Originally posted by superman2012
Just wondering if anyone thinks or knows any science behind this...I mean, we are drilling into a lake how many feet down in the antarctic right now
and who knows what lives in this lake? Could we be unknowingly bringing about diseases that have not been seen by mankind?
The danger everyone is worried about is contaminating the lake... not vice-versa (and...er... "everyone" means the scientists rather than anyone
else.) The environment down there has been untouched for millions of years. Whatever survives is something that is fairly fragile and hasn't had
much experience with outside stressors.
...unlike the rest of the world.
There may be pathogens down there but they would be adapted to the organisms in the lake.
It's kind of like what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans came in. They were in small groups (on the Plains, a band might number
400-600 individuals but you didn't have 200,000 in one place like you did in London in 1600.) Even taking a wildly optimistic number of
30 million in 1400 AD, Europe had twice that many
people, and they were living crowded together in cities. When disease hit isolated groups that didn't come into frequent contact with others and
didn't live in crowded conditions with animals that passed zoonotic diseases back and forth, up to 80% of the people died. The Europeans, however,
didn't get any diseases from the Native Americans -- they were resistant to a lot of things.
So we are far more likely to wipe out any living thing in that lake (which is what the scientists are frantic about.)
Nor are we lab mice, genetically bred to be so similar that skin grafts and organ transplants can happen between any two individuals you nab -- no
rejection drugs needed. We're a real population of mutts.