[Pearls Before Swine]

So much for that clean, fresh mountain air.

[Red Badger]

Ping!..............

[jimtorr]

I call humbug. Millions of people live at those altitudes in Colorado alone.

[z3n]

"... the organisms included several potential human pathogens..."

The key weasel word here is "potential".

That's sensationalist BS!

Microbiology really doesn't work that way. If it's natural habitat is airborn 3000 meters in the sky, it's not going to make the jump to a parasitic relationship with a warm, ground-level, moderately anaerobic biological host environment.
Most microbes are so specialized they don't even jump from similar species hosts, let alone from distant and extreme environments. Most

[9YearLurker]

Oh, noes! C19 spike proteins floating in space!

[sphinx]

When did 1-3,000 meters become high altitude? 1,000 meters is common enough on the Appalachian Trail. Plenty of the Rockies are above 3,000 meters. I guess we should mask up to go hiking.

[Getready]

Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinghe postulated that microbial life could be transplanted between planets by being included in dust particles, micrometeorites or other stone fragments. Modern folk call it lithopanspermia...usually caused by high impact events.
Now,,,if we find organisms in space or other planets we may not be sure they evolved there. From what I understand. Hoyle was convinced that life on earth was seeded from space as he saw the chances of life evolving here on Earth from raw elements impossible without intelligent intervention. He never tried to answer the question of where exactly did life actually evolve from. Some research group wants funding...

[clearcarbon]

"Living the High Life: Scientists Discover Odd, Potentially Dangerous Lifeforms Thriving High in Earth’s Atmosphere

They get a little more ultra-violet light exposure up there.

[ifinnegan]

There’s bacteria everywhere.

Threats From Above hardly sounds like a name for a scientific project.

[DouglasKC]

While I’m sure this is true I wonder why the tone of the article is how dangerous this is. It seems like if they’ve been there for so long they’ve always been dangerous. Is this how they’re going to epxlain the next deadly virus that requires a lockdown?

[Hot Tabasco]

The govt. always screws everything up. Everything was fine until they banned CFC’s in order to save the ozone layer.

[TalBlack]

Well since these things have always presumably been there doing what they do we KNOW their effect on humans.

[WeaslesRippedMyFlesh]

I heard they were potentially safe.

[MayflowerMadam]

Well duh. Why wouldn’t microbes be there? They’re everywhere else. (I could be a scientist, I think - LOL!)

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

Red; In the late 1960s I read a Sci-Fi story about a girl who was able to see transparent paramesium type creatures floating and moving around in the air. (Feet and yards long, not microscopically small.) Some were floating across the fields others up with the clouds in the sky. She had some visual capability at some spectrum that allowed her to see them when others could not. It was something like this:

p THE SKY IS ALIVE Are Many UFOs Atmospheric Creatures?

I can see high atmosphere bacteria and viruses but Ufos as sky creatures seem dubious.

[Beowulf9]

Ping