how does the Siberian worm getting defrosted have a negative impact on the world like the dozens of comment suggest?
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That worm, probably nothing. However, if that worm can do it, it would not be unrealistic for other organisms to do similar. Organisms such as a bacteria that have been otherwise extinct for long enough that modern humans have no natural resistance.
I don’t think as it stands the worm is actually a threat. There is risk of viruses or bacteria that are resistant to modern treatments thawing out and becoming problematic in the population.
I think the current “fear” is more humorous looking back to the last few years with COVID, Ebola, H1N1, etc.
The world is heating up, and there are lots of organisms frozen in tundra and ice that haven’t been part of our environment for thousands of years, long enough that we have no resistance to them if they turn out to be harmful.
Look at what happened with COVID-19, and MERS and SARS and Zika before that. Now imagine something really novel. And it doesn’t even have to be something that attacks humans directly, if it’s a rust or mould that likes the look of our food crops, it could collapse our supply chain and we’d starve.
I’m absolutely no scientist, and this is more of a prompt for someone who has some expertise providing their view, but isn’t the chance of a previously extinct ‘unfrozen’, pre-historic bacteria or virus being dangerous to humans extremely unlikely?
From my understanding, a bacteria or virus being a threat to human health is not so much a question about whether humans have evolved a sufficient immune response to manage that species of bacteria/virus, but whether or not the bacteria or virus have evolved a way to effectively replicate/thrive through adaption from previous intimacy with a host (eg. humans).
Considering the relatively small number of bacteria/virus that are infectious to humans, in comparison to the many millions of different species, statistically wouldn’t the possibility of this ‘worst case’ scenario of letting loose a dangerous bacteria/virus be insignificant?
I’m looking at this from a ‘risk of human infection’ point of view, and realise there’s a much greater chance of an unfrozen bacteria/virus being dangerous to some other species. And maybe the risk is greater in relation to something that’s not a bacteria or virus.
Meh. Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics when they’re exposed to the antibiotic. It stands to reason that ancient frozen bacteria have never been exposed to the vast majority of antimicrobials in modern medicine (maybe they’ve been exposed to naturally occurring penicillium mold). We may not have immunity against these bugs, but they also have no mechanism to resist some good old amoxicillin, since they’ve never seen it before. They may also be susceptible to bacteriophages. Who knows.
Viruses are a different story, since antivirals are less common and very specifically active against certain viruses (influenza, hepatitis, and HIV for the most part). There could be a frozen virus that gets thawed and spreads like wildfire. But we had a COVID vaccine in like a year, and the vaccine development infrastructure is still there, so we’d fight that virus too.
Bottom line is there’s no way to know if microbiological threats exist within deep permafrost, but I’m skeptical that anything really catastrophic on a civilisation-ending scale is in there.
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