Dead or Alive

launch had gone smoothly. Berescheet's lander separated from the rocket that had catapulted it into space. Then, for more than a month, it traced an elliptical orbit around the Earth, going further and further out until it could be captured by the Moon's gravity. Now, finally, the Bearsheet was sinking down toward an ancient volcanic field on the Moon, a place known as the Sea of Serenity. All of Israel was excited. The landing would be the culmination of years

of work. In Los Angeles, an entrepreneur called Nova Spevak was watching the landing on a live stream. He wasn't just a space fan. He had a lot at stake in the Bearasheet mission. It was the culmination of years of work for him too. He knew how it was supposed to go down. But then they were doing the landing maneuver, which basically involves rotating the spacecraft at high speed while it's kind of speeding towards the Moon. That maneuver is very precise and involves a lot of computer

controlled firings of different thrusters. Were the spacecraft try to enable the engine. All of a sudden there was an alert and things were flashing red on mission control in Israel, and we're seeing and something's wrong. We have the main engine back on. No, but it's not no, no I. A sensor is reporting data that can't be right. So either the sensors failed or the spacecraft is losing its orientation. The main engine is back on, but we have lost

communication with a spacecraft. Nova's heart was in his mouth because on board the Bearsheet was a library. You could say it was the library of Nova's dreams, a message in a bottle. The library was a backup of the world's knowledge. It was designed to be stable and robust, enough to last a billion years, a way of saying to future civilization, we were here and perhaps away for twenty first century humanity to cheat death. It was meant to survive eternity on the moon, but had it made

it there, nova had no way of knowing. Chersh hammersh ah bar. Two. This is Into the Zone, a podcast about opposites and how borders are never as clear as we think. I'm Harry Kunzru. We're at the last episode of the season and finally dealing with the biggest binary opposition of all. This is a story about knowledge and tiny animals. It's about dark ages and the darkness of space.

It's about viruses and permafrost and the strange things that can happen on the fuzzy border between life and its opposite. Not death, necessarily call it non life. They say you only die when the last person who remembers you is dead. If we could send memories of ourselves to the far future, wouldn't that be a little like making ourselves immortal. In nineteen thirty nine, as part of the New York World's Fair, the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company buried what it called

a time bomb under a Plaza in Queens. This rocket shaped container held a variety of everyday objects, such as a fountain pen, a set of alphabet blocks, and a pack of cigarettes. It also housed glass fials of seeds and a microfilm, a fancy new technology back then, with about ten million words of text and a few thousand pictures.

Westinghouse later changed the name of the time bomb to the much less fusing time capsule, And if you want to find out about it, you might want to listen to episode ten of My Fellow Pushkin Night Jill Lapaus show, The Last Archive. There's something irresistible about addressing oneself to the future. As a kid, I remember writing a message for a time capsule that was going to be buried outside the offices of a children's publisher. But time capsules

have always been a thing. Ancient Chinese emperors built armies to escort them to the afterlife. In seventeen ninety five, a bunch of freemasons, including former American revolutionaries Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, put a brass box inside the cornerstone of the new Massachusetts State House. Inside the box were newspapers, coins, and a silver plate engraved by Paul Revere himself, who was both a fast rider and a master silversmith, all of us Chinese emperors. Paul Revere me, we're trying to

do the same thing. We were trying to time travel. We were burying parts of ourselves as a way of reaching out into the future, transcending our normal lifespans. With the arrival of space exploration, people stopped just thinking about the future on Earth and began to wonder about how humanity should present itself to other intelligent life forms. What kind of cosmic dating profiles should we build to get

potential partners to swipe right? And after the invention of atomic weapons and the growing consciousness of the environmental crisis, we began to wonder seriously whether we'd be around to witness the future at all. This was the world in which Nova Spivak grew up. When I was about eight years old, somebody gave me a big green book. It was a blank, giant, eight hundred or a thousand page book, sort of a hard bound dictionary or encyclopedia, but completely blank,

and I thought that was just the greatest present. I was constantly thinking about what would I write in this book? Growing up in Boston in the nineteen seventies, Little Nova felt he had a special destiny. Not long after getting that gift, I had this vivid dream I was an adult during a time where some terrible environmental catastrophe took place that caused the authorities around the world to come to the conclusion that the air was not safe to breathe.

It's an epic science fiction novel of a dream in which he's one of a small number of people who survived the apocalypse and live in giant underground capsules. There were these giant concrete cylinders, I mean huge. Each one could have thousands of people living in many, many levels, and they were kind of drilled into the ground. In Nova's dream, which really earns this cosmic soundtrack, a long

time goes by. After a while, the giant cylinders begin to sink into the ground and most people are suffocated. Nova is one of a small group of survivors who make it out. He realizes he's amongst the last people alive who remember the world as it was before the disaster. That world doesn't exist, so what of it should we preserve and how and why? And so those discussions led to a decision to create a book of knowledge of

every other history of everything we knew. And in order to do that, you had to have a person whose role was to sort of be in charge of that project, and that person was me. That person was known as the Keeper of the Book. Then in Nova's dream, he dies and he gets reborn, and he dies and he's reborn again. Like I said, it's an epic dream. And then in my next life in the dream, um I

who I was the next Keeper of the Book. And then it started speeding up, and then I saw life after life flashing by it high speed, like maybe a hundred of them, and I could see everything about that whole life. But it was like that, And then I just couldn't remember it would be, and I saw I was like this lineage of Keepers of the Book going off into the future. Finally, little Nova has a vision of a guy with a long beard living in some

kind of hut cave. It's a far future version of himself, Keeper of the Book, the last guardian of the knowledge of civilization. By now you're probably getting a picture of Nova. He's hyperactive, driven, talkative, the kind of guy who probably gets his way in negotiations just by wearing the other person out. His day job is tech entrepreneur, but he's also a utopian, someone who finds other worlds more interesting than this one, though this one has made him rich.

You know, I did a lot of work on open encyclopedias, used the Wikipedia really intensely, worked on darkast Kalo project, organized knowledge and build intelligent ages later became series built data and analytics companies or natural language processing. Built all these tools. Adult Nova got to thinking about what would happen to all that knowledge if something went wrong. Now, maybe he could do something about it. He could be

a real keeper of the book. We need to make a long term copy of the Wikipedia that also can never be destroyed and that will be found in the distant future, like a backup copy. That got me thinking about how to send the Wikipedia to the Moon. I realized, well, why not put it on the moon? Backing up humanity on the moon sounds like a wise idea. Particularly these days,

our systems and societies feel ever more fragile. If a catastrophe does happen, maybe our knowledge can go into hibernation and then be resurrected to help build a new civilization in the future. Like how the classical texts copied and preserved by dark age monks eventually kickstarted the Renaissance. No Va Spivak calls the Lunar Library humanity's gift to the future. He thinks humanity can become bigger through the physical act

of flinging its knowledge into space. Like I was just a sort of spack on a planet, but now my footprint is as wide as the Solar System. It's a different feeling, and I think everybody should have that feeling because it changes our sense of self. You know, that's important. If you really want to have a multiplanetary civilization, you've got to make people feel like they're part of a multiplanetary civilization. It's inspiring, isn't it. This intergalactic team building.

Nova's vision of transcending the limits of time and space builds on some of the most famous projects of the twentieth century. In nineteen seventy seven, around the time Young Nova was dreaming his epic dream, the two Voyager spacecraft were launched, each carrying a Golden record, essentially a very durable version of a vinyl LP. They held messages of

greeting from humanity to the rest of the universe. We step out of our Solar system into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon to be taught, if we are fortunate, this version of us, the Voyager Record, has already traveled beyond the Solar system. It's a penpal letter to the cosmos, a few lines about who we are and what we care about. But no Va. Spivak wanted to send out more than

a few lines. He wanted to send all of it, all human knowledge, the whole thing preserved on the Moon. But first he got involved in history's most ridiculous mission to Mars Nova. Spivak wanted to build a lunar library to back up the world's knowledge and give human civilization a future among the stars. He set up a nonprofit he called Arc Mission, a play on Arc and Archive.

Since nineteen seventy seven and the days of Voyager and the Golden Record, the technology of data storage has improved beyond all measure, but the basic questions are the same. What do you send and how do you send it? Digital storage is cheap and plentiful, but it has its limits. How can you be sure that your hard drive won't be corrupted by unshielded radiation and space. How can you be sure that aliens or future humans will even understand

what you've created. You need something that will last. That was the thinking behind Golden records, durable analog materials, preferably made of something rare to signify value to an alien race. Novaspivack hit on quartz glass. It's super hard. They use it to make spacecraft windows, and he met a guy who knew how to use a laser to etch unbelievably tiny images into it. They estimated an etched ball of quartz glass would last fourteen billion years, which seemed like

enough time even to them. The question was what should they put on it. A science fiction saga, the three volumes of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy Etched in Glass. When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, and I was into Asimov's Foundation trilogy partly because they were the only books that had a lead character called Hurry.

In Foundation, Hurry Selden is a future super scientist who invents a discipline called psychohistory, which is basically making models or projects based on loads of data about the past. You can see why he'd be appealing to tech guys. In the novel, Harry Seldon lives in a time of decadence. The Galactic Empire is collapsing. Using psychohistory, Harry Selden produces what he calls the Seldon Plan and which I call the hurry Seldon Plan, a project to determine the right

time and place to set up a new society. If he gets it right, it will shorten the coming Galactic dark Age by thousands of years. And it was through the Foundation Novels that Nova Spivak made a connection with another Asimov fan and god involved in the most springbreakish mission in the history of spaceflight. One day, Nova was scrolling through the Twitter feed of Elon Musk. Musk was going to use his cherry red Tesla as a dummy

payload to test out his new Fulcan heavy rocket. His plan was to slingshot his car so it crashed landed on Mars. Here's Elon describing the first convertible to exit our atmosphere. It just has the same seats that like a normal car has. It's just literally a normal car in space, which I kind of like the absurdity of that. I just happened to be there watching when it happened, and I tweeted back to him and threw a bunch of friends as well. Dear Elon, you know you can

find the tweet. I did find the tweet, Nova says, dear Elon, we made you a data crystal that lasts fourteen billion years, containing Asimov's Foundation trilogy wait less than five grams, and we sent it along on the ride to Mars, and Musk replies, Asimov's Foundation books should definitely be part of the mission. They're amazing. We then had to get to his officer trying to make that really happen. For months, Nova and his team couldn't even get Musk's

people to respond to his messages. Finally, they made contact through a random friend of a friend, and Musk agreed to meet. It was the most important pitch of Nova's life. Eventually, he looks up. His assistant is sitting there. She's kind of breathlessly with us, and he looks up. He says, who are you? What is this? What is this about? I've got real work to do. Get out. At that moment, Nova knew that if he didn't get Musk's attention right

there and then it was all over. So forget the presentation. Forget the fancy pedestal. I just whipped the thing out, dropped the crystal in his desk, and I say, that is the Foundation Trilogy. He's like, that's the Foundation Trilogy. Yeah. That He's like, what is its crystal? It's quarts crystal. You know, we wrote the Foundation Trilogy into it with a femto second laser and you agreed to take it to Mars on Twitter and then a spark of recognition

appeared to light in Elon Musk's brain. Maybe he did remember something about that, you know. He thinks it's like a gift and we're like, no, that's like a million dollars. Okay, sorry, but no. So I like grabbing it back from him and he's like grabbing He's like, no, it's mine. I'm keeping it. I'm like, no, you're taking it to Mars. He's like, no, I'm putting it in my personal library.

I have a collection of stuff. And I realized, okay, fuck it, and I pull out one of the other ones from my pocket and I say, look, fine, it's a deal. If you take this one to Mars, I'll give you another one for your library. And he's like deal. When the Falcon Heavy launched elon Musk's Tesla into space. In the driver's seat was a mannequin dressed in a spacesuit. It was called Starman after the David Bowie song, and in the car's glove compartment was a ball of quartz glass.

Novas Bevac's first prototype ARC was one of those great moments in life. The plan was to crash land the Tesla onto the surface of Mars, but they missed, sending the car into a thirty million year orbit around the Sun. Bottom line is by missing Mars. Ultimately, it became the longest lasting library in human history and the first in space. Because three bucks is a library small, but it is

a library. It is a library, a library in a car that has now exceeded its thirty six thousand mile warranty thirty two thousand and four and twenty eight times while driving around the Sun. The ARC that Nova Spivak would send up to the Moon on the Bearacheet mission was much more ambitious. The ARC mission had found a way to etch tiny photographic images onto nickel readable by

an ordinary optical microscope. Using this technology, they made a sort of sandwich with twenty five very thin nickel sheets. The first four were fully analoged and contained many thousands of pages of text and photographs. They also contained instructions on how to read the other twenty one, which were DVD masters etched using the same technology. It's a very clever design. Each layer gets more complex and teaches you how to read the next. So what did they put

on it? Wikipedia? Sure, but more than Wikipedia. When you're in the business of backing up all human knowledge, you have to ask what knowledge is worth while. This problem came up on the Voyage Emission too. When it was launched carrying the Golden Records, there were some disagreements about what to include. A panel was convened to decide, headed

by the famous astronomer Carl Sagan. The record included some pictures encoded in the same way as digital information can be sent over a phone line using an analog modem. The Voyager pictures show all sorts of things and all sorts of people. The music is pretty great, probably because one of the people choosing it was Alan Lomax, the famous sound recordist and preserver of folk culture. But there

were problems. Sagan and his committee wanted to include a photograph of a naked man and woman, but seventies America couldn't handle it, and the photo had to be replaced by a line drawing. Somehow, the drawing, which was intended to be racially ambiguous, got Caucasianized, and even the drawing was too much for some old NASA bureaucrat who insisted that a small vertical line be removed so that the woman would not appear to have genitals. A bean was fine, apparently,

but not Evolver. As a result, this wonderful example of misogyny has recently exited the Solar system. Nova Spivak has thought a lot about how to avoid misinforming aliens about sex. To us, it might have been an artwork, but to them they form an entire scientific theory about life on Earth, which reproduces a sexually. In his space library, Nova included crowdsourced material and a copy of something called the Rosetta Disc,

an archive of one thousand, five hundred World languages. Archmission is a private organization, so they had to attract sponsors. Some space on the tiny Nickel Library was allocated to private archives and to a time capsule for the Israeli Space Agency. Nova also approached his friend, the fantastic, the formidable, the entirely flat, a guesting mister David Copperfield, and he created a library of the secrets to all of his magic,

the magic of David Copperfield, starting David Cornfield. I'm somehow not surprised that Nova as friends with David Copperfield. These tricks of his, they're not just tricks, they're engineering achievements, and there's a lot of science and technology behind it. All of that is in one of our vaults. Some of the space library, including Copperfield's magic, tell all his secret, but Nova promises none of it's naughty. He did not send pawn into space. But there is physical stuff in

the library. We got some artifacts that were from sacred caves or at special religious monuments, or even from the bones of some saints, and a little piece of the body tree and it might just be a piece of sand from a shrine or another place of religious significance. They were at it, they thought they'd attached some actual living things. Tardi grades are microscopic eight legged creatures that

were first seen by an eighteenth century German biologist. He thought they looked like little bears, and sometimes they're still cooled water bears. They're puffy and have tiny claws and are weirdly cute, which is unusual. Most micro animals tend to look like they've come out of a horror movie. Tardi grades have been around almost six hundred million years.

When times are tough, like a sudden drop in temperature, they shared ninety five percent of the water in Their fat little bodies then go into a state called cryptobiosis, which literally means hidden life. In this state, they're almost impossible to kill. Nova Spivak's team encased some dehydrated Tardi grades in resin and attached them to the package. The Tarte grades and the library were shot into space, or

at least that's what I read. Almost every article written about the mission mentions the Tardi grades living creatures on the Moon. It was the big story. But when I asked Nova about it, what Tarte grades? You're denying that widespread reports that Tartar grades were part of the library. I can neither confirm nor deny that there are Tartar grades.

I believe there are, but actually the way we did it, it was like flipping a coin where one side is put Tartar grades, or maybe put Tartar grades, and the other side is I have no idea. At this point, I'm finding the conversation very weird. When I say the story about the Tarte grades was everywhere, I mean everywhere. It was the first thing I heard about Nova or the art mission. So was noa just ballshitting me? Why was he being so kg Well? Perhaps because of what happened.

As the Bearasheet was descending towards the Moon, the scientists in Israel that were conducting the mission realized that one of the engines had stopped firing. They only had a few seconds to think. They decided to reboot the engine. That that caused the whole system to reboot. We seem to have a problem with our main engine. We are resetting the spacecraft. Try to enable the engine. We have the main engine back on it. No, but it snug No. No,

The basheet lander crashed, crashed on the Moon. Then the Israelis sent a blurry, low resolution picture which showed a new crater on the Sea of Serenity. The lander or its wreckage was too small to see. The thing is if the library had been broken open, then it was possible that Tardi grades had been scattered on the surface of the Moon. I'm pretty sure that wasn't supposed to happen. The Tardi grades were supposed to be enclosed in resin sleeping soundly as part of a reference library, not just

hanging out in the sea of serenity. Were they alive, could they come out of their suspended state and revive. There's no water on the Moon, so it's highly unlikely. But if you look at it a certain way, because of the ARC mission, there is probably now life on the Moon. Life on the Moon. It's like the beginning of a Golden Age science fiction story. Nova knows very well, and a myth is what his project needs to get

another chance. So yes, let's say the Art mission has put life on the Moon, but not everyone thinks that was Nova's decision to make. The reason Nova' Spevak is being so post truth about whether the tar degrades are on the Moon is because they got him into trouble. It turns out that he didn't tell anyone they were on board. If they were in fact on board, certainly

he didn't tell the Israeli government. While there's no actual law prohibiting biological material being landed on the Moon, the fact that Nova did it without seeking governmental approval has some people worried. Even if the tar degrades aren't going to come alive and colonize the Moon, shouldn't there be some kind of official record of what we've put into space?

Of course, if you think that all sorts of weird and dangerous hasn't been put into space with governmental approval, and then I have an unshielded nuclear reactor to sell you, or a cherry red tesla orbiting the Sun, you ask a simple question like is there now life on the Moon, and instead of an answer, you get back some microscopic creatures that may or may not be there in a

state that may or may not be called life. When I started thinking about Nova, Spivak's crash landed library and the tardigrades on the Moon, the first thing I thought was, this sounds like the sort of thing Sophia is into. My name is Sophia Roost, and I'm a historian and anthropologist of the modern life sciences. I met Sophia when we were both fellows at the American Academy in Berlin.

I was working on my novel read Pill. Sophia was doing something mysterious involving dead things and the Arctic Circle. We had to eat dinner with our fellow fellows every night, and over several months I got to know her pretty well. She has a dry sense of humor and a very particular set of intellectual interests. Sophia likes to watch scientists doing stuff. She's interested in how they understand the concepts they use, such as the concept of life. We will

think we know what life is. It's the opposite of death, but beyond that, it turns out to be very difficult to define. When I went looking for the scientifically accepted definition of life, I found not one or two, but one hundred and twenty three different definitions. More than it being a difficult thing to define it, I would say that the question of what is life is a really generative question, and has been for quite a long time. That's a very Sophiaish answer. She's basically telling me not

to fall into a hole. She and her colleagues have already been down there and reported back. What we've found is that life tends to be defined according to certain kinds of things that people find value, but at a specific moment in time. So when you look at the way people have understood what life is. It actually says a lot about what we think about, what we value, what we care about, instead of defining life. Sofia tells

me a story. It takes place in seventeen eighty five in the Duke of Tuscany's famous Cabinet of Curiosities, where the ruler keeps his collection of natural wonders. The cabinet has all the stuff you'd expect to find in such a place, skeletons, trays of bugs and butterflies, wax models of anatomical curiosities, strange things, and jars. The court physician, a man named Felici Fontana, is doing some secret experiments

with a visiting French philosoph called Charles Dupati. So the question that was trying to be answered in this experiment was where does wheatlight come from? Tusk and farmers would save wheat from one season to the next, even though it all looked the same, some crops would get blint

and some wouldn't. What was causing it? What Fontana had found and was that you could take a little drop of water and put it on the tip of a needle and bring it close to the grain of wheat, and if there were eelworms in the grain of wheat, even if they were desiccated, dry, seemingly dead, they would be revived by the freshness of the water and would begin to move around again. So this solved the mystery of wheat blight. Tiny worms, But how is it possible

for them to come alive in this way? This seemed to Dupatian to Fontana as well, to be not just a sign that the eelworms had been paused right, that they were hibernating to use a modern term, and were revived, but that they were actually resurrected. They had been dead

and were now alive again. And Dupati asked Fontana why he hadn't reported this, and Fontana, who was practicing Catholic as many people were at the time, said that he was worried that he would be excommunicated by the Church, because Christ can be resurrected, but eelworms cannot resurrection, a

power that for a religious Catholic belongs to God, not man. Cryptobiosis, the state of suspended animation that Tarte grades go into, may not be resurrection in the way a Catholic would understand it, but it's a state that raises profound questions about the definition of life. If an organism isn't doing any of the things we associate with life, moving around, eating, growing, can we really say it's alive? If a dead thing can come back to life, was it ever really dead?

This isn't the first time that Tarte grades have been sent into space. I've written about some work that was done by the Italian Space Agency. They took some Tartar grades from leaf litter in Modna and put those into low Earth orbit for about two weeks, and while they were in orbit, they were able to lay eggs. Those eggs hatched and more Tarte grades came out, so in

that sense that they're already extraterrestrials. There were also tartegrades that were left outside where they were exposed to radiation and extreme temperatures and vacuum of space, and those were also resurrected. Brought that to all out, and as I said, resurrected instead of revived, I promised to fear I'd cut that out the slip into religious language, but it's a perfect example of how tricky it is to think about the border between life and death, or life a non life.

Imagine your Fellychif Fontana and Chel du Petit working in secret in the Duke of Tuscany's personal museum. Imagine knowing what the experiment is telling you, that dead creatures come to life again. Imagine knowing that you can't publish your findings because it shows you casually exercising God's greatest power, the power to animate dead matter, to give it an anima Latin for soul. It's our own new parlor tek right, sent tartegots into space and see how they do when

they get back. It has that same kind of factor of wonder. But I mean, what does that tell us about the nature of life. There's this expectation of linearity, right, that life begins and it proceeds along one trajectory and then it ends, and once it ends, it stays ended. What if life isn't one half of an opposition, but a word for something that just increases in intensity, like turning a dial. And what if it turns out that the line of life can be dotted rather than continuous.

The next time I speak with Sophia, she tells me about the time she went to the far North, to an Arctic land called Spalbud, and it's only town long year Bien outside of lanyere Bien. You need to have a gun license because of polar bearers. Polar bears do come into the town regularly, and a lot of people in land Urbean carry a rifle, but everyone who leaves the perimeter of the town needs to have one with them. So in that sounds, I guess slightly more exotic than

other places. Sophia was there to visit the Spalbird Global Seed volt the world's largest archive of agricultural crops. Swalbud is the work of Carrie Fowler, the conservationist from Memphis, Tennessee, who was active in the Civil rights movement as a young man. He was present for Martin Luther King's last speech, I've Been to the Mountaintop. Fowler has many of the same preoccupations as Nova Spivak, that mix of utopian pragmatism.

He's another keeper of the book. The knowledge he cares about is stored in the crops we plant, the work

of generations and generations of farmers. He determined that actually most of the world seed banks were in places that were quite dangerous either for geopolitical reasons, or climentological ones, and proposed putting a vault buried deep within the permafrost below this mountain that I mentioned, Platyburget Mountain, that would be able to maintain an ambient temperature that would keep the seeds frozen for centuries even if the power has

gone out on civilization. I suppose I should mention that I've been talking to Sophia during the early days of COVID. We're both working from home. You'd probably hear our children in the background. It's a scary time, and every conversation makes its way back to one thing. Well, Viruses in

general are funny things. For as long as we've known about viruses, they've been these limits all objects more than anything else, I would say, the thing that straddles the division between life and death, or life and non life. My favorite definition of virus comes from this guy named Peter Medawar, who sort of mid twentieth century biologists who did a lot of work on graph versus host disease, but he was also a really prolific science writer, and he said that a virus is a piece of bad

news wrapped up in protein, which is timely right. Viruses depend on the host cells they infect to reproduce themselves. They hijack that cell's metabolism and use it to make copies, and a number of scientists realized that there were probably bodies beneath perma frost and various parts of the Arctic Circle or slightly below the Arctic Circle that would still

have extant nineteen eighteen flu in them. They sampled brain tissue, lung tissue, liver, and brought all of those samples back to the laboratory, and what they found was that there was still significant pieces of nineteen eighteen flu rna that could be sequenced and pieced back together, and in the lung tissue when it was warmed back to ambient temperature body temperature in the laboratory, the same bacteria that were

in the lungs came back to life. On her trip to the Arctic Circle, Sophia went to visit the cemetery where scientists had exsumed the bodies of seven miners who died of the flu. She wandered the mountainside until she found the graves, seven white crosses, almost invisible against the snow. At the time, she was looking for traces of the past. Little did she know she was getting a glimpse of the future. The nineteen eighteen strain of the flu in all likelihood is something that, as we know it is

incredibly virulent. It's something that now people are comparing COVID to write is it more virulent? Is it more deadly? How contagious is it? Right now, viruses are on our minds, but there are other things lurking in the permafrost, and with global warming, the idea that they might come back to haunt us is no longer hypothetical. There's smallpox virus from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that is still around

in the permafrost. And then there are also a lot of diseases that we don't know about because they were around before we were. Recently, a frozen wooly mammoth which was about twenty thousand years old was thought and the bacteria that had killed it we're still alive in the mammoth tissue. Of all the borders I've explored in this season, between natives and migrants east and west, the real and the virtual, none is as fundamental as the boundary between

life and death, and none is as ambiguous. Life isn't one half of an opposition, but an intensity that's dialed up and down, moving through a gray zone that we don't know how to name. Things can be alive than dead, than alive again, millions of seeds under an Arctic mountain, dormant viruses in the permafrost, a library on the moon.

Maybe one day we'll understand or just accept that gray zone, and with that understanding, we'll be able to extend humanity's future in time and space, to send ourselves orbiting around the Sun with all human knowledge and a little crystal ball. What then, who would we be? What would we be? In thinking these thoughts, sometimes we feel like experimenters in a grand Duke's cabinet of curiosities, holding a drop of

water on a pin, whispering forbidden words like resurrection. Into the Zone is produced by Rider Also and Hunter Braithway. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for this episode composed by Issy or Campo, also known as Student. Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Petinatti, also known as Lipp Talk Special. Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, head of Fine John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,

Emily Rostick, and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The best way to do this is by rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review and for a Spotify playlist of songs that inspired this episode. You can find me on Twitter at at Harry Kunzru. I'm fantastic, the formidable, the entirely flabbergast. Hurry Kunzrum, See you next time.