Our amazing world is capable of preserving a record of the life on it to an astounding degree
both through fossilization, which is how we know about the dinosaurs,
to actually freezing animal life in permafrost to be revealed often tens of thousands of years later
as that ice melts. Most famously this comes in the form of well-preserved but extinct
frozen mammoths coming out of the melting permafrost in various places on earth.
A number of types of frozen fauna have been found this way,
but one in particular carries an interesting and highly unlikely, but possible implication.
In 2016 a frozen, mummified infant wolf was found in thawing permafrost in Canada. While
amazing in itself, it was also extraordinarily ancient coming in at about 57,000 years old.
This places it in a time frame where not only did anatomically modern humans walk the earth,
but our Denisovan and neanderthal counterparts still did as well.
While the remains of the neanderthals haven’t been found in areas where permafrost occurs, Denisovan
evidence has, they seem to have ranged in areas of Siberia now covered in melting permafrost.
The idea of a hominid coming out of frozen ice has actually already happened in the form of
a modern human thawing from glacial ice on the Austrian-Italian border.
This human, known as Otzi, spent about 5000 years frozen in a glacier and was discovered
by accident during a thaw. Originally thought to be the remains of a climber lost decades before,
the body was found to be strange with unusually worn teeth,
covered in archaic tattoos, and eventually found to be carrying very ancient weaponry.
The plot then thickened in that Otzi the iceman was actually found to have been murdered.
Several wounds including an arrow in his back paint a picture of a violent end for
this person, a very long time ago. What the specific circumstances of his murder were,
we will never know, and that none of his weaponry were taken including a valuable axe says that
robbery was not the motive, but whatever happened his body was left to freeze solid
and preserve almost perfectly for 5000 years until discovery. As a result, it shows that
it is indeed possible for a human to freeze long term in ice and be found thousands of years later.
Could a much older body be preserved in permafrost? For Otzi, the interval was 5000 years,
and for a Denisovan, it needs to be longer than 50,000 years, but as the aforementioned wolf pup
shows, it is possible for life to be frozen and preserved for that long. More, it’s possible for
extracted DNA from frozen life to last far longer under those conditions, the current oldest sample
being from a 1.2 million year old mammoth tooth from the Siberian permafrost. This means that it’s
possible, though pretty unlikely, that we may find and someday extract DNA from a frozen
archaic human that differs somewhat from modern humans. But this in a way has already happened.
Denisovan DNA has been extracted from bones found in caves,
which is interesting in itself because Denisovan fossils are exceedingly rare. In fact,
most of what we know of the Denisovans comes from DNA evidence. Denisovans appear to have interbred
with both Neanderthals and Modern humans, and some groups of modern humans do carry Denisovan DNA.
All of this opens up the possibility of deextinction, much in the same way that
plans to bring back the mammoth have surfaced over the years. Though the resurrection of what
might be a completely separate species of human, or at least a subspecies depending on who you ask,
may prove unethical by consensus and thus is never done. It also may never be possible,
for lack of good DNA samples to ever do such a thing, and the techniques needed to do it.
But herein lies a rather spooky danger if such a frozen body were ever found.
DNA may not be the only thing it’s carrying. It’s plausible for viruses to survive long-term
in a frozen state and remain viable. And indeed they have been found,
plant viruses have been found in Greenland glaciers that exceed 100,000 years old, showing
that it’s in principle possible for a virus capable of infecting a human to survive in ice.
The problem is that for something like that to do so, it has to do it in large numbers. And that’s
where a frozen Denisovan comes in. It would be such a reservoir if it were infected with a virus
at its time of death. Given it’s close relation to us, such a body might allow for the transmission
of the virus to modern humans, resurrecting a potentially unknown disease from the distant past.
Needless to say, if any such thing is ever found, it should be properly quarantined, even above and
beyond any alien virus that may ever be found, since it’s already adapted to infect a human.
But how far can this be taken? Is it possible in the cold depths of space for DNA to somehow
survive? This is actually thought to be possible in two ways, one natural, one not. The natural
method is panspermia, where meteorites can provide an environment for bacteria, and for that matter
viruses, to remain viable, or at least have their genetics preserved. It may even be that life on
earth did not originate here, but rather may have originated in microbial form on Mars and could
have been deposited on earth early in its history. What stands for this hypothesis is that Mars is
thought to have been a better environment for life to arise in those days than early earth was.
The other is a subset of artifact SETI, where an alien civilization sends out physical evidence of
their existence to be found, whether intentionally or unintentionally, by another civilization.
An good example in science fiction of this idea is the monolith on the moon from 2001. Here,
at some point in the distant past the monolith was deposited on the moon, and indeed it’s plausible
that the moon might harbor past evidence of an alien presence in the solar system and
efforts within SETI are forming up to actually start searching for anything that might be there.
But they might also have left something far more personal on the moon or in the solar system that
would have profound implications. They might have chosen to leave their DNA. That could be a far
more useful method of announcing your existence to the universe than a mere radio signal might be.
Instead, intact alien DNA in an artifact of some type would tell anyone that found it everything
they wanted to know about the biology of the alien species. Further the artifact could be tailored
to also provide cultural information about the species to allow for the finder to reconstruct
just what that alien civilization was like, and what they looked like.
But there may be a more pressing matter an alien civilization might be thinking about
that motivated them to send out their DNA. If extinction was looming over them, rather than send
out a sample of the civilization to spend their time in space, they instead might send out their
DNA in hopes that any civilization that found the DNA might bring the species back from extinction.
But there’s a catch, only one method of de-extinction will work on an alien.
We ourselves are in the process of thinking about de-extinction of certain recently extinct species
on earth, such as the thylacine and the aurochs. There are several ways to get to something close
to de-extinction. The first is genome editing where you directly manipulate the genetic code of
an animal to more resemble the extinct version, another is selective breeding where you take a
domesticated animal and try to selectively breed it back to resemble it’s natural form.
These methods however won’t yield an exact copy of the extinct species, but rather a reconstruction.
The one method that will provide that, either from an animal or an alien is cloning.
This brings us to the strange story of the Pyrenean Ibex. This was an ibex native to the
pyrenees mountains that went extinct in the year 2000, but that wasn’t the end of the story for
the species. Three years later the pyrenean ibex was cloned making it the first species on earth to
undergo de-extinction. Unfortunately, not for long however, as the clone only lived for a few minutes
before passing away from a lung related birth defect. Unfortunately, this still would not have
led to bringing the species back permanent at the time, as the DNA was from a female
and any clones would have thus been female. DNA from a male of the species was not known
and the technologies involved with altering DNA to make a male ibex is still not within our grasp.
With alien DNA this would be infinitely harder because it’s, well, alien DNA. It’s
beyond highly unlikely anything could carry an alien to term on this world,
so our current methods of cloning won’t do. It would need to be entirely technologically done,
which is centuries in our future if at all, where an artificial gestation basically in a lab
could be done, or even 3d printed with advanced enough technology.
At the same time, should a scenario like that ever crop up, it seems unlikely that we’d actually want
to bring back a dead alien species, rather we might use the DNA instead to reconstruct a model
of what the alien species looked like. But there is another option.
DNA can really be called the ultimate storage medium for information.
So it could be that an artifact carries DNA, but it’s not DNA as we know it.
There may be no living creature there, rather it might be a natural storage medium for information
and a contact signal of sorts. This assumes that DNA is how all life in the universe works,
which if that’s the case than it might be a natural way for an alien to try to
communicate a hello message as opposed to radio signals or other intentional technosignatures.
And then there’s the idea of de-extinction of alien microbial life found in interstellar
meteorites. This is a new field, the first interstellar object passing through the solar
system was only identified a few years ago, but it shows that material from other star systems
can end up in our own and even be captured. Indeed, there are candidates for sporadic meteors
entering earth’s atmosphere that were moving such that they may have had an interstellar origin.
As a result, it’s possible that the remains of alien microbes could be found in an interstellar
meteorite, or if we were to rendezvous and take samples of an interstellar object.
The wisdom of resurrecting an alien microbe from millions of years ago set aside,
de-extinction is set to be a reality very soon. In addition to the mammoth, the pyrenean ibex and the
thylacine, other candidates for de-extinction on earth include the passenger pigeon,
the christmas island rat, a type of zebra called a quagga,
and a number of others. And there may be a very valid reason to practice de-extinction.
An example of this is the extinct flightless bird the Great Auk.
This bird has been extinct since the 19th century, and we basically hunted them to death.
In fact the last two specimens known to exist ended up being clubbed by sailors.
Unfortunately the DNA of this animal is old and degraded, which you really need a fresh sample
for cloning, but it might be possible to bring them back in some form by editing the genome of
a related species resulting in a similar but not genetically identical version of the Great Auk.
The reason to do it is that the extinction of this bird upset the apple cart as it were
in the local ecosystem, so reintroducing them in some form would be beneficial.
But it can also go the other way. Bringing back certain animals, especially ones that went extinct
in prehistory such as the mammoth, could lead to even more extinctions if the reintroduced
species were invasive or damaging to the current ecosystem that they would be introduced to.
As a result, there may never again be mammoths roaming the tundra on earth,
rather they might simply be relegated to zoos if it proves possible to bring
them back. The timeframe for plans for de-extinction of some species is short,
as soon as 2024 efforts to breed extinct animals back into existence may come to fruition.
Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier and be sure
to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to
my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting,
weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.