Old news? Bacteria are everywhere.
Not so old news? They’re plotting against you ‘n me from up above.
Mmmyep. Science says bacteria aren’t just down here on our counter surfaces and transported via supersecret handshakes and supercharged by poor antibiotic direction taking. They’re up there too (*points surreptitiously skyward*) Watching over us like alien gods. Studying us like ants under a magnifying glass.
While what they’re actually thinking up there is up in the air, what isn’t a mystery anymore is what they’re doing as they dance above us like stringed things on a baby’s mobile. My first reaction was to assume that it couldn’t be anything noteworthy. Like, they’re only up in the clouds ‘cause bacteria are in everything, including water, and water gets evaporated and ends up hovering over us as tomorrow’s billowy cotton-candy looking lies of the skies. Right?
Yes, but there’s more that I as a woman of science should’a known but didn’t think about.
And that’s the fact that bacteria rapidly multiply, which means they rapidly mutate, which means that when they’re in a new atmosphere – they can do ridiculous stuff. The ones who get sucked up to the celestial above, for instance, don’t just go stagnant. During their heavenly holiday, they sit atop the clouds, nomming on them like they are cotton candy (to be fair, there are some sugars in them, so five year old me wasn’t totally off). But it’s not like they’re just sitting there getting porky, though. They also spend their visit to the heavens gaining a fleek new microorganism armor. The armor comes in the form of polysaccharide chain mail that blocks out ultraviolet rays they’re more susceptible to up there. Good for them and not a problem so long as they stay in their cloud state of nirvana indefinitely. But they don’t. They rain back to earth like a winged Matt Damon to kick ass, take names, and laugh in the face of my antibacterial pump soap that I still buy in vain.
(‘cause for them, a sneeze is like a priest sprinkling holy water? Or semen? Or both?)
So, there you go. It’s not 100% our fault that these creatures have gone back to the lab and gotten jacked up in the gym. ‘cause apparently there’s a whole Eastern spiritual element we just can’t eff with – bacteria leave this earth, only to be rain-incarnated into bionic bugs that can kill us all when they rain down, with their reborn-identity.
Short of smiting these bastards in the skies where they reside, there may be no hope.
But, to be fair, we’re doing a good job of blowing a hole in the sky.
So maybe we can take ‘em out along with our ozone and ourselves.