Researchers looking at an 830-million year old chunk of salt (all the young Earthers reading this article will want to do the necessary calculations from this point forward) from the Browne Formation of central Australia have found what they think might be viable living organisms in liquid trapped inside, and they want to crack open the salt and find out.
Why do they think these organisms can be revived?
Some organisms like tardigrades (water bears) can go into a form of hibernation and survive extreme circumstances, like outer space and being bombarded with radiation.
Some organisms called halophilic microbes shut down their host waterways when they get too salty and enter a dormant state and can reactivate when they get rehydrated. We've already revived 250 million year old bacteria from a bee trapped in amber, so there's no reason we can't revive 850 million year old halites trapped in salt.
What could go wrong?
Kathy Benison, a geologist at West Virginia University, says,
It does sound like a really bad B-movie, but there is a lot of detailed work that's been going on for years to try to figure out how to do that in the safest possible way.
Bonnie Baxter, a biologist at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, assures us that,
An environmental organism that has never seen a human is not going to have the mechanism to get inside of us and cause disease. So, I personally, from a science perspective, have no fear of that.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that we don't know nearly as much about disease as we thought we did. And I don't even need to watch movies anymore to know what an out of control novel virus or bacteria is capable of, but I have seen a lot of movies, so I know that Covid didn't even scratch the surface.
We're just one evil plankton away from another planet-level crisis, and scientists are out there playing with bacteria like they don't even care.
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