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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. "
Odds are that any lifeform that is adapted to live on Mars will pretty much die immediately on earth, unless contained in an area that has a Mars-like climate. I wouldn't be too worried.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
Its incurable and we have no cure? Talk about a one, two punch...
caritj.org
..welcome our new bacterial overlords!
I can see it now ... "Not sure where your computer is boldy going? Make sure it's using trusted Mcaffee anti-virus software ... it's what astronauts on Mars use" *cut to video of astronauts dying from lack of proper inoculation*
or something
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
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?
We have to regretfully accept the fact that there will always be some people fear the progress we make and stand in it's way. Martian environment is not so much different from our's, it's just not a friendly. We may find microbes there that can resist extreme cold and heat, but there is no need for them to be resistent against antibiotic or immune systems for there are none.
In Orson Wells' War Of the Worlds, why do the Martian invaders die of our everyday diseases, but humans don't die of theirs?
"I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles."
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.
Can't understand words of more than one syllable? Try the version from Rupert Murdoch's other UK tabloid, The Sun.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
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? """
Until we actually find a single trace of life there this is all due to an overintake of Hollywood crap.
TCAP-Abort
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.
First, we would need to launch a mission to Mars, manned or unmanned, to secure and return to earth core samples that might provide evidence for or against DNA as the organizing scheme for the Mars life form. Having accomplished the return of a biological sample and determined the presence or absence of DNA, we are then faced with a quandary.
Read the full Article
If this is true, we shouldn't worry too much.
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Nothing to see here
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
What's funny is that we may have even infected Mars with our own bacteria when we sent several probes there.
Not so funny.
Alien microbes are less dangerous (to us) than our own terran microbes.
Truly alien microbes may or may not thrive in our bodies.
Earth microbes, on the other hand, already know how to live in our bodies. A mutant earh microbe can readily mutute into virulent new forms.
This was the gist of The Andromeda Strain.
-kgj
-kgj
For example, because there were no heat resistant, space worthy (radiation resistant) memories back then an advance form of magnetic core memory memory was used. So this thing had VERY little memory. All data had to be stored on board for later transmission. The storage was done on magnetic tape. But of course the "modern" plastic magnetic tape could not be autoclaved. So they went back to the original magnetic tape: a steel band.
The atmosphere on mars has orders of magnitude lower pressure than ours. SO one cannot use a conventional pressure gauge. And an ultra sensitive baritron (capicitively measured diaphram gauge) would never have survived baking. (modern ones are become more robust). So insted they implemented a new kind of pressure guage never used before. It consisted of three temrerature sensors on stalks at right angle and some heat sources on stalks. By measuring the time history of the temperature reading they were able to use a mathematical heat transport model to back out the wind direction, velocity and pressure.
This device turned out to be amazingly robust and kept its calibration over years of service. No lander since then can claim the accuracy of this original weather station.
Later probes were not as thourgouly baked in part because they were so much more complicated their components could not withstand it.
As for bacteria living on mars. There are already earthly bacteria that could survive. For example take Radio-durans whose preferred environment is the high radiation environemnt underneath the hanford waste tanks. It can withsand having its DNA sliced in to tiny bits and still recover. It evolved on earth to live in extreme oxidizing conditions, turned out radiation damage, complete desication, and other stresses were a freebie. Things like antrhax spores can live decades, maybe much more, in a non-vegitative form.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
"This is a FOX News Alert! What you don't know about Martian probes could KILL you! Stay tuned for more information after the break - I mean after the break after the break - aww, fuckit, we're reporting a 10 second segment at :55 after."
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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...
Hi, Ken. I see you've found something to do with your time, now that you're off Jeopardy. Welcome!
an icon with Uri-Geller's face will do fine.
Working for necessity's mother.
Organic life and bacteria/virii have been involved in a never-ending arms race for millions, if not billions of years. They come up with a new vector for infection, larger organics evolve a way to counter that infection and so on, ad infinitum...
The chances of an alien retrovirus having the necessary enymes to inject a DNA strand into a human cell are pretty close to zero. The chances of any bacteria being able to survive a highly evolved immune system are also pretty close to zero. I would call this a non-issue.
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
This is a very sad possibility, but will happen eventually.
For sure, we wouldn't want to hurt any of the native flora and fauna teeming across the fertile plains of Mars now would we.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
really, let's worry about that if we send the first landers that actually bring stuff from mars. Right now there is nothing remotely dangerous...
One of the most amazing discoveries from apollo 12 was that when they removed the camera from the surveyor robotic misson that landed a two years earlier, and returned it to earth for analysis , they found human throat bacteria on it, even though it was returned in a sealed, sterile container.
p er iments_III.html
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/expmoon/Apollo12/A12_Ex
One of the astronauts on the mission later remarked that he considered it the most incredible discovery of the entire Apollo program.
My rights don't need management.
What would be 'funny' (WHO picked that word for the summary - geez!?) would be if a microbe from Mars made it back here and turned out to be harmless to all forms of life, BUT killed the AIDS virus.
AT&ROFLMAO
Ladies and gentlemen, the above post is brought to you by the same kind of folks that vote for Bush (i.e., your capacity for rational thought has to be this impaired).
Let's follow the argument presented by the poster:
If it doesn't scare you that people like this are allowed to vote, you aren't paying attention.
Conservatives spent the latter half of the twentieth century telling us to watch out for the communist boogey-man. He was hiding in the bushes waiting to kidnap your daughters and ban Christmas. When it came down to it though, just about every terrorist act perpetrated on American soil was carried out by right-wing nuts or religious extremists. Does anyone else find that deliciously ironic, or is it just me?
Expert: The chances of us getting contaminated with infectious Martian material are slim. But we do know one thing for sure.
CNN Analyst: What's that?
Expert: If we do become infected, it IS George Bush's fault
Go back to watching your Hollywood movies and leave us in peace. If you think it is wiser to spend billions on Hollywood junk (yes, most of it IS junk) than on real science then have the UN start paying Hollywood's fees after we withdraw. And move Hollywood and the UN to Paris. If you are an American, I hear there is a group helping folks like you pay for a bus ticket to Montreal. Then, you can go up there and live off of American third world welfare, American defenses, pay all of your taxes into a system that allows you to wait in line for months for second rate emergency medical care, AND, claim to have invented all kinds of cool things without spending any Canadian dough on real research.
Back in July, I posted a troll comment that used exactly the same reasoning as this article. It was an article about bacteria in Antarctica that had been isolated for thousands of years. My comment was:
We humans aren't going to have any immunity to these microbes that have been isolated for 500000 years. I hope whoever's studying these lakes takes appropriate precautions against both accidental release and theft by terrorist organizations.
It got 17 direct and 78 indirect replies, and made the July issue of Trollback magazine. Sometimes I wonder if the reason Slashdot has so many trolls is because the editors are trolls themselves.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
your sig begs the response - Atheists don't fly planes into buildings in the name of God. They do it in the name of Nietsche...
These Bacteria of Mass Destruction have been ignored far too long. Time to liberate Mars!
Sure. ... "they were
And NASA, at the time, thought that it was
doing the "right" thing about contamination.
The only problem is, is that autoclaving and
UV irradiation DOES NOT KILL all microbal life.
It only makes the "survivors" the very toughest
of the bunch. Microbiologists have discovered
microbes living more than a mile underground
that eat rock! And oceanographers have found
microbes thriving in the hot vents of the ocean
floor, where their thermometers have literally
melted. Re-examination of both the sterilization
process and the materials used, NASA has reached
the conclusion that 100% sterility (no microbal
life) on stars-bound craft was not possible.
That said, there is no reason to believe that
some "cross-pollination" between Earth and Mars
has not been going on since the beginning of
time. Any attempt that NASA or ESA (or PRC)
makes to return "samples" to Earth will only
accelerate that process.
The "war of the worlds" is going on right now,
but on Mars, and at the microbal level, ever
since we landed craft there. Like the line from
the "Alien" movie series stated
with us the entire way".
The push to put men on Mars will far outweigh
the ability to detect and preserve whatever
life already existed on Mars, anyway. And for
true "terraforming" to commence there, someone
is going to have to make the decision to massively
and deliberately contaminate Mars with microbes.
It's worth noting that it is suspected the Soviets did not bother AT ALL to sterilize thier Mars probes. Also, Zond 2 which was intended to only flyby Mars actually crashed, it was certainly not sterilized.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
At least it's not a cure for which we have no known disease!
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
The best example of bacteria from earth surviving harsh conditions: bacteria on surveyor 3 survived almost three years on the moon before they were brought back by the crew of Apollo 12
While I can't stand this AC, it should be noted that this is the first time he has made a valid point. Whether it was accidently or on purpose, I don't know.