Russian Scientists Flirt With A Possible Sci-Fi Style Disaster

Intellectual curiosity is a wonderful thing. It has brought us happily out of the caves. The problem with scientists and their curiousity is that there is no off switch. No one has the power to impose wisdom. If an experiment is illegal or unpopular in one place, scientists just do it someplace else. As we get more advanced, the Sci-Fi concept of “The Big Mistake” gets more and more likely. The issue is this. Scientists make predictions about the outcomes of experiments that they haven’t attempted yet and use their predictions as their understanding of the experimental dangers. Of course, the reason we do scientific experiments is the discovery of the unknown. I would imagine that the large majority of experiments result in unanticipated results.

So, about those Russian scientists. Way down under in Antarctica, the Russians are about to make their final effort to drill into Lake Vostok, a lake that hasn’t seen the light of day or the atmosphere of Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. What strange microbes and life exist down there in the dark is a mystery. There’s a ton of excellent B movie Sci-Fi fodder in this expedition. The scientific community is worried we may contaminate the pristine ecosystem down there. What if we release something into our own ecosystem that we can’t deal with? Many of the worlds nastiest viruses, like Ebola for example, were released into human populations due to logging efforts into the deep jungles of Africa where man had never been. The Russians aren’t the only ones in on this either. The University of Edinburgh is sending a team to drill into Lake Ellsworth, another deep undisturbed Antarctic lake.

PopSci has the full article on both teams attempts. It is a very interesting read and I recommend you give it a look.