The Threat From Life on Mars

sweetshot97 writes "According to the UK site, Times Online; future trips to Mars that will have probes return with samples of the martian surface may contain deadly microbes of course, foreign to our world. The threat may be incurable bacterial infections we have no cure for. What's funny is that we may have even infected Mars with our own bacteria when we sent several probes there. "

Comments

Typical media scare

[johnjaydk]

This is so typical. Due to the same media circus Armstrong & Co had to sit in qurantine when they returned from the moon. No politicians or administrators had the balls to tell the media to go piss up a rope. So they went along with the farce.

Until we actually find a single trace of life there this is all due to an overintake of Hollywood crap.

Re:Odds Are Against It

[TFGeditor]

Not necessarily. Many bacteria (e.g. anthrax) can survive almost indefinitely in a cysted state, then revive under the right conditions (moisture, warmth). Likewise, the cysted causative agent for BSE ("mad cow disease") can survive cooking heat, and hence remain viable to infect when ingested.

If anything microbial survives on Mars, it would most likely thrive in out environment.

there's pretty much

[ivano]

a whole division at NASA devoted to stopping cross-planentary contamination. Remember that little episode of downing the Galileo probe into Juptiter *just* in case it might end on Europa.

One of the main problems now is the lack of funds for such programs, esp for probes we send out of Earth. On the other hand, any probe returning from Mars will be heavily guaranteed - not just for safety reasons but for scientific ones as well.

BTW, the chances of Martian life surviving on Earth is going to be close to nil since the reducing atmosphere will oxidize anything that hasn't already had a few billion years evolutionary head start to protect themselves from it. [Yes, I know it won't be zero.] And Mars doesn't look like it had enough oxygen in it's atmosphere to effect evolution anytime in it's history.

Ciao

Re:Move along, move along

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been found that internal temepratures of meteors don't always get very high, below 50 degrees celcius. Bacteria can easily survive this. Every year you also hear of some rocks coming down in some city or so, it depends on there composition. Ofcourse alot burn up, the majority even, but some do not. And it only takes one afterall.

All in all though, the idea that a bacteria would cause a incurable disease is at the extremly long end of near insane thoughts. Any foreign bacteria would not be adapted to our natural defences against diseases, let alone some of our more complex immune system responses. And as others have pointed out, this completly forgets about that as I also pointed out above, that bacteria can and would have survived the trip from mars to earth.

Quickshot

Re:Andromeda Strain

[3waygeek]

Yes, but the guy who wrote the book the movie was based on has written a new book, to be released this week, suggesting that such fears are overblown.

In advance of the book's publication, Crichton has written the cover story in today's Parade (Sunday magazine supplement in many US newspapers) giving several examples of such exaggerated predictions.

Re:Life May Have Originated on Mars

[dannytaggart]

NASA has since stated that there is no evidence of life on the above mentioned meteor:

NASA said that after two years of study "a number of lines of evidence have gone away". Several different chemicals and molecular structures were exciting because they looked similar to byproducts of life on Earth. However, these chemicals and structures can also be created without life. Some are even present in deep space on comets, and scientists do not think that they came from Martian life anymore.

Re:Odds Are Against It

[Alrescha]

In the sense that anything is arguable, I suppose it is. But a Prion is just a mis-folded protein. Proteins are molecules. They do not meet the scientific criteria for life.

More to the original poster, they do not 'cyst'. The reason that you can't cook prions to death is because they aren't alive in the first place. By the time you heat a prion to the point where it isn't a prion, your meat isn't meat anymore. Even the dog won't eat it.

A.

Re:Odds Are Against It

[ozbird]

And given that "Earth and Mars have been swapping spit for billions of years", chances are it has already happened.

Re:MY GOD!

[Phleg]

This is a fork bomb. The first part is a decoy, but look at the last portion:

:(){ :& };:

It creates a function called : which takes no parameters (). The function creates a copy of itself and forks into the background with :&. Then, immediately after the function declaration :(){...}; it calls itself with :. There's a better one where the "payload" of the function is :| :&, which pipes one into the other and forks into the background...