Out-evolving coronavirus by evolving our own scientific ingenuity and social practices
Published Date: 6/2/2020
Source: phys.org
If there is one thing that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed, it is that there is much that we still don't know about the world around us. Forget about the trillions—okay, more than trillions—of galaxies in the universe that we'll never explore. Just at our feet or in the air around us are cohabitants of our own world—viruses—that occupy an odd liminal space, pushing our understanding of the meaning of life. They exist in what is effectively a hidden world, almost a "first Earth" that is both just offstage and right in front of us, and even inside of us. It's a world teeming with activity, full of blooming, buzzing confusion, competition, and evolution. Sometimes we explore this world intentionally, but at other times we run into it by accident, most noticeably when the alarms on one of the megafauna bio-detectors—people and animals—go off. It's when these encounters happen that we remember that the space of things we don't know is truly unfathomable.