|
Scientists recently unearthed a 250-million-year-old dormant bacterium from a cave in New Mexico. That's remarkable enough, but then they took it back to the lab and brought it back to life, using a combination of the Heimlich maneuver and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (after first strapping it to a gurney and raising it through the skylight of a castle during a huge electrical storm, while screaming, "It's alive! It's alive!"). The whole process was very complicated, not to mention scientific.
This discovery and resurrection have, as they say, profound implications. It could mean that, by any real measure, bacteria could be as immortal as Dick Clark.
But even if they're just extremely long-lived and extraordinarily hardy, the possibility looms that bacteria possess the "stick-to-it"-iveness to have come here from other worlds, hitchhiking to earth on comets, meteors, or attached to the hulls of the space ships of little gray aliens. (Assuming that little gray aliens aren't anal-retentive when it comes to hull maintenance.)
This is all heady stuff, and probably amazing.
Still, the bacterium's extreme age aside, what distinguishes it from, say, the stuff underneath the shower mat? Or the gray-green gunk we scrape off cheese? Or pond scum? Is this the same substance we tackle with an old toothbrush and bleach to remove from grout?
At what point in time do bacteria cease to become a nuisance and turn into something miraculous? A month? Gross. A year? Even more gross. A hundred years? Frankly, I'd have a long talk with the realtor before buying. A thousand years? Hmm. The point is, the time always comes when once useless gunk becomes a collector's item: diamonds, petroleum, Brady Bunch reruns....
What if they'd found this bacterium on a 250-million-year-old wedge of Gouda? Would they have scraped the mold off and tried to save the cheese? If it's rust on Caesar's chariot, do we go for the rust or the wagon? What has more value, the stuff in the attic or the dust collected on it?
It's hard to get a perspective sometimes. What are we supposed to believe about any given phenomenon?
The new service economy, for instance. Everybody's excited about it, even though there is no actual service as near as I can tell. Gas stations used to have polite, uniformed attendants who would not only fill up your vehicle but also check your oil, wipe your windshield, and tell you how to get back to the Interstate. You have to do all that yourself now. Have any of these gas station attendants been preserved in amber?
About six months ago, I responded to one of the many commercials asking me to get DSL. The promise of DSL is that everything on the Internet will be that much faster. What they don't tell you is that it takes more than six months to get DSL, and when you do, it doesn't always work. It's like being sold a car that doesn't exist yet, and while you're gathering cobwebs and mold waiting for the scientists to bring it back from the cave, it finally shows up at your door in a state of dormancy. It just sits there.
So when you're put on hold after wading through the maze of voicemail, and that friendly prerecorded female voice tells you, "Your call is important to us," what are you supposed to think? I know the call is important to me (I want DSL to move!), or I wouldn't have stayed on hold for the past 40 minutes and counting. Is it truly, madly, deeply important to this woman? Or is she just shining me on, lying to make me like her more?
And how long would I have to be on hold before the call achieved cosmic significance? An hour? A week? A year?
If they find my skeletal remains in my fossilized hovel 250 million years from now - receiver still clutched in my bony hand, easy-listening versions of 1960s psychedelia still emanating from the tiny speaker, and the woman's voice still assuring me of the importance of my attempt at communication - will the scientists try to revive me?
I hope not, unless there's a tech support clone somewhere on the other end of the line being revived as well. If I can't get those lame Web site graphics to load in less than 10 seconds - well, what's the point of going on?
Ian Shoales is in his larval stage in San Francisco. Soon he will be a butterfly.
|
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
