The Real Dangers With Microbes & Viruses

Earth's Most Abundant Entities

Let's begin with the question not often asked:

"What are the estimated 1 x 10³¹ viruses and estimated 9.2 - 31.7 × 10²⁹ microbes on Earth doing as their ecosystem is being destroyed around them?"

We have some clues around us with which to explore a very necessary answer --necessary because this epoch which we call the Anthropocene is the epoch of an ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction, killing things all around us.

A mass extinction which may not be like any of the past five mass extinctions, at least in the sense that it is happening slow enough for human observation - at least so far.

This gives more time for us to observe microbes, viruses, and even the macroscopic flora and fauna reacting to their changing environment.

And more to the point, it gives us an opportunity to observe those reactions to the ongoing extinctions:

"Geographers have projected temperature increases due to greenhouse gas emissions to reach a not-so-chilling conclusion: climate zones will shift and some climates will disappear completely by 2100. Tropical highlands and polar regions may be the first to disappear, and large swaths of the tropics and subtropics will reach even hotter temperatures. The study anticipates large climate changes worldwide." (Completely New Climates)
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"Vegetation around the world is on the move, and climate change is the culprit, according to a new analysis of global vegetation shifts led by a University of California, Berkeley, ecologist in collaboration with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

In a paper published June 7 in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, researchers present evidence that over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where temperatures are cooler, as well as toward the equator, where rainfall is greater."(Major Vegetation Shifts, emphasis added)
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"Narsaq’s largest employer, a shrimp factory, closed a few years ago after the crustaceans fled north to cooler water. Where once there were eight commercial fishing vessels, there is now one.

As a result, the population here, one of southern Greenland’s major towns, has been halved to 1,500 in just a decade. Suicides are up." (Greenland Changing Due To Warming, emphasis added)

Not too long ago I wondered what impact the ancient mass extinctions had on microbes and viruses (What Did The Mass Extinctions Do To Viruses and Microbes?).

Today, let's hypothesize, based on actual scientific observations, what the viruses and microbes might begin to do en masse.

First off, note that the flora and fauna of our planet are being diminished dramatically:

This latest edition of the Living Planet Report is not for the faint-hearted. One key point that jumps out and captures the overall picture is that the

Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures more than 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, has declined by 52 per cent since 1970. Put another way, in less than two human generations, population sizes of vertebrate species have dropped by half. These are the living forms that constitute the fabric of the ecosystems which sustain life on Earth – and the barometer of what we are doing to our own planet, our only home. We ignore their decline at our peril.

(Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch - 4; cf. this PDF). That is like when half the canaries in the mine have died in a short span of time.

If we consider that certain types of viruses and microbes require or are naturally inclined to operate in or on specific plants and specific animals but not in or on others, we can hypothesize that as times get desperate for them, and then become catastrophic for them, they will radically morph (genetically and behaviourally).

And we can further hypothesize that they will have to attempt to migrate to different species that have not become extinct yet.

There are examples of that happening now:

"Maybe you take a Toxo-infected human and they start having a proclivity towards doing dumb-ass things that we should be innately averse to, like having your body hurdle through space at high G-forces. Maybe this is the same neurobiology. This is not to say that Toxo has evolved the need to get humans into cat stomachs. It's just sheer convergence. It's the same nuts and bolts neurobiology in us and in a rodent, and does the same thing.

On a certain level, this is a protozoan parasite that knows more about the neurobiology of anxiety and fear than 25,000 neuroscientists standing on each other's shoulders, and this is not a rare pattern. Look at the rabies virus; rabies knows more about aggression than we neuroscientists do. It knows how to make you rabid. It knows how to make you want to bite someone, and that saliva of yours contains rabies virus particles, passed on to another person.

The Toxo story is, for me, completely new terrain — totally cool, interesting stuff, just in terms of this individual problem. And maybe it's got something to do with treatments for phobias down the line or whatever it is to make it seem like anything more than just the coolest gee whiz thing possible. But no doubt it's also a tip of the iceberg of God knows what other parasitic stuff is going on out there. Even in the larger sense, God knows what other unseen realms of biology make our behavior far less autonomous than lots of folks would like to think." (The Germ Theory - of Government - 9, quoting Dr. Sapolsky)
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"Chloroviruses (family Phycodnaviridae) are large DNA viruses known to infect certain eukaryotic green algae and have not been previously shown to infect humans or to be part of the human virome. We unexpectedly found sequences ... in ... DNA extracted from human ... samples. These samples were obtained by throat swabs of adults without a psychiatric disorder or serious physical illness who were participating in a study that included measures of cognitive functioning. The presence of ATCV-1 DNA was ... associated with a modest but statistically significant decrease in the performance on cognitive assessments of visual processing and visual motor speed." (Chlorovirus ATCV-1, emphasis added).

As Dr. Sapolsky pointed out, the viral and microbial ability to alter brain circuits is well beyond the ability of human brain surgeons.

We are also finding out that viruses and microbes are essential for human and other life forms:

Today, we are at the edge of a main turning point in understanding biological processes. The prevailing central dogma of molecular biology of the last 50 years is no more than a subordinate clause, relevant only to a small fraction of reality.
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Now, the new renaissance of viruses is taking centre stage. Research data from the last decade indicate the important roles of viruses, both in the evolution of all life and as symbionts or co-evolutionary partners of host organisms. There is increasing evidence that all cellular life is colonized by exogenous and/or endogenous viruses in a non-lytic but persistent lifestyle. Viruses and viral parts form the most numerous genetic matter on this planet.
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To understand their competence in natural genome editing, we have to look not only at their linguistic competence in editing and regulating correct nucleotide sequences, but also at their communicative competence, that is, how they interact with each other, how they compete within host organisms, how they symbiotically interact with host organisms to ward off

competing parasites, how they generate de novo sequences and what life strategies they share. Exactly these features are presented in this volume. Persistent infection lifestyles that do not harm hosts, and symbiotic, cooperating viral swarms, may be more successful in evolutionary terms for integrating advantageous phenotypes into host organisms than are “selfish” agents. Increasing empirical data about the abundance of viruses and virus-derived parts in the ecosphere of this planet, and their roles in the evolution and developmental processes of cellular life forms at the level of the microscopic processes of replication, transcription, translation, alternative splicing, RNA-editing, epigenetics and repair, raise a fundamental question concerning a crucial decision about how to define and explain life ...

(Viruses: Essential Agents of Life, at viii-ix; see also this). This we find out at a time when we are so paranoid about them that all we want to do is make war on them and quarantine those of us we think are the only ones exposed to them (Obola: Art Thou Dying Properly?).

They have existed on this planet for billions of years prior to humans, but we have yet to even figure out where the hell we are (You Are Here).

If we drive the virus and microbe world insane, as previous mass extinctions have done, there will be hell to pay.

It will take them a long time to recover from us, but they have the ability to do so (In Space or Buried Alive).

We won't make it without them ... but they will make it without us.

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Professor who studies "social intelligence" of microbial entities gives lecture:

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On The Origin of Catastrophe

The Sixth Mass Extinction is Underway.

The insatiable and pugnacious need to pervert meaning and reality tends to show up in psychotic denialist's rhetoric near the dates of the releases of IPCC official reports of climate change.

Especially when those reports evince the strong consensus among scientists.

A consensus in the scientific community concerning the reality that Oil-Qaeda has led us to create the Damaged Global Climate System.

Those denialist perverted propaganda mills, borne of infected minds know of two aspects of our cultural amygdala which recoils at the notion of something fearful, such as impending death.

One of those aspects they use in their propaganda is that it must happen to us or our extended self to qualify as a "catastrophe," or on the other hand, that it must happen to an enemy for it not to be considered to be a catastrophe.

Let's begin to dissect their demented propaganda infested minds by first taking a look at the meaning of the word:

ca·tas·tro·phe [kuh-tas-truh-fee] noun

1. a sudden and widespread disaster: the catastrophe of war.

2. any misfortune, mishap, or failure; fiasco: The play was so poor our whole evening was a catastrophe.

3. a final event or conclusion, usually an unfortunate one; a disastrous end: the great catastrophe of the Old South at Appomattox.

4. (in a drama) the point at which the circumstances overcome the central motive, introducing the close or conclusion ...

5. Geology. a sudden, violent disturbance, especially of a part of the surface of the earth; cataclysm.

(Dictionary, "catastrophe", emphasis added). We can readily conclude that the definition of the word "catastrophe" qualifies to describe some events ongoing now (Air Pollution Kills 7 Million Annually).

The word "catastrophe" also describes many oft-repeated human events of history:

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

(Exploded Planet Hypothesis - 2). The way the word "catastrophe" has been used in literature and even in common conversation also illustrates that in our world we have already had climate change catastrophes, and will continue to do so.

That is because the definition of the word "catastrophe" does not require being the worst of anything to qualify as a "catastrophe":

"Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He's eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe." - Mario Batali

"Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?" - Geraldine Brooks

"There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe." - Robert Cailliau

(Brainy Quotes). Nevertheless, on a somewhat more serious side of the meaning of the word, the "the great catastrophe of the Old South at Appomattox" is remembered in the minds of some as a catastrophe because it happened "to us or our extended self", but that same event is celebrated by others because it "happened to an enemy" (see definition #3).

Those definitions of "catastrophe" do not work in a global context, because it happens to "us" and to "them", so the denialist mind perverts the meaning of the word to hide the global aspects even where the word "catastrophe" might aptly apply.

A global catastrophe under the definition of the word certainly would be "any misfortune, mishap, or failure" that affects the global population or our entire civilization (see definition #2).

A rogue global climate caused by global pollution can fit the bill.

Today and now is a new epoch, the sixth mass extinction epoch, and it applies to all members of the human family around the globe (On The Memorial Daze - 2).

Catastrophe has not been a rare event in the past, and the sixth mass extinction catastrophe now taking place isn't a loner either, in terms of "that meaning" of the word "catastrophe."

It is, however, so rare as to be the first and only time that the leadership of the human species has utterly lost its mind to utterly reject the warnings of over a hundred years, but to instead head into a mass extinction event because it is afraid of a mass extinction (The Exceptional American Denial).

Microbial Languages: Rehabilitation of the Unseen

Some of my best friends are Germs

The Fourth Tenet of The Tenets of Ecocosmology urges us to recognize that microbial and other small life forms are useful as well as mandatory for our own existence and betterment.

In modern times this tenet has been considered to be an alien concept in Western Culture, especially in the Western medical sciences, so, in today's post let's discuss an emerging revolution in those general concepts of Western Civilization concerning perceptions of what it means to be "a human" and what it means to be "a germ."

Yes, let's reconsider the general concepts which without reservation tell us that the anti-biotic wars without any reservation have been a good thing, that consider microbes to be something to exterminate, and that are ignorant of what it actually means to be human in the biological reality of the planet Earth.

The text of the Fourth Tenet currently reads as follows:

The seeds of intelligence (genetic and memetic clues) required to successfully perform The Test are distributed into all species, races, religions, sciences, creeds, and genders. Thus, all individuals should be respected as carriers of some quanta of the seed of intelligence required to pass The Test, lest a fundamental quantum of necessary intelligence be lost.

(The Tenets of Ecocosmology, emphasis in original). The meaning of the word "intelligence" as it is first used in that text is enhanced by the later use of that word in the section of the text that reads "intelligence required to pass The Test" (compare: What Kind of Intelligence Is A Lethal Mutation?).

Which begs the question, what is "The Test"?

That question that is answered by the first three tenets to be the survival of species on planets near central stars.

Stars which eventually change in ways that mandate travel to another star system.

That is to say (taking our star the Sun as an example) that species on planets orbiting near the Sun are naturally destined for utter extinction and obliteration when the Sun enters its final phase.

Our star, early in that final phase, expands out to, or near to, the orbit of Mars, vaporizing or otherwise destroying those inner planets in the process (see Tenet One Basics).

There are other intermediate threats to species on habitable planets in our solar system, which we call "extinction events" (Asteroid Killed off The Dinosaurs, Sixth Mass Extinction?).

The sixth mass extinction is currently underway.

It is being caused by current human civilization.

The first five mass extinctions were primarily cosmological and other non-human events.

This brings us to the recent scientific discoveries in the microbiological sciences which focus on our new understanding of what it means to be human:

... the fields of medical and environmental microbiology have begun to merge. The resulting hybrid discipline embraces the complexity of a larger system; it’s integrative rather than reductive, and it supports the gathering view that our bodies, and the bodies of other animals, are ecosystems, and that health and disease may depend on complex changes in the ecology of host and microbes.
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“We’ve all been trained to think of ourselves as human,” he says. Bacteria have been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. But now, he says, it appears that “we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn’t thought about.” It will take a major cultural shift, says Karasov, for nonmicrobiologists who study the human body to begin to take microorganisms seriously as a part of the system.
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Equally challenging, though in a different respect, will be changing long-held ideas about ourselves as independent individuals. How do we make sense of this suddenly crowded self? David Relman suggests that how well you come to terms with symbiosis “depends on how comfortable you are with not being alone.” A body that is a habitat and a continuously evolving system is not something most of us consider; the sense of a singular, continuous self is a prerequisite for sanity, at least in Western psychology.

(On The New Meaning of "Human" - 2, see also On The New Meaning of "Human"). Those two posts are a couple of years old, so let's look at a couple of more recent writings which show that this new science is moving along rapidly:

Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford, suggests that we would do well to begin regarding the human body as “an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.” This humbling new way of thinking about the self has large implications for human and microbial health, which turn out to be inextricably linked.
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Our resident microbes also appear to play a critical role in training and modulating our immune system, helping it to accurately distinguish between friend and foe and not go nuts on, well, nuts and all sorts of other potential allergens. Some researchers believe that the alarming increase in autoimmune diseases in the West may owe to a disruption in the ancient relationship between our bodies and their “old friends” — the microbial symbionts with whom we coevolved.
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Human health should now “be thought of as a collective property of the human-associated microbiota,” as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology — that is, as a function of the community, not the individual. Such a paradigm shift comes not a moment too soon, because as a civilization, we’ve just spent the better part of a century doing our unwitting best to wreck the human-associated microbiota with a multifronted war on bacteria and a diet notably detrimental to its well-being. Researchers now speak of an impoverished “Westernized microbiome” and ask whether the time has come to embark on a project of “restoration ecology” — not in the rain forest or on the prairie but right here at home, in the human gut.

(Some of My Best Friends are Germs, see also Smithsonian - Microbial Revolution). The Fourth Tenet has to do with the survival of human civilization long enough to develop the behaviors and skills necessary for space travel away from this solar system before the Sun extinguishes all life on Earth.

Living in harmony with the nature around us and in us is a fundamental prerequisite --because if we make critical life forms extinct, we thereby make our species extinct at the same time.

Living in harmony may also require us to do "remedial rehabilitation of the unseen", as the title of today's post suggests.

By that I mean to rehabilitate the microbes that have experienced past mass extinction events that utterly upended their world.

Which may have caused some of them to thereby end up going rogue and to then eventually become ill behaved parasites (Are Microbes The Origin of PTSD?).

Perhaps by learning to communicate with the rogues among them we will thereby be able to talk sense into some of the microbes that have become killers, maimers, or otherwise harmful?

The next post in this series is here.

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The following video illustrates how we are beginning to understand the tiny language of the unseen world where most living things dwell.

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Someone Figured It Out

Bolivia is considering a human law that acknowledges what is already law of a different sort, the laws of nature.

It would not matter any if nations passed what they might call "The Law of Gravity", since that is already the law whether we like it or not.

However, it would be a sane gesture to acknowledge a superior, immutable law.

That is, acknowledge natural law which always issues its own equal-justice-for-all punishment each time it is violated.

In that vein, Bolivia is considering passing national laws which declare that the environment has the same rights as human beings:

Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

(There Otta Be a Law). Like gravity, the law of the environment already exists, in that, the law of this planet is that if we destroy nature we destroy ourselves, seeing as how we too are nature.

But hats off the Bolivians who are bringing focus to the laws that really, really matter.

Tenet Four Basics

Tenet Four is a recognition that we learn from the nature around us, derive all we need for sustenance from it, cannot exist without it, and that if we are to pass The Test we will do so using the resources in the natural web of interdependent life around us.

One area of science, called Biomimicry, recognizes that wisdom is to be found in nature; hopefully including knowledge about how to make a space craft capable of the journey of salvation sometime in the future before the Sun destroys us.

We will have to study gravity and light in a new way, a new physics, if we are to attain the efficiencies required for that journey.

This tenet warns that no species should be destroyed or become extinct by our behaviour on any habitable planet, because a necessary clue to our survival may be hidden in that species.

The term "species" certainly includes all "groups" (white, black, red, yellow, brown, male, female, etc.) within the human species.