How microbes live for centuries – by shutting down | Aeon Essays
aeon.co · 2,527 words · saved by 1 readers
How a 500-year experiment to revive dormant microbes could reveal the secrets to cheating time
Suppose you wanted to preserve a room completely unchanged. Picture an Egyptian tomb, or perhaps a storage vault for fragile artefacts. Suppose that your maintenance budget is effectively zero. How should you arrange things? Is it better to seal up your chamber against every possible disturbance? Or perhaps you make a provision for cleaners to come in whenever resources permit. They might not be able to do much. They might knock things over. But still, perhaps they’re better than nothing – a fragile, fallible defence against the forces of entropy. It is said that if you want to survive,…
related reading
- Could Microbes Survive a Trip to Mars? We Asked a NASA Scientist: Episode 1 - NASAnasa.gov
- Our Warming Planet Is a Petri Dish for New and Deadly Microbes | The New Yorkernewyorker.com
- How to survive boiling watertaxa.substack.com
- untiluntillabs.com
- Why Cryonics Makes Sense — Wait But Whywaitbutwhy.com
- Brain Freeze—Asteriskasteriskmag.com
- Inside Deep Undersea Rocks, Life Thrives Without the Sun | Quanta Magazinequantamagazine.org
- Virus, Coal, and Seed: Subcutaneous Life in the Polar North | Los Angeles Review of Bookslareviewofbooks.org
- Tomorrow.biotomorrow.bio
- The tardigrade in the ice hole: how extreme life finds a way in the Arctic | Biology | The Guardiantheguardian.com
- Kai Micah Mills - High school dropout, cosmist, Thiel Fellowkaimicahmills.com
- Seven Wonders of Biologysubstack.com