

Life found deep below Antarctic ice - dsil
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/348007/description/Life_found_deep_below_Antarctic_ice

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monsterix
For some reason I always feel underwhelmed when they dig up a few microbes and
their corpses from the deep. Where are those huge tentacle-ye monsters, we
want so much to look at? Or at least find the Tesseract?

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bearwithclaws
Huge tentacle-ye monster (or at least, close):
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026950>

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xk_id
Is it not dangerous to do this? What if we bring to the surface new viruses or
bacteria that are very harmful?

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hartror
Unlike what Hollywood would lead us to believe organisms cut off from the rest
of the world don't become dangerous. In fact the opposite is more likely,
organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem are more likely to be
specialised and be at risk themselves from outside organisms.

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Smudge
But which are the "outside" organisms -- us or them? ;-)

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sliverstorm
It's like you are trying to be deep, but didn't actually read your parent.

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ghshephard
The parent wrote: "Unlike what Hollywood would lead us to believe organisms
cut off from the rest of the world don't become dangerous. In fact the
opposite is more likely, organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem are
more likely to be specialised and be at risk themselves from outside
organisms."

So, the question the Smudge was genuinely asking (and I think it's a clever
one) is are the "organisms cut off from the rest of the ecosystem" the
microbes in the glacial lake, or are the humans the "organisms cut off from
the rest of the ecosystem" for 100,000 years?

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sliverstorm
The only way to consider the rest of the world, with its 8.7 million species,
to be the organism that was cut off from a few types of bacteria in a remote
lake is to quibble over pointless semantics.

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bfwi
I wonder if they're archaea or bacteria. Does anybody have a guess?

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spiritplumber
ia ia cthulhu fhtagn!

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archangel_one
Actually, it was the Elder Things that were in Antarctica. Cthulhu's in the
Pacific somewhere.

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okonomiyaki3000
Shoggoths. They've definitely found shoggoths.

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nnnnni
Se til helvete og kom dere vekk. Det er ikke en bikkje, det er en slags ting!
Det imiterer en bikkje, det er ikke virkelig! KOM DERE VEKK IDIOTER!!

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nnnnni
Ah, no love for The Thing. Oh well.

