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Panel Recommends Mars Samples Be Quarantined
selectspec writes: "The NYTimes is reporting that a panel of scientists has recommended that NASA treat samples returned from Mars from future missions be quarantined as if they contained deadly viruses until proven otherwise. ABC news also has the scoop, as does space.com. Of course many scientists agree this is pure politics given that over a ton of Martian material enters our atmosphere every year, spit up from meteor impacts on Mars. In the unlikely event that life currently existed on Mars in the past million or so years, such debris would have likely transported microbial organizisms here. Many forms of microbial life would be able to survive such a journey."
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Episode 324 - Is Mars alive? YES!
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Episode 456 - Mars IS DEATH!
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Episode 789 - Maybe Mars HAD life...
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Episode 1034 - No there are no chances for life in Mars...
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Episode 1345 - There could be life in Mars...
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Episode 2345 - Aliens! Saucers! BigMacs in Mars!
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Episode 3456 - Mars was/is and will be death
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Episode 4569 - Remake of episode 789...
This IS Mars. People this is not a joke. That how Mars has been seen for the last 400 years, since people started to seriously speculate about life in other planets. And nothing in the last scientific achievements has given a determined and final evidence that Mars is either dead or alive. Personally I tend mostly to the fact that this planet is still damn alive, even after all those shake-ups one may detect on its geology.There is evidence that certain formations could have been "build" by ancient organisms. One of them is exactly the ill-famous "Face" and the new fresh pictures even add some support to it. Besides there is a weird system of "black strikes/spots/marks" all over Mars, which strongly suggest that some organisms may still be playing a major role in Mars.
Some of you may counter with the fact that Viking didn't show any signs of organics. People, I specially studied some memories of persons who worked at that project and I have enough evidence of two facts:
the author of one of the biologic tests counsciously undermined the project, and tried to destroy some work made by some other people. He also tried in 1967 to revoke the demand for spacecraft sterilization;
the ill-famous Gas spectrometer experiment is questionable because the instrument was not only flawed in design but also the produced results cannot fit even the most pessimistic calculations.Besides the story of its development shows tons of questions
Besides of this. I cannot find, till now, the wholly promised results on Carbon presence from the rocks tested under Sojourner's mission. Till now, the promise "results will be published after calibration" still hang in the remains of the old Pathfinder's site. It passed nearly 4 years since then. I tried to search sites, science sites, news sites, NASA sites and till now Carbon is missing on Pathfinder's mission. Anyway it is still a result. As "to silence means to cooperate..."
It is better to have a quarantine set up and find out the rocks were harmless as expected, rather than find that they did contain something and have no quarantine in place.
Rocks that pass through the atmosphere, enter at high temperatures, so any life that might have survived the space flight would unlikely survive the re-entry. On the other hand a probe visiting Mars would not put its rock samples through such conditions, so life would have a better chance of surviving.
Anyhow, if the rocks are in quarantine, then you can ensure that they aren't contaminated by Earth based micro-organisms and thus screwing up any lifeform-tests.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"They quarantined our samples Mr Ambassador! Should we dispense with the biological warfare route and try a full scale invasion instead? We could always pretend to come in peace..."
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
All of the life on earth has evolved into its own particular niche, specializing in exploiting a specific set of environment parameters. For 4 billion years, whatever is left alive today has managed to fight off any sort of competition to at east a near standstill. There's a chance that Martian bugs, growing in a completely alien environment, may be able to survive here unaided, there's a chance that they may find all the extra atmosphere, sunlight, water and heat wonderful and grow out of control, but I'm betting they're barely going to avoid being lunch for E. Coli even under sterile lab conditions.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The Apollo moon samples were also quarantined and the chances of finding living material on the moon was very remote. Mars is much more likely to contain living material, and therefore even more caution should be taken. Apart from anything else, we want to make sure that earthly life doesn't infect the mars rock before it's been established that there aren't any martian lifeforms there.
Of course many scientists agree this is pure politics given that over a ton of Martian material enters our atmosphere every year, spit up from meteor impacts on Mars.
Yes but does it come here under controlled conditions? I don't think so. Coming over here on a probe will be a lot different than getting pummelled into space, floating over towards earth and then entering the atmosphere and getting torched on it's way down.
A quarantine is warranted.
Execute? [Y/N] _
Many forms of microbial life would be able to survive such a journey.
Many forms wouldn't.
Although you are correct that it is unlikely in the extreme that anything has survived on mars, however it is always better to play it safe when there is nothing real to be gained by taking a stupid risk no matter how small.
It hurts no one to so a complete analysis of these materials in quarintine before allowing them out.
Finally it is logical to assume that Martian microscopic organisms (if there are any) would be only slightly more hearty than their Earth counterparts. This means that even though some could survive being violently blasted off the surface of the planet, then survive in space for years or even centuries, then survive the massive heat of atmospheric entry, most couldn't.
Since we are now going to bring them back with better control, over the transport envrionment, it is possible for something that could not have otherwise reached Earth to survive.
Granted the chances are minescule, but why take even a small risk of setting off a plague when that can be avoided by such a simple precaution.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
It makes sense to quarantine the samples to prevent them from getting contaminated by *us* and confusing any results.
I remember reading years ago that NASA's policy on such things was that any samples brought back from other planets were to be treated as Level 4 Biohazard anyway. i.e. glove boxes and biohazard suits.
This is the same standard as pathogens such as Ebola and other haemorragic fevers are kept at.
They absolutly should be totally quarantined due to the fact that our own microbes will contaminate the samples and then make it hard to tell if indeed there was any life on it or not.
StarTux
I agree. It's one thing for martian material to be blasted into space where it orbits for millions, perhaps billions of years before it impacts in Antarctica. This is direct from Mars to Washington D.C. without all those bothersome millenia of celestial mechanics in the way.
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(snip) given that over a ton of Martian material enters our atmosphere every year, spit up from meteor impacts on Mars. (/snip)
Riiight, because that "intense heat in reentry" thing wouldn't kill anything...
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
while true that some microorganisms could survive an interplanetary trip on their own, not all of them can. why not take the high road and quarantine them? nothing is lost by doing that, and you significantly reduce the potential of disease. sounds like a no brainer to me.
Rabbits in Australia.
The banana slug.
The gypsy moth.
Numerous infectious diseases carried by explorers.
For as far back as we've been able to travel with significant speed between dissimilar ecosystems, we have consistently failed to anticipate the tremendous impact of flora and fauna that often accompany those travels. As often as not, the cause is ignorance of the presence of these "passengers." I agree that politics may be a significant driving factor here, but honestly, looking back, have we learned nothing about just using a little bit of caution? If we feel like taking the martian rocks out for a walk in the sun here on earth, we can always do that later...there's no need to do it straight off the recovery site, and the past seems to be a good argument not to do so until we are absolutely sure what it would mean.
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