

There's also the thought that evolutionary adaptations are so tightly coupled with environmental landscape that it'd primarily work the other way around. For whatever defense mechanism we lack for that particular parasite, they lack anything to combat their own million-year-more-efficient predators (like our immune system). It is less about evolution moving forward and being more 'advanced', and more about evolution ensuring an efficient equilibrium with a crazy-dynamic environment. Jumping into a new environment after being conditioned for a very different one likely leads to death much much more often than an accidental advantage. You might not be able to even breathe were you transported a few hundred million years either forward or backward.

Depending on how far back you go, today's planetary environment is a very different place - in terms of chemical food, predatory tactics, biochemical efficiency, atmosphere, etc. Having to compete against organisms that are efficiently adapted in our current environment will almost certainly be immediately lethal for these revived organisms.

But you only need one organism to end up with an accidental advantage to result in a catastrophe.

Not really. A single organism (outside of the human race) cannot call the full force of an entire 'environment' against another species. And species (outside of humans) must abide by natural laws of energy transfer - for every advance there is an energetic tradeoff. The more different the organism is the easier it would be to target with drugs that only target precisely those differences. The less different, the easier our own bodies would work on it. The more lethal it was, the less it would spread. The less lethal, the more time there would be to figure it out. Without bringing to bear the force of an environmental change (shifting the equilibrium or set-point), there is very little that could be biologically catastrophic for the human race.

That is not to say that a virulent plague would not be a bad thing for a lot of individuals, if not the human species - but it'd be pretty challenging to even design worse than already exist out there - HIV, ebola, marburg or smallpox.

> biologically catastrophic for the human race

Something equivalent in virality and lethality to smallpox could be catastrophic if you consider the geopolitical consequences as well as the initial biological impact.

A nonlinear system, like an epidemic, can have phase changes. Most epidemics don't make it very far, but we should still be nervous about that one which crosses the manifold into pandemic.

One should keep in mind, for example, that less than 1% of the Liberian population ever caught Ebola, but the consequences for the country have been serious and long-running.

What about with horizontal gene transfer.

> Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite

In evolution, a population gaining immunity means that all individuals without the immunity die out before spreading their genes. Yeah, still not the ideal scenario...

> bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.

When the white man arrived in South America and in Australia the diseases they carried devastated native populations.

Even though in the case of Australia they had been separated for over 50,000 years.

HIV came from chimpanzees - evolutionary distance 5 Million years.New influenza strains regularly come from chickens and pigs.

So what you are saying is complete nonsense.

None of your examples are fatalities from bacteria/vira that haven't eveolved for millions of years.

Thousands of years is a blink of an eye for genetic differences.

> It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.

Famous last words

IANAD, but I imagine modern bacteria that have evolved multi-antibiotic resistances are much more dangerous than ancient bacteria that are probably still vulnerable to most of our antibiotics.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/09/bacterial-defenses-pr...

This falls under the class of things that if they could happen, they already would have. The global temperature is not a uniform scalar modifier on what the temperature "would" have been without the changes. There are already hot spots and cold spots every year, continuously. There are already places in the ice that thawed out last year, and ten years ago, and during the Medieval warm period, and whenever it was warm before that. And we have not witnessed mass dieoffs due to disease from those events either.

It's like the concerns about high-energy collisions doing something terrible like forming micro-blackholes and eating the Earth. If that was a danger, it would be something Nature would already be doing and we'd be able to see it.

The ability to "infect" something is not a natural property that all bacteria have. It is something that has to evolve. A bacteria popping out of cold storage from half a million years ago precisely adapted to infect a modern animal would be every bit as weird as seeing a bacteria pop out of that same cold storage that was precisely evolved to live on Mars, or live on vast quantities of plastic, or otherwise adapted to conditions it couldn't possible have witnessed during its previous life.

It isn't absolutely, mathematically impossible. But it's not much worth worrying about. It's a science fiction storyline, not something that happens.

Now, if there were humans in such cold storage, I would be somewhat more careful. But so far in those cases where that has occurred we still haven't been wiped out. I haven't even heard of anyone pinning so much as a cold virus on pulling a cadaver out of a glacier. Links welcome if anybody does have such a story.

But it's a numbers game, right? A global thaw would be more likely to release a pocket of bacteria. It's like saying that just because a single bullet from a handgun didn't hit you, you ought to be safe when someone fires a machine gun at you.

And the Black Plague did happen to come by less than a century after the end of the warm period...

Per my point about evolution almost certainly prepping these bacteria to live somewhere other than the rather hostile insides of an animal, at the very least I'd modify that metaphor to someone shooting their bullets a few miles away from you, and pointed the other way.

I don't think we need to hypothesize that the Black Plague was some sort of bacterial refugee from the past; I've never heard anyone express any confusion about where it could possibly have come from, so it seems like a solution to a non-problem.

> if they could happen, they already would have

An asteroid can impact with the earth... Oh wait, that's happened already. Luckily, we haven't had such a collision large enough to kill us all, yet.

A plague could kill many people... Oh wait, that's happened already. Luckily, we haven't had a plague with enough virality and lethality to kill us all, yet.

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