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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. "
Stuff gets ejected off the surface of Mars and ends up on our planet anyway. All sorts of organic stuff can survive the journey too. This is a non-item if ever there was one.
Did he inhale?
Life here has spent millions of years adapting and evolving defenses against such threats. Considering the massive amount of interactions taking place here, our microbes are likely far more dangerous to any life that may be there.
When people start stirring up this idea, they need to be reminded of the fact that Earth and Mars have been trading meteorites for millions of years. There are plenty of Martian meteors already on this planet, and doubtless plenty of Terrestrial ones on Mars. Any 'infection' that was going to happen would already have taken place quite naturally.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Didn't they make a movie about this type of thing back in '71?
- passion
There's plenty of incurable diseases on earth today, and bacteria transfer over from the strangest places. Even with the rich life Earth has, we still haven't seen any all-conquering all-devouring super-micro-organism-to-destroy-anything here yet. Why would they exist on Mars?
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Unless these pathogens have evolved from something found on Earth (or vice versa...creepy), it's probably pretty unlikely that they will be bacteria (or viri, for that matter) per se. I think it would be fair to assume that any martian pathogen would be a totally new beast.
That said, however, given that there are no macro-scale living things on Mars to infect, its pretty unlikely that it would have any mechanisms in place to handle our immune defenses. While this cuts both ways (our immune defenses would also be woefully ill-prepared), our immune system is good enough to have generalized responses queued up to handle just about anything (think about inflamation, etc). This is not to mention that the pathogen is unlikely to have any idea (if you'll excuse the anthropomorphism) how to infect the human body in the first place (how to cross from the lungs to the blood stream, how to infiltrate mucous membranes, etc).
I think we'll probably have to look for the apocalypse somewhere other than in the form of a martian plague.
caritj.org
Is long far more probable than we got infected by a mushroom/squid/worm/elephant specific disease, that have at least a similar biochemistry and even very similar ADN, than getting infected by an alien disease, be from Mars, Titan or Beta Eridani.
It would be great news if there was life capable of surviving both Martian and earth climates, because that would mean we could terriform Mars.
As far as bacteria from Mars that might infect earth, let me put it this way: what about bacteria from the deep sea being brought up by submarines? What about bacteria from deep in the earth's crust being being unearthed by drilling operations? What about all of these micro organism that inhabit exotic environments on our own planet that we risk releasing into our habitat all the time? What happens to them?
Tersely put: they die.
It's evolution, my friends. Organisms have specialized to compete in their own biological niches and developed the best tools available to do so, at the cost of performing well in alternative environments. Any organism introduced from such a foreign environment as I've mentioned, even if it could survive our human environment, it would be horrifically outcompeted by the existing organisms in our ecosystem and die handily.
Notions of a superplague from another planet wiping out life on earth are strictly fantasy stories which ignore real evolutionary fact.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
What's funny is that we may have even infected Mars with our own bacteria when we sent several probes there.
How funny? +5 Funny? +5 Stupid more like...
Maybe, maybe not. Terrestrial microbial life-forms have had millenia of evolution and competition to fill every available niche in their available environment; how will Martian microbes compete, let alone thrive? How many extremophiles have been dredged up from their remote terrestrial locations and then caused terrible plagues?
Caution is appropriate here, but the article seems to be hinting at a "let's just stay home and lock the door and hope no one bothers us" attitude that would have kept mankind safely ensconced in the Olduvai Gorge.
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
Why in the world would Martian microorganisms evolve with the ability to infect Terrestrial organisms? What's the "selection pressure" for that? What advantage is conferred by the ability to infect organisms that 99.9 *ad infinitum* Martian organisms will never, ever encounter? How would such a selection pressure manifest itself?
Without serious, plausible answers to these questions, this concern really strikes me as more appropriate to a b-movie than serious space exploration. Now, I *like* b-movies. But still.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."