You can stop saving money in your 401(k), because the world will be hopelessly lost and probably unlivable long before you retire. At least, that’s what I take away from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest video rant, which we covered here:
I understand that the congresswoman is just trying to justify the $93 trillion price tag on her Green New Deal. But she has clearly fallen prey to science fiction. Half of the scenario she describes above comes more or less out of the movie Interstellar; perhaps she watched it over the weekend.
Obviously, the only way to deal with the end of farming on earth is to start building large, rotating cylindrical spaceships in which we can live in earth-like gravity while traveling to a new home light-years away. Come to think of it, that’s probably a better use of $93 trillion than her legislation.
But the first half of her rant, about the revival of ancient frozen diseases, has a different origin. It comes from a rash of news stories that ran in 2016 and 2017, speculating (emphasis on that word, because that’s what a lot of day-to-day “science journalism” does nowadays) about the possibility of “zombie pathogens” thawing out in the Arctic. Fortunately, this probably isn’t a thing. NPR’s Michaeleen Doucleff took a closer look in 2018 after finding that “something is a little fishy about these ‘zombie pathogen’ stories: The evidence presented is as holey as Swiss cheese.”
Doucleff’s conclusion, after a trip to northern Alaska and several interviews with scientists, was that the scenario seemed “unlikely,” given repeated failed attempts by scientists to revive bacteria and viruses from frozen carcasses of various species (including humans) in the Arctic. Although scientists could see the ancient pathogens under the microscope, they couldn’t revive them — not even the viruses — or get them to grow in a lab.
Doucleff tempered her conclusion by noting that one of the subjects of her article did in fact get an infection around the same time he handed ancient thawed seal carcasses. But the infection, which was never definitively traced back to any particular source, went away quickly with ordinary antibiotics. (You can read or listen to the whole story here.)
So much for “zombie pathogens.” Which means we can focus on more important questions. Such as, why is Ocasio-Cortez eating food that contains cheese? Hasn’t she heard that those farting cows are destroying our planet?
