Note that while the cultures were outside the Space Station, they were in containers simulating the conditions of Mars, so it doesn't seem like they were in the vacuum of Space itself, unless I've missed something in the article?
I think you're right: the atmosphere inside the container was artificial and intended to be equivalent to the atmosphere on Mars, with natural light from the Sun allowed to pass into the container through filters which also emulated the conditions on Mars.
If I'm not mistaken Mars' atmospheric is pressure is less than 1% of the Earth's atmospheric pressure. That is a lot closer to a vacuum than it is to Earth conditions.
Why does we go through so much trouble to not let mars etc get polluted by life from earth, why don't we just send a bug chunk of hardcore life forms like this fungi and others on the red planet etc and go back later to see how they are fairing?
What are we trying to find or learn that life from earth will permanently remove the chance of?
> What are we trying to find or learn that life from earth will permanently remove the chance of?
Species prove to be invasive all the time on earth when exposed to new ecosystems or environments, and usually that's at the expense of many potential discoveries about the life forms that are replaced.
Seeding the universe with life from our planet may make sense as a survival strategy, but there's no ceiling to the knowledge we can glean from life thats different from our own.
In short: we don't know what we don't know, and the gains from such knowledge could be endless.
So one of the things we are trying to learn is if there are other type of life forms than what we know from earth. What if do find something, there are no big size living things there but if did find some microbial Mars/X native life form, will we just let that be? Won't we still try to put ourselves there anyway? that's what we do on current planet being top of the food chain.
Perhaps we are the only life in the universe. It would be a pity to have the earth destroyed and that is all gone, because we were so terrified of spreading life around.
> the gains from such knowledge could be endless.
Could be - but the gains from spreading Terran life around will be endless.
If life in the universe is actually really rare, isn’t it irresponsible for us to not be seeding life anywhere we can put it? If we put microbes on several planets and moons in the solar system those worlds could have complex and even intelligent lifeforms in millions of years.
For starters it becomes harder to find martian life. The earth life could kill the martian life before we get a chance to find it. Also, if the experiments detect signs of life, we won't be able to know if it's from martian life or from the earth life we brought along.
> Approximately 1,300 colonies were picked from culture plates, identified, lypholipized, and stored for future reference. About 75% of all isolates were microorganisms considered indigenous to humans; the remaining isolates were associated with soil and dust in the environment.
So that if we do encounter that particular strain on Mars, we'll know its from Earth.
I think that we want to exhaust any possibility that there was/is life in some form on mars without merging our biosphere with it just yet. I think to most of humanity that would be an extreme epiphany that you don't need a higher power or that humans are anything special outside of our own little mudball. Seems like a reasonable take for now. I'm sure if we actually do establish permanent colonies there it won't be a choice, although avoiding taking extremophiles that might easily adapt there is something we'll avoid for a while.
I don't know either. We could limit exposure to a tiny patch on the planet's surface and still have ample opportunity to look for signs of life on the rest of it.
nitpick: fungi don't produce their own food; they need something to eat. what you need to get an ecosystem going is photosynthetic or chemotrophic organisms that produce their own food.
Well it was made out of plywood. Unless they made the wood poisonous to all life, it is also food. And humans basically exhale the rest of what fungi need to thrive.
Space is not all that inhospitable to life. There are strong theories that after major cataclysms on earth, rocks in space with life attached then reseeded earth when they came back down.
I was sorta hoping that radiation would mutate the Mir Fungus into something really catastrophic that would survive Mir's re-entry and then more or less destroy the world. Or at least that someone would have made a really nutso film based on such an idea.
One of the main ideas explained in this video is that the very early universe (i.e. the universe “right after the Big Bang” in cosmic timescales) might have been habitable for a short period of time. During this time window, the right temperature to support life wouldn’t have been restricted to the proximity of stars, but would have instead taken place absolutely everywhere in space due to the intrinsic temperature of the universe itself.
We often think about life arising in one location and then spreading across the galaxy or universe. Quite interesting to consider instead life arising everywhere and then being reduced to only a few (maybe one) remaining pockets across the entire universe, or not at all.
Of course that likely doesn’t apply to life as we know it, assuming our estimates of the age of the sun and the universe are correct.
> The second one is an observation about the rate at which the different genomes on Earth have changed over evolutionary history. When extrapolated back into the past, this evolution rate of genomes suggests that the current lineage of life on Earth might be at least 10 billion years old,
I wonder to what extent the scientists who study these evolutionary clocks are able to factor in increasingly (or decreasingly) capable DNA replication and repair mechanisms. More faithful DNA replication and repair would artificially show a slower rate of genome evolution.
My understanding is the time when the universe was at life supporting temperatures, was long before the formation of the first stars and fusion of heavier atoms than hydrogen.
It is hard to imagine life without a large variety of atoms.
The habitable epoch, when "the cosmic microwave background (CMB) had a temperature of 273–373 K (0–100 °C), allowing early rocky planets (if any existed) to have liquid water chemistry on their surface and be habitable, irrespective of their distance from a star," has always fascinated me [1]. Space itself was room temperature.
Our universe would seem to them like the universe on the verge of heat death does to us. To my knowledge, I don't know of any fiction that explores this setting--it's on my bucket list to write.
I first read about this ages ago as a kid and was fascinated. I never figured it was probable though. Years later I'm finding it more and more likely in my completely worthless and undereducated opinion. It'd be crazy to eventually find out that many planets out there have similar DNA.
I read something by a SETI researcher that pointed out that some research focuses on finding DNA outside of earth (e.g. Mars) that has the reversed chirality of DNA on earth (i.e. corkscrews the opposite way of all life we've found on earth). This would be an incredibly strong indicator for life that actually came from somewhere else and wasn't just contaminated from DNA from earth that got on the equipment. They said "strong" instead of "certain" as it's still possible for a "shadow biome" on earth where the chirality is reversed that we just haven't found yet. This is important as there is no reason that it should be one way or the other (at least that scientists are currently aware of). As far as they can tell it should be 50:50, so chirality makes for an interesting indicator. Note: this is what I read over a decade ago. I'm no biologist.
Why does an asteroid have to hit the earth? Life is constantly being shed from the upper atmosphere into space right now. As we travel through space we leave a plume of life behind us. Certainly almost none of it survives, but almost isn’t none, and a lot of life spreads as hardened spores that can withstand extreme conditions until more favorable conditions present and they “wake up.”
> Life is constantly being shed from the upper atmosphere into space right now. As we travel through space we leave a plume of life behind us.
Can you point to any source for that? I've never heard of such a thing and can't find anything from a quick online search supporting that idea. Everything I read is that gravity will pull back any bacteria that get to the outer edges of the atmosphere, which makes sense because they'd need to have some force stronger than gravity to escape.
What information can you point to that supports the idea that we leave a "plume of life behind us"?
I think the idea behind an asteroid is that only something with that level of force could eject bacteria that could overcome the Earth's gravity to escape.
Edit: atmospheric escape [1] is a well-known phenomenon, but that's exclusively about gases, at the molecular level. It doesn't mention anything about bacteria, which are of course massive in comparison -- the factors that can cause a single atom or molecule to gain enough energy to escape gravity don't apply to things the size of bacteria.
There was that ISS experiment during multiple spacewalks that discovered marine microorganisms on the outer surface of the space station that got there somehow, many of them surviving the conditions. It's hard to explain by the contamination alone because some species were endemic to the places well outside the trajectory of the launchers.
The authors suggest/speculate about the existence of some ionospheric updraft or electromagnetic phenomenon capable of elevating them to the upper thermosphere where ISS is located. If that's true, panspermia hypothesis suddenly becomes much less far-fetched, and also the "reverse panspermia" you're talking about.
After the big bang, there was likely many millions of years where the universe was a comfortable temperature that would have allowed life to evolve there first. Which eventually cooled and died out until it met the right conditions. Probably why space smells like burnt food "Other astronauts have described it in similar yet varying ways: "burning metal," "a distinct odor of ozone, an acrid smell," "walnuts and brake pads," "gunpowder" and even "burnt almond cookie." " https://science.howstuffworks.com/space-smell.htm#:~:text=Ot...
"electrical smell", "burnt almond cookie" is the smell people who survived report HCN to have. And it's not that space is full of a lethal-on-touch gas, that's the smell your nerves report when the sensory cells are dying faster than they can pass on a chemical signal.
> Terence McKenna's theory was that human intelligence stems from psilocybin-containing mushroom spores
The Stoned ape theory "has largely been rejected by the scientific community, who cite numerous alleged discrepancies within his theory and claim that his conclusions were arrived at via a fundamental misunderstanding of Fischer's studies" on "psychedelic drugs, schizophrenia, the perception-hallucination continuum model of altered states of consciousness, and...gustation" [1][2].
I am no biologist; I am unclear about the terms here.
Let say I have a piece of bread that has mold on it.
I leave it alone, the mold grows and consumes more of the bread.
The mold / fungi is "alive" in that it is growing and consuming.
Let us say that the fungi here was from moldy bread.
They shoot it into space, stuff it inside the lab and expose it to the
same environment.
Does survival then mean that it keeps eating more of the bread while
the experiment is taking place, so when they look at it afterwards
there is a lot more of it? But 40% of it has died?
Or does it mean that the cells making up the mold are entirely dormant
but is the DNA structure has remained intact for 60% of the mold and
the hypothesis is that if you brought it back to earth it would start
"being alive", growing, eating again?
>The most relevant outcome was that more than 60% of the cells of the endolithic communities studied remained intact after ‘exposure to Mars’, or rather, the stability of their cellular DNA was still high,”
didn't they do that to test the effects of being in space for a long time on general health, dna status? See how much bones degrade, if blood chemistry stays the same, etc.
Readit News
What are we trying to find or learn that life from earth will permanently remove the chance of?
Species prove to be invasive all the time on earth when exposed to new ecosystems or environments, and usually that's at the expense of many potential discoveries about the life forms that are replaced.
Seeding the universe with life from our planet may make sense as a survival strategy, but there's no ceiling to the knowledge we can glean from life thats different from our own.
In short: we don't know what we don't know, and the gains from such knowledge could be endless.
> the gains from such knowledge could be endless.
Could be - but the gains from spreading Terran life around will be endless.
Besides, Mars is a lifeless hulk.
From there, https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aem.33.2.379-384.1977 is "Microbiological profiles of the Viking spacecraft"
Note things like:
> Approximately 1,300 colonies were picked from culture plates, identified, lypholipized, and stored for future reference. About 75% of all isolates were microorganisms considered indigenous to humans; the remaining isolates were associated with soil and dust in the environment.
So that if we do encounter that particular strain on Mars, we'll know its from Earth.
---
One that's on the interesting side and has more than just an available abstract: Europa Clipper planetary protection probabilistic risk assessment summary https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00320...
https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2023/03/29/mold-in-space-the-hidd... has a picture of a wall panel covered in the stuff after astronauts hung damp workout clothes out to dry.
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2017/03/27/aggressive-fungu...
Space is not all that inhospitable to life. There are strong theories that after major cataclysms on earth, rocks in space with life attached then reseeded earth when they came back down.
But what are the odds an asteroid hitting Earth has already seeded life elsewhere in the solar system?
https://sites.google.com/view/sources-big-bang-life/
https://youtu.be/JOiGEI9pQBs?si=kOHM_l0saPkEhWcX
Of course that likely doesn’t apply to life as we know it, assuming our estimates of the age of the sun and the universe are correct.
I wonder to what extent the scientists who study these evolutionary clocks are able to factor in increasingly (or decreasingly) capable DNA replication and repair mechanisms. More faithful DNA replication and repair would artificially show a slower rate of genome evolution.
It is hard to imagine life without a large variety of atoms.
Our universe would seem to them like the universe on the verge of heat death does to us. To my knowledge, I don't know of any fiction that explores this setting--it's on my bucket list to write.
[1] https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/habitable.pdf
I read something by a SETI researcher that pointed out that some research focuses on finding DNA outside of earth (e.g. Mars) that has the reversed chirality of DNA on earth (i.e. corkscrews the opposite way of all life we've found on earth). This would be an incredibly strong indicator for life that actually came from somewhere else and wasn't just contaminated from DNA from earth that got on the equipment. They said "strong" instead of "certain" as it's still possible for a "shadow biome" on earth where the chirality is reversed that we just haven't found yet. This is important as there is no reason that it should be one way or the other (at least that scientists are currently aware of). As far as they can tell it should be 50:50, so chirality makes for an interesting indicator. Note: this is what I read over a decade ago. I'm no biologist.
Can you point to any source for that? I've never heard of such a thing and can't find anything from a quick online search supporting that idea. Everything I read is that gravity will pull back any bacteria that get to the outer edges of the atmosphere, which makes sense because they'd need to have some force stronger than gravity to escape.
What information can you point to that supports the idea that we leave a "plume of life behind us"?
I think the idea behind an asteroid is that only something with that level of force could eject bacteria that could overcome the Earth's gravity to escape.
Edit: atmospheric escape [1] is a well-known phenomenon, but that's exclusively about gases, at the molecular level. It doesn't mention anything about bacteria, which are of course massive in comparison -- the factors that can cause a single atom or molecule to gain enough energy to escape gravity don't apply to things the size of bacteria.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
The authors suggest/speculate about the existence of some ionospheric updraft or electromagnetic phenomenon capable of elevating them to the upper thermosphere where ISS is located. If that's true, panspermia hypothesis suddenly becomes much less far-fetched, and also the "reverse panspermia" you're talking about.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2018/7360147/ - one of the papers related to the experiment
https://nplus1.ru/material/2020/02/21/iss-test-experiment - a pop-sci article and an interview with a PI of that experiment (in Russian, use a translator)
Then again, he also wrote a lot about the self-transforming machine elves he met while stoned out of his gourd on DMT.
The Stoned ape theory "has largely been rejected by the scientific community, who cite numerous alleged discrepancies within his theory and claim that his conclusions were arrived at via a fundamental misunderstanding of Fischer's studies" on "psychedelic drugs, schizophrenia, the perception-hallucination continuum model of altered states of consciousness, and...gustation" [1][2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_theory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_L._Fischer
Deleted Comment
Let say I have a piece of bread that has mold on it. I leave it alone, the mold grows and consumes more of the bread. The mold / fungi is "alive" in that it is growing and consuming.
Let us say that the fungi here was from moldy bread. They shoot it into space, stuff it inside the lab and expose it to the same environment.
Does survival then mean that it keeps eating more of the bread while the experiment is taking place, so when they look at it afterwards there is a lot more of it? But 40% of it has died?
Or does it mean that the cells making up the mold are entirely dormant but is the DNA structure has remained intact for 60% of the mold and the hypothesis is that if you brought it back to earth it would start "being alive", growing, eating again?
>The most relevant outcome was that more than 60% of the cells of the endolithic communities studied remained intact after ‘exposure to Mars’, or rather, the stability of their cellular DNA was still high,”
If they were spores, they would test to see if the spores were viable.
If it was the mycelium body they would see if it was still viable to grow.
The paper, from 2015: https://doi.org/10.1089%2Fast.2015.1324