I’ll try to keep this short.
For years, viruses have both fascinated and completely terrified me. I understand that bacteria are little itty bitty simple organisms. Makes sense, like when you learn about your own cells in biology class.
But a virus? From what I’ve read, they aren’t alive. They just go around hoping to get inside of you so they can hijack your cells, cause mayhem and potentially kill the host that’s keeping its cycle going.
Where did they come from? How can they not have a full life cycle on their own? Seemingly no purpose, but still exist. How did they start out? I know no life form has a ‘true purpose’ because we’re all lucky to just be here but, there are pollinators, predators to keep prey numbers in check. Organisms that work together to both benefit. Then there are mindless viruses that just exist and if you inhale them, they mess you up. Why?
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Viruses are like computer viruses. What’s a computer virus? It’s a file. A bunch of 1s and 0s. You could write the 1s and 0s down on paper, nothing would happen.
You get the file on your computer and you double-click to open it and now your computer is following the virus instructions which tell it to email the virus file to everyone in your contacts.
That’s also how bio viruses work. You get them in your cells and they get mixed up with your DNA and the cell starts following the virus instructions which tell it to make more viruses and put them in your lungs so they come out when you sneeze, or whatever.
Computer viruses first came from hackers. Bio viruses… first came from random chance. A lot of weird things can happen in 4 billion years.
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