View from the North 40: Will the Proterozoic past be our variant future?

I have been on tenterhooks for a month now, not just about the excitement of having a practical use for a juicy, old-timey word like tenterhooks, but also, and mostly, about science and specifically whether a salt crystal will prove to be Pandora’s box, Spiderman’s arachnid or, like, a dud firecracker where you’re anticipating drama and excitement but get pffft.

NPR reported May 24 that large crystals of salt were found in central Australia, and the crystals show signs they have water encapsulated within them. Scientists at West Virginia University see “shapes that are consistent with what we would expect from microorganisms,” said Kathy Benison, a geologist at the university. “And they could be still surviving within that 830-million-year-old preserved microhabitat.”

So the plan is to cut the crystal open in a safe and controlled environment to study the Proterozoic Eon microorganisms from inside the crystal because they could be alive in a dormant state.

“It does sound like a really bad B-movie, but there is a lot of detailed work that’s been going on for years to try to figure out how to do that in the safest possible way,” Benison told NPR, in an effort to comfort listeners midway through the third year of a global pandemic.

I just want to go on record here as pointing out that this situation is statistically prepared to make some noise. The action could be awesome, it could be terrifying, or it very well could just be a spectacular slide sideways into a tailspin.

First of all, the crystal came from Australia, land of the widest variety of deadly plants and animals on the planet, plus they have kangaroos, blowfishes and platypuses. That’s some weird stuff, right?

And I know what you’re thinking: None of these lifeforms are so bad that people can’t live and thrive on the continent, so how bad can Australia be?

Think about this: A crocodile is a dangerous creature that really only thinks about killing stuff to eat and sleeping. However, as bad as it is, the crocodile is nothing compared to a T-Rex of 68 million years ago, which was nothing compared to the Spinosaurus, which which is a descendent from 99 million years ago of the microorganisms — which emerged from the primordial ooze 830 million years ago.

Just think how aggressive those microorganisms were to go from fitting on the point of a pin to top of the food chain and bigger than a London double-decker bus, before mellowing to a relatively benign croc or an oddly cute platypus.

So we are going to risk mixing the two living things — a speck from the dawn of life on earth and a present-day lifeform — without benefit of a buffer from the many millennia between the two. The time to mellow those microorganisms’ hard-shelled aggressiveness to the self-destructive, soft-middled creatures we know as the modern human.

Precautions will be taken, we’re told, as we entrust the safety of this mission to scientists in a state best known for its hill-and-holler-folk who are most widely known because, shall we say, their apples don’t fall far from the tree, generation after generation and after generation.

Rude, yes? Stereotypes start from some seed.

Plus, we’ve all seen the movies with their Jurassic Parks, their mummies, their zombies, their gremlins and their superhero origin stories, if we should be so lucky because the super-villain stories start the same way, just with a twist.

What do we know from these stories? Can we be prepared?

Turn the light on before you enter the room. Do not walk through a door that was cracked open to begin with. Don’t stare into anything that’s mesmerizing. Don’t touch any buttons. Heed the warnings of the wizened old person. Read any mysterious writings silently with your mind, not out loud with your mouth. And no matter what, when someone starts saying “I wonder what would happen if we … ” just tackle them and tape their stupid mouth shut before they finish the sentence.

Because here there be dragons.

So what are we going to do as we await the fate of the world here on our tenterhooks?

Think about this: The contents of your salt shaker.

Surely this handful of crystals acquired from a mysterious “found” source on an island continent so harsh that one of the cruelest empires in the history of mankind used it for a penal colony, along with Georgia, USA — which is an observation not a judgment — but I digress. Surely, Australia can’t be the only source of salt that happens to have encapsulated primordial microorganisms.

So far it’s been all pffft, but we may just be dodging bullets.

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Let’s face it, we couldn’t even successfully handle a virus, which is an immobile, lifeless speck. How are we going to handle a microorganism with self-propulsion features at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .