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Not nearly as much as you're implying
The storyline, and even the first picture do mirror a lot of doomsday/virus/zombie/etc plots. I'm sure that occurs to just about everyone that reads it. A pointer to some credible source as to why it's not dangerous might be interesting. Even being somewhat reasonable, scary things like prions do exist.
What is the researcher wearing in the first photograph? It looks like a lead smock for radiation protection, but those bags have gaps between them so that doesn't seem likely. Sample containers?
It's a ice jacket. Temperatures in those caves can reach up to 58 °C (136 °F).
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It would also be clearer if "looking for extremophiles" were moved to an earlier position in the sentence. Here's how I would word it: Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years looking for extremophiles in the Naica Mine. The mine, located in Chihuahua, Mexico, contains caves as large as cathedrals.
This is tangential at best, but a) I've been thinking about it for some time and b) someone reading this thread may actually know: why are there differences in punctuation rules between languages? Comma placement before certain words in a particular situation, hyphen-related rules, quoting, and so on - there may be differences even within a single language, and differences between languages are even bigger. How come?…
There's a popular meme about it:
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That's the joke.
can you please help us by explaining the joke (of an updated renamed Chesterton's fence)?
My working hypothesis, though, is that this is mostly funny because of the conjuction between the familiar and the unfamiliar. There is then a second layer of funniness to do with absurdity.
So, Chesterton's Fence is a bit of a meme (in the original sense) on HN now. I've seen it come up a few times, as something people consider obscure, but are eager to share, because it's interesting. I assumed that people would recognise it. The re-formulation as a piece of Kryptonian philosophy (Zal-Tar is the scientist guy from the 1984 Supergirl film) about something fantastical and over-the-top like an ancient evil trapped in a crystal, on the other hand, is unfamiliar. There's something about the superposition of the two that is funny.
However, that feeds immediately into absurdity, because my re-formulation is rubbish; it's entirely unconvincing, and fails to disguise the origin of the quote. But that makes it more funny, because now you think i'm an idiot. Except you know i'm not really an idiot (well, something like that), you recognise that i'm playing at being an idiot. That isn't a universal element of all comedy, but it's something i personally lean on a lot - if you can make a really obviously silly statement the right way, either deadpan or hyperbolic, it can be funny.
I'm reminded of "You've not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.":
As an aside, I find it deeply, poetically beautiful that the world has giant crystal caves.
Naica Mine is a beautiful place, wish I could be inside some day. I've read that is not accessible to public in general due to constant water flow that has to be drained and a very high humidity.
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can you please help us by explaining the joke (of an updated renamed Chesterton's fence)?
You know, i'm not sure i can explain the joke. I can explain what i wrote, but not why it's funny (if indeed it is). As far as i know, we don't really understand what 'funny' actually is. My working hypothesis, though, is that this is mostly funny because of the conjuction between the familiar and the unfamiliar. There is then a second layer of funniness to do with absurdity. So, Chesterton's Fence is a bit of a meme…