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Can Bacteria Survive Space Vacuum, UV?
Porfiry of ExoScience writes: "The theory that microbial life once came to Earth on a meteorite from another planet will be tested on July 26 when a NASA rocket carries into space special microorganisms from research at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI). The tiny space pioneers will be riding an apogee, or suborbital, flight path similar to the historic 1961 flight of astronaut Alan Shepard. The passengers this time will be four dime-size cultures, each holding about 100 million cells of the microbes that will be exposed to space vacuum and solar radiation for 10 minutes."
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I doubt it, since if you had examined it, you would probably not call it "shaky". The resurrection of Jesus is a as fully established as any other historical fact of the era.
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My cousin who was born and raised in Florida doesn't believe in snow. By Hume's logic, we must then conclude that Snow does not exist. He never accounts for this question of inadequate evidence!
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The moderation of this post is wrong, and it is contrary to the moderator guidelines, which call for moderators not to moderate down because they disagree.
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There is a theory that there is life in the bacterial life within the moon. If conditions are hot enough within the moon then such life can exist. The theory even states that is where life may have from when the earth was formed within the core of the earth. It is just another theory.
Hume's principle is about *probability*, not belief.
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Peter
In order to justify more funds allocated by the congresscritters...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
You are probably referring to D. radiodurans, which is one of several organisms that will be carried aloft in this mission.
This NASA article talks about D. radiodurans with an eye on possible uses of the bacterium in space exploration.
I believe people recently found a meteorite that contained droplets of water enclosed within rock salt. Given the melting point of salt and other properties, I think that makes it unlikely that the interior of the meteorite got too hot. Of course, if the bacteria were on the outside to begin with, they might simply "come off" during reentry and then drift down harmlessly through the atmosphere.
They don't _have_ to fight. If you survive to reproduce, you pass on your genetic traits. If you don't survive to reproduce, you don't pass on your genetic traits. This IS well understood. You need neither a biology degree, nor a background in medicine to grasp these basic concepts (although the original poster does seem to have congnitive difficulties). What is NOT yet fully understood are mutation rates, their causes, and how it leads to speciation.
And ignore the other guy, he's a blatant troll, and apparently a pretty ignorant one as well. In his bizzaro universe natural selection magically does not exist (in ours it does. This part is not a theory. See the alt.origins FAQ). Not only that, but according to him, evolution sets out to prove we are "descended from apes" (in the universe WE live in, the theory of evolution says nothing about apes being our ancestors). Poor deluded fellow.
Btw this is so far off topic its not even funny. Please moderate this entire thread down if you have to.
Human eye - random series of mutations where by NATURAL SELECTION, those creatures with bad or no eysight were eaten by creatures with it, thus leaving only sighted creatures to reproduce (more sighted creaures)
Human soul - I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt that it exists. Electromagnetic energy stored in our brains and nervous systems. These are the the 3D representations (shadows if you will) of our multi-dimensional bodies from 4th-7th dimensions existing only 1 mm away (see string and M-theory).
My ideas are just about as provable as yours. The eye thing is absolutly proveable.
As for observing evloution, try microbes. I generation of human life can be millions for a bacteria - plenty of time to observe evolution.
BTW can you suck your testicles up into your body cavity at will? The ancient Romans could. But since it no longer serves a purpose, the ability has been "bred out" of humans (as is the ability to wiggle you ears) so that today, almost no one can do it.
That sound suspiciously like evolution to me.
I'd rather be decended from a Bonobo or Chimp than be created by a God which says its ok to kill someone who doesn't believe in him/her the "right way" - see Northern Ireland, Isreal, Iran, the Crusades, the Inquisition etc all done in the name of God.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Hey man, I can troll too....hehe
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Here is the clickable link. That ain't no 10 minutes! This is proof (if true, of course) that bacteria can survive harsh space conditions for extended periods of time.
Sure it doesn't prove that "we are the aliens", but it's the best evidence yet (besides similar lab results of vacuum and radiation) that bacteria can survive things like mars meterorites. (Who knows, maybe even comets?) So life may be more pervasive than we thought. (Or maybe only able to be more pervasive)
-Ben
Trying to figure out if life "arrived" on earth is going to be
difficult, and it really isn't the interesting question. The
interesting question is can we get life off of this planet,
and surviving somewhere else. If mankind is to have any long term
legacy (think geological time scales...) it will be the spread of life
through the solar system and onto passing comets. This research will
help select candidate microbes for such a mission.
I would imagine that a suborbital flight would be pretty darned optimal for picking up stuff like this.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
While I'm sure this is a troll, some of the points raised are disturbing. I'll throw caution to the wind and feed the beast anyway....
Sorry for my ranting, but at the end of the day evolution is nothing more than a myth with only circumstantial "facts" to back it up, and it doesn't deserve to be taught to children who are blinded to this important difference.
While you may believe that the evidence in favor of evolution is suspect, I would counter that you have not objectively viewed the evidence in question. Furthermore, your viewpoint is in opposition to that of mainstream science and science education organizations, such as the AAAS and the AAPT, who have condemned the change in Kansas school standards. The burden is on you, my friend, to prove that the Christian mythos is necessarily a more consistent explanation of the facts than is evolution. It is not enough to sit back and say "Evolution is wrong, ergo the Christian myth is right." Please keep in mind that "the bible says so" will carry little weight in your argument; heliocentrists were condemned for decades by the church in part because the bible allegedly indicated that the earth was the center of the cosmos.
There are plenty more worthwhile projects we can do in space, ones with real scientific value.
Looking for the boundary of "Heaven?" Searching for "angels on high?" I shudder to think what one who has no understanding of how science is conducted would imagine space projects with "real scientific value" to be. I suppose you do not believe in geology either, that dinosaurs were just big beasts who wouldn't fit on the ark, the Big Bang theory is false, and that nuclear theory is suspect as well (can't have carbon dating indicating an age of a living entity that is older than the age of the universe). Do you object to the term "fossil fuel?"
Allow me to distinguish between science and religious scibabble for you: Science (in principle) follows the scientific method. You formulate a hypothesis, conduct experiments (such as this one) to test said hypothesis, and then you refine your hypothesis based on the results of the test. Sometimes this leads to the unpleasantness of having to scrap your "sexy brilliant idea" and start anew, and sometimes you just have to tweak the hypothesis somewhat to explain the data better. Then more experiments are conducted, and more refinement is performed. Eventually, when the hypothesis is good enough that it stands the test of numerous experiments it gets elevated to the status of "theory." A scientific theory is logically nothing more than a successful hypothesis, albeit one that has passed so many tests successfully that one may strongly suspect it to possess a measure of veracity. Scibabble (I shall use our good friends in Kansas as an example of scibabble at its best/worst) holds that "idea A, my pet idea, is contrary to idea B, which happens to be a scientific theory. I do not believe the weight of evidence in support of B--I shall call it all "circumstantial evidence"--therefore idea A must be correct." It is a position based on a logical fallacy, and as such its conclusions are suspect. When I attended grade school we indeed learned about "this important difference," however it would appear that you did not.
Thank God I come from somewhere where they value the difference between a theory and the Truth.
Kansas, perchance? I find it curious that you capitalize the word "truth"--perhaps you associate the notion of truth with biblical truth only? It must be difficult to do your taxes each year.... "Blast! Where's the 1040A section of Leviticus?!"
Alan Shepard's was a much lower orbit than Gagarin's. If the point of the analogy is to explain what orbit the bacteria are going to be in (low), then it's entirely correct to cite Shepard before Gagarin.
Slava Gagarinu, a hero for all mankind, and all that jazz, but you're still wrong.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Join NASA: Be an astronaut, explore strange new worlds and civilization, and kill their inhabitants with alien bacteria.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Sorry for my ranting, but at the end of the day evolution is nothing more than a myth with only circumstantial "facts" to back it up, and it doesn't deserve to be taught to children who are blinded to this important difference. There are plenty more worthwhile projects we can do in space, ones with real scientific value.
Thank God I come from somewhere where they value the difference between a theory and the Truth.
Kansas?
So what's wrong with the Heterotroph Hypothesis?
Even if you prove that microbes might have landed here from a meteor, you have to explain how they got there. The possibility of life starting somewhere else, then surviving being blasted off their home planet, travelling [b/m]illions of years through space, and landing here would be lower than the possibility of life just starting here, given the ideal conditions that evidence points to. Wouldn't it?
I agree with some other posters here... I don't think the scientists actually wonder if life came from other planets.
Fsck this hard drive! Although it probably won't work...
foo = bar/*myPtr;
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
What about Yuri Gagarin? He was the first person into space! Have some respect when it comes to space travel and try to think about who did what first.
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marotti.com
As is the resurrection of Elvis in this era.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Wasn't this also a MacGyver episode:
S hows/Action_and_Adventure/MacGyver/
They sent some bacteria into space to see how it would be altered by the solar radiation. The satellite crashed to some remote part of the US, and MacGyver was sent to retreive the sample from the woods in a bio-suite. All of the animals around him had died suddenly with the symptoms of "old age". The transmit on his suite gets broken and he almost ends up being napalmed.
Back in the labratory, an over zealous scientist tries to save the bacteria before they're destroyed by Peter and MacGyver. She and her dog get exposed to the bacteria and die. MacGyver gets out just in time to have the whole laboratory incinerated right behind him.
... Then MacGyver puts the building back together with duct tape and his trusty pocket knife! Oh, how sweet were the days when each week's MacGyver was NEW!!!
http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Television/
Your tax dollars hard at work I guess
One cannot prove that the universe was not created yesterday out of nothing, with all our memories and all its other internal records made consistent. On the other hand, such a theory has very little predictive power, since the next thing you look at might be the one thing that is not consistent. One cannot prove that the behaviour of gravity will not change tomorrow to cause the Earth to crash into the Sun.
Scientists always have to choose among the theories that fit the available evidence. Then they seek more evidence to test their choices. Experience leads to some "meta-theories" about which choices seem to work out better:
* simplicity -- once you have the right language (usually mathematics) then theories that derive lots of behaviours from a few simple rules seem to do well
* predictive value -- theories that don't let you make predictions about experiments not yet performed are not much use.
* mediocrity -- theories that have our location, our species or our epoch in the history of the universe as somehow special do not seem to do well
* aesthetics -- a bit of a two-edged sword, but brilliant and experienced scientists often seem to develop an effective intuition for which theories are "beautiful enough" to be true.
Anyway, returning to the question of evolution. All reasonably simple theories consistent with the biology that we observe seem to have
+ Mendelian inheritance, with minor modifications
+ Malthusian pressure resulting in not all
juvenile creatures actually breeding
+ mutations
A consequence of this is the sort of evolution by natural selection that can be seen going on over short timescales in (for instance) butterflies adjusting their camouflage to smoke polution, or cod breeding at younger ages under fishing pressure.
The next question is what happens if this process goes on over geological timescales (assuming for the moment the basic theories about the age of the Earth and the basic geological processes acting). Here, you will find more divergence among theorists about details, but most surviving theories do have species emerging, diverging and dying out, matching the fossil record. Recent theories suggest this may be less gradual and more jerky than earlier theories, with processes like the isolation of small populations on islands playing a larger role.
Finally, you can ask whether processes like these have been taking place in past, and if so, how the existing range of species fit in, which brings me back to where I came in: you cannot disprove creation yesterday, or one second ago. On the other hand, teh available records, mainly fossils, but also ice cores and other things, are really quite consistent with the broad thrust of evolution.
The near-Earth space environment is more complex than "gamma rays and a hard vacuum". There is the solar wind and solar radiation, cosmic rays, microgravity etc.
The experiment is a hitchhiker on a sounding rocket used for solar research, so it isn't costing the taxpayer big bucks.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I can imagine bacteria traveling through space, buried inside some porous rock... This way they don't have to be exposed to the harsh conditions of space.
-- Cheers!
Does PETA know about this? Is there going to be a protest? How inhumane! Bacteria have a right to live just like we do. What's next? Monkeys? Dogs? People?!?
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'...let the rabbits wear glasses...'
Y2038 consulting
They have already found that these bacteria survive gamma rays and a hard vacuum in their lab.
Why should gamma rays and a hard vacuum be any more difficult to survive if it is in space?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
will involve shooting politicians into space sans spacesuit, to see how well they stand up to the vacuum and solar radiation. Theorists propose that this form of life came to Earth from outer space, possibly on meteorites.
Gonzo
Today scientists dicovered several microscopic life forms living on a 5.25" disk containing the ancient classic Commander Keen. They are eager to investigate how the bacteria survived amid the piles of dust on the floppy.
Surviving in a hard vacuum and radiation is one thing, but surviving a re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere is quite another.
Not to mention the state the artifact must have been in when it was ejected from Mars in the first place. As I understand it, the theory is that significant meteor strikes on Mars can propel martian fragments outside of its gravity well. From all I've read about meteor strikes on Earth, any 'shrapnel' from a blast that large is molten rock when it ejects.
So the real question is: Can microbial life survive a molten host environment, then frozen, irradiated, and exposed to a hard vacuum (the microbes on the exterior, that is), then heated to near-molten levels again when it reenters the atmosphere? If so, we'd better not go to Io!
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
http://www.science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast0 1sep98_1.htm
Many have referred to it; here it is from a reliable source. Or as reliable as you get on the internet.
-Ben
I was briefly annoyed when I saw this article, but fortunately the scientists were smarter than the blurb made them sound. Of course throwing some random bacteria into space won't prove anything about the long-term space-endurance of their entire form of life. Bacteria, thanks to their rudimentary life-support needs and short generations, can undergo some truly striking mutations. The extremophiles are a group of bacteria that have evolved to live in ridiculously inhospitable extremes of heat, cold, and toxicity. Some species grow optimally at >100C and pH1.0 -- a hundred times more acidic than stomach acid and hot enough to boil water! In fact, the project appears to be using something similar, a bacterium which was discovered in an extremely hot geothermal spring.
Even then, Earth bacteria aren't necessarily going to have the right stuff. Bacteria that evolved on a planed without a magnetic field to block harmful high-energy particles and an ozone layer to absorb UV might have tolerances to radiation that would be stupidly excessive for anything in our relatively lax biosphere. Like bacteria from our own poles, life from a very cold planet might have a metabolism slow enough that traveling through space for 10,000 years wouldn't be a big problem (and if not, we always have spores). If you had some bacteria initially living on the interior of a chunk of ground that became a meteor, it's even conceivable that they could gradually evolve specifically to survive on the surface of a spacefaring rock.
If this fails, biologists might turn to trying to engineer bacteria that can survive in space. Creating selection pressure for radiation, vacuum, etc. isn't so hard...
- Michael Cohn
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