Yes, Virginia, There ARE Zombies

Russian scientists recently announced they brought some microworms back to life.

So what’s The BIg Deal?

Well, the worms were 24,000 years old.

Ay, caramba!

Talk about bringing the undead back to life…

The undead-but-oh-so-old worms were extracted from deep permafrost in Siberia. According to a story in Popular Mechanics (seems like a weird one for them to cover), the scientists thawed the frozen worms ever so slowly and gently -- and they began to wiggle and exhibit signs of activity after their ultra-long sleep.

That “sleep” is called cryptobiosis, and it involves a living organism having its metabolism suspended after acquiring special chemical compounds they would need to someday begin “living” again.

If you call swimming around in a test tube and reproducing asexually an acceptable form of living…

Be that as it may, re-invigorating these tiny harmless creatures is being considered a milestone in the field of cryptobiosis.

Oh, other organisms have been revived after at least 1,000 years, like moss and nematodes.

That’s also impressive, but to be re-animated after 24,000 years? That’s ALL of recorded human history and a whole bunch more!

So OK, what’s the practical result of this amazing feat?

Well, nobody really knows for sure at this point, but it does present some intriguing possibilities.

Like, if living things can be frozen and kept alive for decades -- even hundreds of years -- what might that mean for humans?

One thing quickly comes to mind: Long-term hibernation on very long space flights in the future. That’s one possibility, certainly.

But say you’re someone suffering from a fatal disease for which there’s currently no known cure. Could that person be frozen -- put in a state of cryptobiosis -- and thawed out sometime in the future when a cure has been found?

Sounds interesting, but think of all the things that could go wrong with that scenario.

Like, who’s going to monitor my crypto chamber for the next who-knows-how-many years?

Do I really trust that person with my looooooong-term care? And what if that person gets tired of being my crypto-bio buddy and runs off to the beach with my money and my wife?

Or, what if the power gets knocked out or turned off sometime in the future BEFORE I’m ready to thaw? I wonder what premature melting would feel like...

Or, my long-term cryptobiotic budget turns out to be vastly under-estimated and I eventually run out of refrigeration money?

And what will I be thinking about while I’m a human popsicle? Would it be one very long dream/nightmare -- or just total blankness?

Even if it worked, would I want to come back to a world where everyone I ever knew is long dead and The Future is a really crappy place?

So many questions, so few real answers.

Thank you, Russian scientists!