What lies beneath

3001 – the final odyssey

In 2001 (the book and film) Frank Poole gets shafted by super computer HAL and disappears off into space, all umbilici severed, presumably never to be seen again. At least not for a thousand years. In 3001 he gets spotted, picked up, and revived after a thousand years at a life preserving (so Arthur C Clarke would have us believe) temperature of near absolute zero. Life stopping but decay preventing temperature. Maybe that's nearer the science. So, happy in the 'what the hell, read on' land of artistic licence in sci-fi, I carried on regardless.

Until, the same week as reading the book, this news item came along. We're increasingly digging and fracking and doing all sorts to produce more carbon fuel to increasingly melt the icy bits of the planet, where god-knows-what lies frozen and dormant. The giant virus is huge (in viral terms, anyway) and is visible under a normal microscope. It has many more genes than the viruses responsible for, say, flu and AIDS. It is 30,000 years old.

30,000 years old, and they've managed to revive it. Whether the reviving was a big job, involving a miniature Frankenstein's lab, a micro-Igor, the smallest defibrillator ever, and a couple of AAA Duracells replacing the electrical storm; or whether it was a simple case of bunging the blighter into the microwave on defrost for thirty seconds, they've got it going sufficiently to ascertain that it attacks amoeba, and is safe for human consumption. But that means that a life form, and, in virus terms a pretty complex one, is viable after 30,000 years in the tundra. In the melting, under drilling attack and increasingly disturbed tundra.

A thousand years adrift in space? Child's play.