Keeping Alien Samples Safe For Study

Metrollica writes: "Space.com features an article describing NASA's plans to prepare the Johnson Space Center that could one day house extraterrestrial life." An excerpt from the article: "It's human nature to clean for company more thoroughly than one would for oneself, but nowhere is this truth taken to greater extremes than at the Johnson Space Center. NASA's setting new standards of cleanliness in its labs that handle samples returning from space. And their efforts are laying the groundwork for samples that might some day contain evidence of extraterrestrial life from Mars, Europa, and other points little known."

Comments

I don't watch Farscape, but...

[rxs]

Given the results of the last poll, in which CowboyNeal lost horribly to the option of 'yes', I voted for his option this time in hopes that it will raise his possibly near-obliterated self-esteem. :_D

Re:CowboyNeal...

[Karma Sink]

You know, I used to think that people like you were just being elitist, until I actually fucking did it. I killed the cable, have nothing but network, and put a picture in front of the TV... I watch a movie maybe 2-3 times a week, and watch some sporting events, occasionally.

I've not felt better in quite some time. Television is a fucking drain, and a waste.

Andromeda Strain...

[Bonker]

There was no air on the moon or in high earth orbit, so there was no reason to keep the astronauts quaranteened.

HOWEVER, it was a good idea, because they didn't know everything they were dealing with yet.

On Mars, Europa, and Io, there exists a remote possibility for life. Retreival missions should be geared to keep this life hermetically isolated from the Earth's biosphere.... Just in case.

Re:Andromeda Strain...

[Perdo]

There was no air on the moon or in high earth orbit, so there was no reason to keep the astronauts quaranteened.

This is sort of recent but there was fungus on the outside of mir's glass

google cache of article

Mir crashed and this crap is in the ocean now after spending millions of life cycles in had cosmic radiation

Nature at it's best through evolution and man doing stupid things to himself.

Server down?

[quantaman]

The story went up ~5 minutes ago and I can't get anything, surly it can't have been /.ed this quickly? I would have really liked to see what kind of measures they would take to house extraterrestrial samples. How would you be able to remove all microbes from the air in a lab? Would you even use air, just keep it in a vacuum. That still leaves the problem of microbs on the equipment and and lab environment. They have experience keeping things in with viral labs but I don't think it's entirly applicable to this situation where you'd have to keep things out. All I can think of is shortly after building it roasting the entire lab to destroy every last trace of life than doing the same thing to the lab suits when coming in, which would of course have to be fire proof AND impermeable to moisture, anything come to mind? Are there any other more practical ways to effectivly destroy all cellular matter in an environment?

It'll be used sooner then you think...

[S-prime]

If all goes well the Stardust mission will be returning to Earth with cosmic dust particles from the comet WIld 2 sometime in 2006

From what is mentioned on the project webpage it seems that they plan to return the sample to Earth via a capsule to be jettisoned from the space probe when it returns.

While the chances for contamination are relatively low, it certainly can't hurt to be prepared.

More info at
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html

Dangerous stuff

[NewtonsLaw]

Imagine if there was once advanced, possibly even intelligent, life on Mars.

Would it be too far-fetched to speculate that perhaps that all higher life forms were wiped out by some virus or bacterial disease?

With the plant and animal life gone, the climate of the planet would change radically -- to the extent that we see today - but the cause of the catastrophy could stil be lurking in the soil.

What guarantees do we have that bringing back a sample of soil or rock from Mars wouldn't expose this planet to the same catastrophic outcome?

From what I read, scientists are still debating whether those odd fossil-like oddities discovered in meteoric fragments from Mars are actually petrified bacteria.

I think it makes a lot of sense to take every possible precaution when it comes to bringing stuff back from Mars. It might even be a good idea to do the initial analysis up in the ISS just in case it's really bad news. After all, how do we know that we could actually contain a pathogen such as that which might be returned from the red planet?

Is it really worth the risk?

Re:Dangerous stuff

[LadyLucky]

See, I tend to think the opposite. Life on earth has spent millions of years adapting to our environment, adapting to be more and more efficient at doing bad stuff to us. I think it would be highly unlikely that any given virus would have any potency in a terrestrial environment. After all, there is nothing inherent about a particular virus that makes it deadly, it is just that its interactions with our bodies cause ill effects.

I would have thought extra-terrestrial life is likely to have the same kind of effect on us as we would on them. If we can't survive over there, why could they survive here? All in all, it is more like a roll of the evolutionary dice, in a game where the possibilities are huge, and the successful species very few. Not only that, but they have to be more successful than the ones on earth that have evolved already.

Re:Dangerous stuff

[ender81b]

WARNING: long post

A virus dangerous enough to destroy an entire planet would defeat itself - it would be a evolutionary phreak and oculdn't survive. Consider this:

Most scientists rightly consider Ebola virus a 'defunct' virus - not a good one. Ebola will kill a victim in 3 days (or so, maybe a week depending on the strain). By doing so it lessons it chances of infecting the next host. The only reason Ebola is such a (possible) problem today is b/c of things like airlines. In actuality, a ebola 'outbreak' will occur and then will rapidly die out as the hosts die faster than the virus can spread. IN a sense Ebola does one thing perfectly (reproduce extremely fast by consuming bodily tissues) but another very, very badly (destroys the hosts too fast).

A far more 'perfect' virus would be something along the lines of AIDS/HIV. These virus spread very, very slowly and can remain inside their hosts for 10-20 years in some cases. Remember the point of a virus is to Duplicate itself and survive. Ebola just isn't as effective as AIDS in doing so. I.E. 100-200 Ebola deaths a year compared to 5-6 million AIDS deaths a year (and rising with an infection rate of around 60% in some African countries).

Indeed, it would be nearly impossible for a virus to do as you say (wipe out a planet) nor would it make evolutionary sense (no, not a perfect theory but do you really want to argue creationism?). It would most likely burn itself out. No virus ever discovered can travel between more than a few species or genus that I can ever recall hearing about. And don't forget that life has been evolving on this planet for 3-4 billion years far longer than martian life would've had time to evolve and probably a higher mutation rate (due to larger amounts of radiation - closer to sun).

The difference in the organisms make travel impossible between them. Not only that but remember people *Do* survive Ebola and other types of doomsday virus's. The mortality rate may be 90% but that 10% will be immune to the virus from then on.

Ok, so your perfect virus wiped out 90% of the life on a planet (we will discuss why this is nearly impossible ina second). 10 % remaining. Planet screwed right? Nadda. During the.. oh crap can't remmeber the eon.. I think it was phanerozic - something transition around *98%* of all species on earth died (most likely due to a huge meteor impact). NINETY EIGHT PERCENT. Within 50 mil years afterwards life had recovered, if I am wrong on any of this please some geologist correct me but I think I got the time frame pretty close.

Yet we are still here and the earth fine. You see life expands expotentially (sp?). You oculd wipe out everything on the earth except for a few bacteria (and I mean a FEW one or two) and the earth woudl be ship-shape in a say 100 million years.

At the height of the cold war if the soviet/us/china released all their nuclear weapons at once distrubuted evenly over the earths surfact they wouldn't destroy life on earth. B/c of things like aneorabic bacteria just discovered living miles underground, or deep-sea vent colonies living 10's of kilometers under the sea or mold spores perserved in rock, etc, etc ad nausem.

The final point is this: why the hell would the bacteria be dangerous to us? TO do so martian life would've had to have had a DNA/whatever structure incredibly close to ours. SOooo here we go:

Your virus has to:

A.) Somehow destroy all life on a planet within a relatively short timeframe (say 10,000 years) otherwise life will adapt, and fast.

B.) Be able to infect every single species of life and mutate fast enough to overcome any changes between the species.

C.) Be able to survive for oh, 1 billion or so years on the martian surface blasted by UV, in near freezing conditions with no life to prey upon to reproduce.

D.) Be able to adapt to EARTHS lifeforms somehow.

E.) Somehow this has to make sense evolutionary-wise (remember life always expands, not contracts)

Anyways sorry for the long post.

This sound foolish

[qpt]

What justification is there for intentionally housing possibly dangerous extra-terrestrial life forms? The curiosity of a few academics is surely not reason enough to put the entire human race at potential risk!

After all, no matter how carefully they may store these organisms, there is always the possibility that they may somehow escape. Once the terrestrial biosphere is contaminated with foreign organisms, who can say what the result will be? History is rife with examples of non-native species decimating populations of unprepared organisms.

I am not worried so much about macroscopic life forms as microscopic ones, such as bacteria and viruses. Having evolved for millions of years apart from terrestrial macro-organisms, these creatures could devastate our maladapted immune systems.

This is a job for the space station

[corebreech]

Why bring it to Earth? Just bring it to the Space Station.

Specifically, you have the returning space probe enter Earth orbit. A service vehicle is then dispatched to dock with the probe. Part of the service vehicle is designed to serve as a containment module for whatever beasties the probe brought back.

Then the service vehicle navigates back to the space station and docks. The containment module remains off-limits to personnel, all observation/experiments are performed using machines preinstalled in the containment module.

If the beasties start pulling an Andromeda on us, you jettison the module and send it on its way to the Sun.

Re:This is a job for the space station

[CheshireCatCO]

This is a job for a full-blown lab with actual human involvment. If the Viking landers taught us anything, it's that we cannot anticipate all of the kinds of tests we might need and results (false and real) that we will see. There is no way you'll launch a full-sized, fully equiped biological lab into orbit, espeically not one where humans can really work (gravity is pretty popular amoung biologists, silly people).

The whole point of bringing these samples back is to bring the full arsenal of our scientific abilities against them. You can't do that via remotely controlled robots, either on Mars or in the next room of the space station.

The Alien

[_Sprocket_]

In one of the buildings I occasionally worked in at JSC (medical facility - forget the building number), there is an underground room. Pretty far underground. I've been told it was origionally used to examine astronauts before and after flights free from stray radiation, etc from the atmosphere (a combination of an insulated room and earth). Of course, we liked to claim that was where The Alien was housed.

Of course, that fell in line nicely with rumors that JSC was actually a Hanger 18 site. And that's why JSC property includes lots of undeveloped land (all those underground facilities). Now days there's a major road and a magnet school along one of the borders that used to be closed off NASA territory.

Of course - its all bunk anyway. But it fit nicely with the Alien Room at the bottom of the (sometimes) locked elevator.

Houston not a safe location

[texchanchan]

Johnson Space Center is just south of Clear Lake City, between the city of Houston and the Gulf of Mexico. The land it is on is already sinking. Every year, local roads disappear for days at a time under high water after heavy rains.

Houston locals, including the people at NASA-JSC, entertain themselves by betting on where the hurricanes are going to hit. Locals track them on maps--and everybody has maps with latitude and longitude, because they are distributed by local businesses printed on placemats, grocery bags, and such.

Clear Lake has a straight section running directly from the Gulf of Mexico to the south side of Johnson Space Center. Topo map A big hurricane, hitting at the right point in the tidal cycle, could create a storm surge that would flood everything at JSC up to, maybe including, the second floor.

When I worked there (a long time ago) high-water preparedness consisted of putting the equipment up on tables and desks.

It seems to me that a place which could be sloshing with seawater is not the best location for this lab.