In the midst of worries about a new deadly disease, apparently one that originated in or near Wuhan, China, comes another doomsday worry: Viruses from the deep past. I mean really deep, say ten to twenty thousand years or more. Here's this year's worry: Viruses not present on the planet for a long time suddenly released from melting glaciers. It’s no wonder that the people who want to scare us the most, that is, the people who keep resetting the “Doomsday Clock”—now at 100 seconds before midnight—keep shortening the time till our mutual demise.*
Scary world, right? Bad enough that we have to be concerned about toxins in just about everything we consume and about bad and warlike people, but now we have to think about some melting glacier releasing death upon the world via a virus that hasn’t infected people since the Paleolithic Magdalenians were hunting and gathering and mammoths were roaming. Twenty-eight formerly unknown viruses had been hiding in the ice of a Tibetan glacier until researchers from The Ohio State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory deiced and identified them.** Was it a virus from some melting Tibetan glacier that wafted over Wuhan? Is this the past truly coming back to haunt us?
Frightening! It’s as though we have all just become mortals. What happened to that carefree immortal lifestyle we were living?
Viruses mutate all the time, and some, as we all know, cross species barriers à la swine flus and bird flus. It’s amazing that our species made it to the present. It will be amazing if we make it to the future, especially since the doomsday people give us only 100 seconds on their “clock” of survival.
As sure as we are that Paleolithic people are no longer with us, possibly many of them having succumbed to one of those Tibetan viruses, so we can be just as sure that some of us will survive the doom, just as we who still live survived SARS, a virus seemingly related to the newly identified coronavirus from Wuhan. Yes, I might kick the bucket, or you might. No promises can be made and kept in the battles between life and death. Hard to know with all this intermingling of travelers from an interconnected world whether or not you and I will survive a traveling virus. However, our species has a good chance of sneaking a few of its members through to the future.
And that brings me to reiterate the two statements I have written before: 1) This is NOT your practice life. 2) What you anticipate is rarely a problem.***
*Voytko, Lisette. 23 Jan 2020. Doomsday Clock Set at 100 Seconds to Midnight, Issuing Dire Warning of Apocalypse. Forbes. Online at https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/01/23/doomsday-clock-set-100-seconds-to-midnight-issuing-dire-warning-of-apocalypse/#4f0141bf4e65 Accessed January 24, 2020. The prophets of doom, including Gov. Jerry Brown, Rachel Bronson, Mary Robinson, and UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-moon, attribute the coming apocalypse mostly to the nuclear threat, but they also throw in some warnings about climate change. They presented their 100-second timetable at the National Press Club in D.C.
**Yirka, Bob. 23 Jan 2020. 15,000-year-old viruses found in Tibetan glacier. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-year-old-viruses-tibetan-glacier.html Accessed January 24, 2020.
***You don’t have to tell me. No one can anticipate when a contagious person is going to sit next to you on a plane, shake your hand at a business meeting or party, or sneeze a nose full of viruses into your personal space. Gesundheit! Like Prospero in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” we might think isolation affords protection, but viruses are really little, small enough to get through any crevice or crack. We might also find that as we move through the rooms in our protected environment that a virus can be latent and therefore carried in by a seemingly healthy person we invited to the party. But not all is doom and gloom. Modern medical science is already working on a preventive vaccine. Of course, “modern medical science” is composed of people—whose names I do not know and whose competence at countering any virus can be warranted only after the fact of human survival.
Scary world, right? Bad enough that we have to be concerned about toxins in just about everything we consume and about bad and warlike people, but now we have to think about some melting glacier releasing death upon the world via a virus that hasn’t infected people since the Paleolithic Magdalenians were hunting and gathering and mammoths were roaming. Twenty-eight formerly unknown viruses had been hiding in the ice of a Tibetan glacier until researchers from The Ohio State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory deiced and identified them.** Was it a virus from some melting Tibetan glacier that wafted over Wuhan? Is this the past truly coming back to haunt us?
Frightening! It’s as though we have all just become mortals. What happened to that carefree immortal lifestyle we were living?
Viruses mutate all the time, and some, as we all know, cross species barriers à la swine flus and bird flus. It’s amazing that our species made it to the present. It will be amazing if we make it to the future, especially since the doomsday people give us only 100 seconds on their “clock” of survival.
As sure as we are that Paleolithic people are no longer with us, possibly many of them having succumbed to one of those Tibetan viruses, so we can be just as sure that some of us will survive the doom, just as we who still live survived SARS, a virus seemingly related to the newly identified coronavirus from Wuhan. Yes, I might kick the bucket, or you might. No promises can be made and kept in the battles between life and death. Hard to know with all this intermingling of travelers from an interconnected world whether or not you and I will survive a traveling virus. However, our species has a good chance of sneaking a few of its members through to the future.
And that brings me to reiterate the two statements I have written before: 1) This is NOT your practice life. 2) What you anticipate is rarely a problem.***
*Voytko, Lisette. 23 Jan 2020. Doomsday Clock Set at 100 Seconds to Midnight, Issuing Dire Warning of Apocalypse. Forbes. Online at https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/01/23/doomsday-clock-set-100-seconds-to-midnight-issuing-dire-warning-of-apocalypse/#4f0141bf4e65 Accessed January 24, 2020. The prophets of doom, including Gov. Jerry Brown, Rachel Bronson, Mary Robinson, and UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-moon, attribute the coming apocalypse mostly to the nuclear threat, but they also throw in some warnings about climate change. They presented their 100-second timetable at the National Press Club in D.C.
**Yirka, Bob. 23 Jan 2020. 15,000-year-old viruses found in Tibetan glacier. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-year-old-viruses-tibetan-glacier.html Accessed January 24, 2020.
***You don’t have to tell me. No one can anticipate when a contagious person is going to sit next to you on a plane, shake your hand at a business meeting or party, or sneeze a nose full of viruses into your personal space. Gesundheit! Like Prospero in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” we might think isolation affords protection, but viruses are really little, small enough to get through any crevice or crack. We might also find that as we move through the rooms in our protected environment that a virus can be latent and therefore carried in by a seemingly healthy person we invited to the party. But not all is doom and gloom. Modern medical science is already working on a preventive vaccine. Of course, “modern medical science” is composed of people—whose names I do not know and whose competence at countering any virus can be warranted only after the fact of human survival.
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