There's also another similar long-term experiment being performed on the International Space Station [0]. It's not finished yet but apparently preliminary results [1] suggest that microorganisms can possibly be lifted into the upper atmosphere from the oceans somehow. They found different planktonic species from all over the world on the outer surface of the space station, which is hard to explain by spacecraft contamination on the ground or during the flight alone.
An armchair explanation might be that a hurricane or tornado might be able to do this. Water spouts have scooped up fish into the sky only to dump them on land hundreds of miles from shore.
In Ben Rich's book about the Skunkworks, one of the aircraft (U2? SR71?) was encountering high-altitude insect impacts on their windshields. Turns out they'd been lofted up there by nuclear tests.
I think one of the things that still blows my mind is how quickly they went from concept to first flight on the U2 (18 months?). That's the kind of things a well-focused, finely-tuned, well-funded, "cut the bullshit" engineering organization can accomplish.
You don't really need a hurricane. A regular thunder storm will lift stuff pretty high and then I guess they would mix with the jet stream and the like.
Interesting. I wonder if some extreme events could have kicked up enough microorganisms that some even went to the moon! That would be a false positive for finding life on the moon.
Fun little fact: you can fit pretty much exactly all the planets in the Solar system between the Earth and the Moon. More precisely, the eccentricity of the Moon’s orbit is small, about 5.5%. The sum of the diameters of all the planets is a number in the interval between the lowest and highest distance between Moon and Earth, i.e. between 363k km and 405k km.
We find rocks from the Moon and from Mars[0] on earth, and have reason to believe that small pieces of rock travel from most inner solar system bodies to most others.
I find it totally believable that some micro organisms could survive the ride on such rocks and possibly thrive on other bodies, if the environment is suitable.
Depends on how fast the magma cooled. There are life forms which can handle up to 122°C and still actively reproduce. Look up hyperthermophiles for more info.
When the magma has cooled enough the rock would be in space or in the upper mars atmosphere at least, not touching anything.
Anything growing on mars surface would burn, only an hypothetical floating microbe could land in this rock after cooling, but would be like expecting a bacteria landing in a bullet, surviving the impact and then sticking to the surface whereas still alive (and much later surviving a second impact against earth after years in outer space). Seems unprobable.
Well that is an interesting result. Also bodes well for the pan spermia crowd, they are the ones that think an asteroid impact can bring life to a planet and kick off the whole life cycle. Certainly the center of an icy mass probably stays well within the survival parameters of these forms of mold.
Also interesting to see if we can deduce the DNA changes that lead to this resistance. It would be an advantage for astronauts to be highly resistant to x-rays and other DNA damaging events.
Of course I always think of "The Andromeda Strain" when I read things like this. At least this mold doesn't seem to "eat" radiation for energy.
Random observation: I guess the Canadians spell mold as 'mould' ?
This comment: "at some point (and $) you lose the fire to write."
I had noticed the same thing with another author. And at the time I was working with Jerry Pournelle[1] helping him with things he didn't need or want to do with his BYTE column. I asked Jerry about it. His response was fairly enlightening so I share it here.
Jerry said that writers were arrogant, and in their arrogance they despise editors because editors tell them what they wrote doesn't read well, or isn't necessary for the story, or has the wrong character point of view and demand that the writer rewrite it. When a writer is young and hungry, they do this because they have to, if they don't they won't get published. But if they become successful, they get more sway with the publisher. At some point they have enough sway to override what the editor says and have them publish it the way they wrote it. And that is when you find out if they are a good writer, or if they are only a good story teller and without an editor their writing is sub par.
That made so much sense to me at the time and it was also the basis for Jerry's oft used phrase which was the secret of good writing was re-writing.
Essentially the same argument about a band's lead singer going onto a solo career.
Were they the main component of success? Or simply the most visible participant?
My rationale has always been that writing (or art in general) is hard. And that people are lazy. And that few people able to afford not working hard are still willing to pursue it with the same dedication.
But I really like your idea too. "The invisible team" makes a lot of sense.
Ghostwriters. They are such a norm that I wouldn't take any wealthy author on their word about them. Some call them them "assistants" or "editors" but the reality is that, if you can afford it, there is nothing stopping anyone from hiring a team to do the actual writing. And we all accept it.
See "The Art of the Deal". He says he wrote it. He genuinely believes he wrote it. Some people think talking to the ghostwriter, giving them the broad strokes and signing off on the final work, constitutes 'writing a book'. It is not that different than saying "I built a hotel".
> Goodreads Author Patti Roberts would like to know if you work with a ghostwriter.
> DS: It's a shocking question. I've been asked by my fans, "Who writes your books? Does someone help you?" And I said something to my editor not long ago, "It's so insulting that people would even say that." She said, "Yeah, but you are one of the few authors left who doesn't use somebody." There is a very, very famous best-selling author who has apparently eight writers. He writes the outlines, gives them chapters to write, and doesn't write his own books—I was so shocked. And there is not just one. I don't know if the public knows that or not. Maybe I'm the last idiot on the planet, up until 4:30 in the morning typing my own work. It's just incredible. Then you are not a writer; you are some sort of scriptwriter. Nobody writes my stuff. I find it a shocking concept. It's different if a celebrity wants to write their memoirs, and they have no writing ability. OK, then they use a ghostwriter. Otherwise it's like becoming a tennis pro and having a stunt double. What's the point of that?
She's also well known for her decades-long habit of spending 20 hours a day working on a book.
Maybe (and likely) there already exist intelligent alien life forms capable of living in the radiation and vacuum of outer space and migrates from planet to planet, even feed on radiation like Gozila does.
"The research touches on this, and it warns astronauts to follow recommended planetary protection protocols designed to prevent visiting spacecraft from contaminating other planets and moons in our solar system with microorganisms from Earth. The study suggests that, because of the risk of contamination, these fungal spores may need to be considered a more serious threat."
This makes me wonder if we've accidentally already started terraforming Mars.
Seriously, is this a threat or is it the unexpected boon of getting a jump-start on terraforming? If you could press a button and "contaminate" Mars with life that would start spreading and generating an oxygen atmosphere, wouldn't you?
Yes I would; if you think it a useful idea for humans to become a multiplanetary species, then it seems to me just as important that life itself be multiplanetary.
And that we ought to be spamming as much life as we can, the hardiest Earth organisms, as far as we can onto any body where they stand a chance of taking hold - Venus, Europa, Martian poles, comets, lobbing things at distant stars with planets intending them to crash land. If humans can't make it off Earth, something might be able to, and it needs our help.
Well, the thing that sets living stuff apart from non-living seems to be the ability to sustain life (usually in the form of offspring). From this we can infer the purpose of life to be keeping life alive.
Spreading live across the universe being a good way to keep some of it going seems plausible. I'd obviously prefer intelligent beings like humans doing so, since so far evolution indicates this development path to have the best chances long term. But if not possible or too costly, spreading the next closest thing to us that is possible makes sense. At least as a form of backup. And sending microbes seem quite easy...
Well, that is obvious. Because causality works backwards and because we need conscious observers everywhere to make sure the laws of nature turn out just right for the universe to exist.
I didn't claim either of those things; if your counter-point is something better than "hurr durr humans are a cancer we deserve to die, we ruin everything" then I'd be interested to hear it. But if that is your counter, then I don't want to hear it.
But, the universe has been getting more complex all the time - every stage of its history over billions of years has moved towards more things, more complex interactions, more abstract organizations - fundamental forces splitting off, plasmas, galaxies and stars, fusion and heavy elements, solids and liquids and planetary systems, chemistry tectonics and weather systems and day/light cycles, LIFE, multi-celled life, biological systems and their interaction with weather, communication, socialization, organization, co-operation, industrialization, it just gets more abstract and more involved.
Unless you think a God exists and put a barren radiated rock somewhere for a good reason, then you may as well conclude that the universe is trying to get more complex. Like you can say that humans moved grass over the ocean for our own benefit, you can also interpret it that grass got humans to move it over the ocean for grass's long term survival benefit. There is only one known life-o-sphere and if one-day it is going to outside Earth, it needs a highly intelligent species to appear and move all the rest of it. That could be us, it could be why it looks like we're screwing up the planet - because long term, the point is not for us to stay here as bucolic agriculturalists, but to be an ignition chamber for something (probably silicon) to burst out and go forth.
What makes it our job is that nobody else can. Whales cannot do it. Cows cannot do it. Oak trees and crickets and fungus and cockroaches and E.coli aren't going to. Only humans can escape Earth intentionally, so humans have the obligation to do that on behalf of all life.
Compare how many humans think life is important (a lot), with how many humans think it important that Mercury stay barren until it gets swallowed by the Sun at the end of its fuel supply (the number of people who have even considered the idea in all human history, rounds to zero).
What makes it important? WE make it important, because - in the absense of a deity giving orders to us - who else can give meaning to anything, except humans? If nothing else, a more populated universe would be more interesting for us. Eventually.
It would mean you have a much harder time finding out if Mars once had life, if instead you're detecting mold that hitched a ride with your spacecraft.
I think you're right, this is the best argument against.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy[0] deals with this a great deal, the early scientists pretty quickly devolve into two camps, terraformers and preservationists. There's a lot of other things going on as well, but this is one subplot.
At one point in the book, a terraformer made the argument if we discovered life on Mars we'd never know how or when it got there anyway. The monkeys in South America are an interesting parallel - total mystery. Best hunch is that some survivable population "rafted" across the Atlantic at some point - under conditions somehow rare enough to have happened exactly once in 40 million years.
KSR doesn't explicitly take a side, but seems to think that terraforming will be inevitable, so we might as well get on with it.
On the other hand, Mars may not be terraformable.[1] The challenges there are so extensive as to possibly be insurmountable. Consider that we are so accustomed to certain environmental conditions that changes so subtle as working extended hours in a popcorn factory can give us cancer.[2] Mars just has toxic soil, a low enough gravity as to probably prevent a sustainable atmosphere, and is constantly bombarded with radiation.
But who knows, futurism is hard because humanity is pretty ingenious.
Isaac Arthur has an extended video on terraforming that's worth watching if you want to dive deeply into this topic.[3]
I don't want to give any spoilers, but the weirdest part of Blue Mars (?) seems to take a side on the existence of life on Mars. Or am I misremembering.
if we discover life in mars, and is similar to other life on earth we definitely can estimate an evolutive point of fork among both. If the DNA is basically identical in mars and earth, is from earth. There is not a lot of time to accumulate a lot of mutations since 1971
That's fine though. Having a second home for humanity is more important than maximally preserving the ability to detect past life (note that we wouldn't be eliminating that ability, just hindering it somewhat).
Also, we think we'd be able to tell pretty easily whether any life detected is from Earth (i.e. we brought it along with us). Life that isn't descended from the same tree of life as us is likely to be radically different.
Mars will never be able to be a "second home" for humanity: it lacks the ability to maintain an atmosphere that can support humans due to its weak magnetic field.
The bottom of the ocean would be far more habitable if we faced any type of extinction event.
> The bottom of the ocean would be far more habitable if we faced any type of extinction event.
Yeah, space has a coolness factor, and there are things about the origin of the universe we can't learn from the bottom of the ocean, but an underwater station is one of the most underrated projects humanity could pursue.
Oceans are phenomenal shields against radiation, extreme weather, or even the temporary combustion of the atmosphere, should things get that bad. The opportunity to learn about groups surviving in isolated habitats, or about megastructures that have to survive hostile external environments, could even provide really useful lessons for space.
The lack of a magnetic field ablates away an atmosphere only on cosmic timescales, not human ones. That seems like a problem that could be solved with the benefit of thousands more years of technological development. Never say never. Just a hundred years ago many people argued it was impossible to ever leave the atmosphere of this planet (And it wasn't ... using cannon. The rocket solved that problem).
It's a moral hazard to hold out hope for a "home away from home". Terraforming Mars is a moonshot.
If we ever find ourselves in a situation where we cannot survive on a planet where food literally grows out of the ground, with abundant liquid water and atmospheric oxygen at 1 atm, how on Earth would we survive on a planet that is devoid of life, has no liquid water, an atmosphere that's 1% the pressure of Earth's with no atmospheric oxygen, and little to no sources of energy?
Again, the bottom of the ocean is far more habitable than Mars, even if we experienced a similar extinction event similar to the one we experienced 65 million years ago.
Earth is habitable now. There are plenty of plausible non-anthropogenic disasters that may make that so not so. Some typical examples include megavolcano eruption, coronal mass ejection, and asteroid impact. It would be good to not have all of our eggs in one basket here on Earth.
And it's for exactly the same reason of having redundancy that it would be a good thing for Earth to continue to remain habitable, i.e. we should stop ruining the planet through climate change.
It's not a moral hazard at all; the two outlooks are congruous.
> megavolcano eruption, coronal mass ejection, and asteroid impact.
Even after any of those events, the bottom of the ocean would still be more habitable than Mars.
> It's not a moral hazard at all; the two outlooks are congruous.
The moral hazard is that we'll begin to think of Mars as a backup, when it isn't one at all. The Earth is very likely to be the one shot we have at a home. If we can't manage to make Earth habitable in the face of catastrophe, there is little hope to make a cold, barren rock that's millions of miles away habitable.
What about impacts such as the one that created the moon? We can argue about likelihood of it happening again but large enough impacts can liquify even crust on the opposite side of the planet. The bottom of the ocean won’t help at that point right?
I mean, the likelihood is pretty important here. The likelihood of such a large impact was pretty high in the early solar system, and it was high for Mars, as well.
Yeah, but most of that was waiting around for oxygen-releasing life to evolve.
We could create an oxygen atmosphere on Mars much more quickly than that, because we'd be sending life explicitly for that purpose that's ready now, and we'd also be importing gases and digging up in-situ resources and turning them into gas.
> Yeah, but most of that was waiting around for oxygen-releasing life to evolve.
No, it wasn't. Photosynthesis that released O2 evolved relatively quickly, and was more efficient than other forms of photosynthesis. Then it took another billion years for oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere. Mind you, we had an entire planet with oceans teeming with photosynthetic life. That will be next to impossible to replicate on Mars.
There are two oxygen sinks on Earth that reacted with oxygen released from photosynthesis: the first was the ocean, the other was minerals on land. This is the reason that it took so long for atmospheric oxygen to accumulate. Mars will have a lot of oxidizable minerals and compounds that will react with oxygen before it can accumulate in its atmosphere. Even then, it will escape into space without a sufficient magnetosphere to trap an atmosphere.
Assuming they originated independently, sure. Panspermia (see other comments) suggests that life from one planet might easily end up on another, or that both may originate elsewhere.
> If you could press a button and "contaminate" Mars with life that would start spreading and generating an oxygen atmosphere, wouldn't you?
No. Mars has a weak magnetic magnetic field which is incapable of containing an atmosphere that would support us. It also took Earth over 1 billion years for atmospheric oxygen to accumulate in significant amounts.
With active terraforming you could accumulate an atmosphere much more quickly than over the course of a billion years. We're currently adding a measurable amount of carbon dioxide to the Earth's atmosphere every year, which isn't great here, but would help tremendously to terraform Mars.
Probably not. We don’t know how that would affect other planets in our solar system. Besides you would need another button for “water”. Without it no multicell organism is capable of growing.
I'm more excited by the prospect that we've started terraforming Venus. It has an atmosphere, and with a lot of CO2. Wouldn't take many surviving plant microbes on one of the probes we've sent to start things off. Get the CO2 under control and in a few million years it might be downright balmy.
Edit: ops grand parent mentioned Mars and it’s atmosphere is extremely thin. For comparison at 35,000 feet on earth it’s 3.4 psi. On mars at ground level it’s 0.088 psi. Add in being 53% further from the sun and would take quite a bit to make Mars habitable.
Venus has the opposite problem sitting much closer to the sun and with much higher atmospheric pressure.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but terraforming Venus’s atmosphere wouldn’t do anything about the pressure, right? Even if all that CO2 became oxygen, and it cooled off a bit, Venus would still have almost 100 atmospheres of pressure at the surface and still be basically uninhabitable.
The problem is there's very little hydrogen on Venus. It has next to no magnetic field, too. Days last 243 Earth days. There are a lot of problems with Venus.
In any case I'm really wondering how it grows outside, which the article didn't really explain. It's one thing for the spores to survive in vacuum, another altogether for it to actually grow in vacuum. Or did I misunderstand something?
“New research being presented at the Astrobiology Science Conference shows the International Space Station has an irritating mould problem — not only on the inside, but the outside, too.”
"We now know that [fungal spores] resist radiation much more than we thought they would, to the point where we need to take them into consideration when we are cleaning spacecraft, inside and outside," Cortesao said in a statement.
I'm not quibbling about "outside". But nothing like "grow*" appears there. Spores aren't actually growing. Just waiting for suitable growth conditions.
I recall reading mold has a redundant set of DNA. For a mutation to happen, both sets need to have the same damage/radiation/etc happen at the same time. It's believed to be the reason why molds evolve so slowly and why they are so resilient to radiation damage.
Being a homeowner, hearing an "irritating mould problem" didn't make me think "resilient fungi could lead to new kinds of materials for use in space". It made me think that there are some serious health risks for those astronauts if that mould gets out of control.
Mold problems are significantly overblown in homes. Even a moderate amount of mold isn't really a significant health risk. It can be a serious problem for people who are allergic, or have compromised immune systems. Even the ever feared "black mold" isn't particularly dangerous.
When a home has a mold problem, the solution often isn't even to clean up the mold. The solution is to figure out why the mold is growing, which is usually humidity problems or leaky pipes or poor ventilation, and deal with that. Once you've got the moisture problem handled the mold issue pretty much goes away.
(don't astronauts have suppressed immune systems or something btw?)
I think from the Twin Study they saw changes in the immune system, but not severely compromised. Additionally, NASA astronauts are a highly selective population in pretty strong physical conditions who are lightyears away from those you hear about who have truly suppressed immune systems.
"But the spores may not be all bad though. Cortesao's research is looking for ways the space-growing fungi may help us long-term, investigating their capacity to grow in less than ideal conditions. The study's aim is to harness the hardy microbes as biological factories to create materials astronauts may use on longer missions, such as antibiotics and vitamins."
There’s a fantastic show on Netflix called “One Strange Rock” that talks about how earth sustains life, interconnected systems, and astronauts’ views on being earthlings.
There were probably microorganisms and fungi on Sputnik, and before that, things that didn't orbit, like a V2 rocket in 1944: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MW_18014
"In 1999, several Russian sources reported that Laika had died when the cabin overheated on the fourth orbit. In October 2002, Dimitri Malashenkov, one of the scientists behind the Sputnik 2 mission, revealed that Laika had died by the fourth circuit of flight from overheating."
[0] http://tsniimash.ru/science/scientific-experiments-onboard-t... (in Russian, but Google Translate seems to work okay on this one)
[1] https://www.energia.ru/ktt/archive/2015/01-2015/01-03.pdf