ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

Another historic challenge for the scientific community has fallen by the wayside: the search for the elusive gravitational waves predicted by Einstein and crucial to the Big Bang Theory (the real one—not the TV show) has ended in success.

A team of astrophysicists announced this week that their exotic equipment based at the South Pole has detected variations in the universe’s microwave background radiation that are polarized, made that way by ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by gravitational waves produced in the great expansion that followed the Big Bang. No-one’s ever detected gravitational waves themselves since Einstein described them in his Theory of General Relativity ninety-nine years ago, but this is the strongest evidence yet of their existence. The scientists spent three years crunching the data to eliminate every other possibility for what they found. More than that, the existence of these gravitational waves gives a huge boost to what’s known as the Inflationary Universe Theory: that in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded to something approaching what we see now. So a double whammy for the South Pole observation unit, and two major milestones achieved in one stroke.

This comes not all that long after the discovery of the Higgs Boson in the summer of 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Called the “holy grail” of particle physics, the Higgs Boson (and the omnipresent Higgs Field) are what give objects mass. Their existence was predicted back in 1964 but forty-eight years passed before it could be proven (after which the originators of the idea received a Nobel Prize). Even a few years ago, some wondered if gravitational waves and the Higgs Boson would ever be found. I’m reminded that the proof of extraterrestrial planets is only a few years old, too, though now there have been hundreds discovered, and it’s generally thought that they far outnumber stars in the galaxy.

It makes me wonder: if the great scientific quests of our time are all being achieved, will we suddenly have a whole lot of physicists out of work? There must be something we can put their talents to. Wormholes and black holes are still sexy. How about the multiverse theory (so we can escape climate change to an Earth we haven’t screwed up yet)? Or with so much brainpower on hand, surely time travel isn’t an insurmountable problem? OK—maybe that one is too risky, but at the very least they’ve got to find a way to give us faster-than-light travel or we’ll never get to see any of our own galactic neighbourhood, let alone the rest of the universe.

Or maybe, just maybe, they can go to work on the true unsolvables: why buttered toast always lands face down, and where single socks go when they vanish from the clothes dryer.

Just trying to help

THE GERM THAT WOULDN'T DIE

In Michael Crichton’s terrific debut novel The Andromeda Strain a satellite crashes to Earth and triggers a horrifying disease outbreak. It had captured a deadly pathogen while in outer space—likely in a deliberate attempt to find new biological weapons—and although the outbreak is contained, the pathogen is shockingly virulent while it lasts.

The idea that there could be organisms capable of surviving the hardships of interplanetary space is not new. The concept of “panspermia” describes the spreading of organic life through space from planet to planet via various means of transportation, including comets and meteors. The idea has been around for a very long time, although in the modern era it’s most often connected to a theory by astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe which included the disturbing proposal that interplanetary organisms drift down into Earth’s atmosphere all the time, and may be responsible for periodic outbreaks of disease. Maybe at one time we would have scoffed at the idea that anything living could survive an environment of near vacuum, temperatures near absolute zero, and deadly radiation. We’re far less confident these days.

This week, in a plot point straight out of a B-movie, we learned that an organism frozen in Siberian permafrost for thirty thousand years is still infectious. Some French scientists got their hands on permafrost samples and decided to  find out if they contained any aggressive organisms by using amoebas as bait. Sure enough, when the amoebas started to die, it was discovered that they were infected with a form of giant virus (a rare form very much larger than most). Thirty millennia as a germsickle apparently hadn’t done these bugs any harm. And, in fact, the French researchers had been inspired by a Russian team who’d resurrected a plant frozen in permafrost for a similar amount of time.

Why should we care? First of all, the researchers point out that global warming is causing huge areas of permafrost to thaw, and that process is likely to increase over the coming decades. Also, there’s a lot of new drilling and mining going on in permafrost zones around the world. Who’s to say that there aren’t virulent strains of pathogens from our ancient past waiting to be awakened, to wreak havoc in a species that has no immune defense against them? (My inner horror writer coming out there.) Secondly, if so-called “extremophiles” can survive being frozen for millennia, or endure the heat, pressure, and poisonous chemicals of deep-ocean volcanic vents, it seems naïve to expect that organic life could not survive the rigors of space travel, especially sheltered from radiation within bodies like meteors and comets. And Earth passes through meteor swarms and comet tails all the time.

Other experts will reassure us that we live with billions of micro-organisms around us all the time. They’re right—on the list of things to worry about, this probably ranks really low. But it may make you pause the next time you go to catch a snowflake on your tongue.