Slashdot Mirror
Microbes Alive After Being Frozen for 32,000 Years
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 years in the Arctic was ready to swim, eat and multiply instantly upon being thawed. Researchers are excited because they're the sort of microbes that might thrive in the ice sea announced on Mars yesterday. The instant revival abilities mean a future mission, if it found anything on Mars, could conceivably culture it and bring it back alive. Maybe NASA could market them as Martian Sea Monkeys."
Hasn't anyone ever read Andromeda?? Don't thaw them out!!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Wouldn't you be ready to eat and, uh, multiply if you had been without for 32,000 years?
I can imagine the fark headline in a few years.
NASA scientists market Martian microbes as 'Martian sea monkies'. Hilarity ensues.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Researchers are excited because they're the sort of microbes that might thrive in the ice sea announced on Mars yesterday Yeah, if the likely problems of salt in the martian see can be solved for these critters, maybe.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
The number of years isn't rounded to 32,768? And you call this a geek site?
....in a bad sci-fi movie? Now I guess we're all screwed.
Smart move, Scientists!
This is obviously not true because the endospores created by the bacteria have a shelf-life of about ten thousand years before they are rendered 'dead', which is exactly what should of happened here. Hence, this is a made up story, thanks for reporting it too us.
Little Billy pours a packet into a little acquarium only to have something out of Species in his bedroom the next morning.
Well. I'd buy it.
But seriously, discovering unicellular life on Mars would be the greatest scientific discovery of the last 200 years, and if it's there, we could do it very cheaply with an uncrewed sample return mission, using present-day technology. It's too bad that the average taxpayer thinks germs from another planet just don't sound very interesting.
Find free books.
Am sure that if I were to be frozen and reawakened 32,000 years later I'd want to eat, screw and... yeah, that's about it.
Bah.
Yum
LiveScience is reporting on a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 .... yeah, new... only 32 Kyears...
tardigrades are way cooler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrada
really bored? My blog
It's Encino Paramecium
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
market their astronauts as:
Nasa Space Monkeys!
now thats a more interesting concept.
--
matt
<insert sig here>
Sounded like a good idea at the time is now a major problem.
Don't bring them back!
queue asstastic Sci-fi ripoff movie in 3...2...1...
I wonder though, which Star Trek and other series sort of gloss over, is that if Martian bacteria did develop, seperate from ourselves, we would probablly lack any auto immune response to be able to combat them. We are the product a millions and billions of years of fighting other life forms for our existence. It would be naive of us to assume that other lifeforms out there would fundementally eat us for lunch, and the reverse being true.
On the other hand, maybe the right of universe is made up of right handed Amino Acids and we will be safe...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
this movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/ The Thing.!?
Sometimes its a good idea to leave that frozen stuff the way you found it.
>
>NASA scientists market Martian microbes as 'Martian sea monkies'. Hilarity ensues.
Dehydrated martians? Yeah, I can work with that.
Audioedit: This bunny yelling " Run for the hills, folks! Or you'll be up to your armpits in Martians!"
K-9 wants steak?
entire populations wiped from ancient microbes.
The so-called Martian "sea-monkeys" would turn out to be no more than an elobarate deception consisting of (admittedly Martian) brine shrimp larvae being passed off as something decidedly more cute and consumer friendly.
I'm not exactly a religious person, but as the parent wondered, I too was curious how the discovery of life elsewhere beyond our planet would affect the more religious of our /. kindred? Would this challenge your faith, or do you see life elsewhere as sort of inconsequential?
IMHO, the impact of the discovery isn't much different than when people were discovered to live in the "new world" (read: the Americas, numerous then unheard of peoples in the Pacific, and elsewhere), who would have been totally absent from any of the on-goings of the "olde world" religions.
[Note: To those who entertain my question, it isn't my intent to start a flame war as I'm genuinely curious. This topic has long been a curiosity for me]
Yeah I'd like to know it's there. On the other hand, I think I'd like for them to wait on bringing it back until they can confirm the initial six astronauts are not dying and highly infectuous.
On the other hand, who wouldn't like to have a symbiote like Venom from Spiderman? hehehe
Is our immune system still ready to compbat bacterias of more than 32,000 years ago?
Or are we unleashing a monster? Letting the genie out of the bottle? Something reminds me of "curiosity killed the cat".
There are Catholics on Mars?
Maybe martian microbes will give us clues towards a cure for these and other illnesses. We haven't had any luck finding cures here.
I'm also confident in my belief that we could find new minerals on mars, or other planets that could be put to good use as well.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
...the melting ice might liberate some long-dormant microbe for which we have no immunity.
Cthulhu for President! Why settle for the lesser evil?
that any Martian bacteria would serve as a cure for penicillin?
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Uh, Jurassic Park?
SSL Certificate
...will make for very grumpy awakenings, they're gonna some be pissed-off little buggers, I wouldn't wake 'em up... unless of course you thaw them out in a nice cup o' joe.
I sure couldn't handle it, but I know people who could.
This is a great discovery, but only for what it tells us about what things were like 32,000 years ago. Everytime something like this is discovered everybody immediately jumps up and down about life on Mars. At this point it's pretty damn clear that life has found ways to survive everywhere on Earth from the highest clouds to somewhere around the planet's core. But it didn't start there. All of these discoveries are the harshest possible environments on Earth- but they're more like the best conditions on Mars. In fact each new discovery makes the odds of finding life on Mars less- if it's so easy to find life in such amazingly cold and barren conditions why have we still found nothing on Mars that isn't, at best, something that isn't easily made by simple geological (areological?) chemical processes? (But also, sometimes, are by-products of living things.)
Then again no one's gotten a chance to really peak under any Martian rocks. Yet...
haha, you mean, like aids/hiv? ..how about cancer?
take a really long piss.
Generally religions tend to get round such things in time (though not without much wailing and gnashing of teeth).
Most of them will probably be happy accepting that it is "our kind of life" that is the special thing and that the existance of microbes etc elsewhere doesn't diminish how special us higher beings are. After all, most of them don't seem to like the thought that we and simpler organisms have common origins anyway.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It's all 5, Funny until an entire (human) race gets obliterated by Martian bacteria...
"...could conceivably culture it and bring it back alive. Maybe NASA could market them..."
Can you even think of a worse idea???
The basic way to date ice samples is pretty similar to "endochronology"
(which is looking at tree rings to determine their age). Ice cores
have similar striations which can be counted to determine the age of the
surrounding ice.
And I couldn't find a link, but I thought at one point
scientists were looking at the air composition inside the ice and comparing
it to historical atmospheric ratios of gasses to date things.
When did we send reporters to Mars to get the news?
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I am not really sure that is a likely scenario. Things that we use to kill bacteria are "highly conserved" genetically. That is because bacterial metabolism is basically the same and has been most likely for a very very long time. Anything that thaws out of 32,000 year old ice will likely be just like normal old today bacteria. We should probably worry more about things like viruses from today or bio-terrorism.
we found that bacteria can live after 32000 years in frozen condition and we are considering the possibility of Martian bacteria, but we still don't know all bacteria living on Earth. We explore other planets and we know very little about our own planet. For example, we recently identified three new bacteria species by closely examining publicly available DNA data. It is surprisingly how easily we can look at a DNA sequence and miss vital information in it. All that data were available to all scientists, but just one understood that there were new species footprints hiding in them.
"What if I never fell into the freezer-doodle and came to the future-jiggy?"
I wonder if the microbes are surprised with how much has changed on Mars since the year -30,000.
which of the researchers had a bad tuna sandwich for lunch on the day of "discovery"...
Why is it that religious leaders can always incite their zealot followers to violence against those who are different, but they can never incite their zealot followers to embrace the tranquillity, harmony, sanctity of life, forgiveness, mercy, tolerance, and passiveness that pretty much all of the major religions are based on?
I've never believed religion to be anything more than a crutch. It's a crutch for the immoral to have a reason to stay moral, just like law and prosecution are reasons for the criminally-minded to avoid crime. It's too bad that the crutch can be used both ways, and can facilitate the very thing the crutch was invented to stop.
Behold, mankind.
The microbes replied:
"Throw us a fricken bone here. We've been frozen for thirty thousand years!"
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
... who goes there?
Heh
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
"we would probablly lack any auto immune response to be able to combat them."
It's easy enough to speculate on a vice versa: our modern earth bacteria are tough customers, honed by millennia of unending counter-immune war. Wimpy mars bacteria would cower in their meteorite, like preschoolers dumped in a rough biker bar.
Yes, scientific types, I'm blowing smoke, too. Vote me +1, funny.
I wish my microbee survived this long... it barely managed 10 years.
sounds like the plot line of Evolution, a movie that had Duchovny in it.
Acrylic Bubble Panels www.beyond7.com
"Martian Sea Monkeys."..hmmmm... nice name for a band...any takers?
when companies will start wanting to take a look at these microbes and then start patenting their DNA, proteins, or any other sort of chemicals they may be able to extract from them...
Or then again, maybe everyone else is right and they are just going to kill us.
Of course the bacteria were entirely dessicated, not just frozen, so it's a better model of the martian situation.
That's dendrochronology. "Endochronology" has to do with study of some of the odder properties of thiotimoline.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Ah, yes. The good old cancer microbe.
I think you mean dendrochronology. Unless you mean endocrinology, but that has little to do with trees. Endochronology would be a rather intriguing temporal effect, possibly involving relativistic effects.
The abstract of the research paper says that this 'new' bacteria, Carnobacterium pleistocenium, has a 99.8% similarity to Carnobacterium alterfunditum, as determined by gene sequence. I don't have access to this journal, so perhaps someone can fill in the details (how do these frozen bacteria differ from their modern day relatives and/or descendants?).
Phylochronology is a new field that proposes studying molecular evolution on both spatial and temporal scales, using the tools of aDNA and paleontology. Here, however, we have living samples with which to make a comparison. Thus, there's the potential to compare not just nucleotide sequence, but differences in morphology, development, and evolvability.
Let's hope they sell it in 8 oz. containers, not those skimpy 6 oz. ones...
I remember a great old Scifi movie (with the usual commentary by Mike, Servo, and Crow on MST3K) called The Deadly Mantis. It's about a giant preying mantis (that can fly) trapped in the antartic ice but freed when the ice shelf it's in breaks up. Of course, the first thing it does is waste the air force base, then heads south to take out Washington DC. Fortunately, there's an expert on bugs or radioactive mutations, or wearing suits on the big screen or something like, who follows it into a tunnel and kills it in some creatively unspectacular fashion that I don't remember. It ends with him getting the girl, who is, of course, only in the movie in order to be "gotten" by the hero. Now we've unleashed this terror upon ourselves.
MST3K fans will remember this as the episode where Bobo blows up the earth, followed by Crow's immortal words, "It was as though millions of monkeys cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced."
If there are bacteria on mars, actual bacteria with mitochondria, genetic information encoded on ribose chains, etc, then I think a lot of the atheist block of science would spontaneously convert. I mean, really, why would identical chemical makeup in two different spontaneously generated lines be a hindrance to creator religions? If it happens, I might even give those creationist nutters some credence.
Really nasty ramifications. Haha.
Also, I meet your "vast majority of religions", and raise you a "The vast majority of religions don't care one way or another wether the earth is the center of the universe, balanced on a turtle, or shaped like a klein bottle. They just don't."
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
If evolution is a process requiring billions of years to occur and such exquisitely balanced conditions that life has never been created from raw materials in the lab, wouldn't finding life on other planets make evolution EVEN MORE improbable?
/. are created as needed to meet the demand.
Evolution seems to imply that each occurance of life is an independent event. If p(1)=10^-100 (boosted to 1 since life is observed), then p(2)=10^-200 (boosted to 10^-100)... Having a Creator boosts the probabilities to p(1)=1 (observed), p(2)=?? who knows? No reason not to create again. The Bible gives you places full of plants, animals, angels, cherubim, leviathon; just not people on any other planets.
Both creationism and intelligent design (aka aliens/other almost-godlike-but-not-quite-gods) should get major PR boosts over evolution if life is found on other planets.
I first heard this reasoning ~8 years ago. Take it or leave it.
PS. 93% of the statistics used on
"in the Arctic"
Fox, Alaska, home of the northernmost brewery in North America, http://www.ptialaska.net/~gbrady/pages/about.htm (obligatory beer reference), is just 10 miles NE of downtown Fairbanks and a few hundred miles SOUTH of the Arctic circle.
This makes it SUBarctic. You don't need a refrigerator, though, just a shovel/dynamite to get down to the permafrost. This may be the origin of a beer blast.
Maybe they should try pitching the bacteria in some beer wort and see what happens. It would probably taste better than what comes via the Clydesdales.
There is no problem that cannot be solved as long as you have sufficient quantities of beer or dynamite or both.
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
About the same amount of time it will take you to have intercourse with an actual member of the opposite sex. Of your own species. Whatever that is.
Actually the worst would be someone who died of an extremely virulent form of a virus and was subsequently frozen, then thawed later.
I recall reading about how in some scandinavian country they found a body of a man who died of the 1918 influenza pandemic (one of the worst flu strains ever, millions died) that was frozen in some tundra. They set up a quarantine area around him while he was recovered, lest the extremely contagious and deadly form of the flu in him get loose.
-
Thawing out old bacteria is not a new discovery--what's interesting here is that it is older bacteria.
The more interesting question about possible unicellular organisms in Mars is whether they share a common ancestor with Earth's unicellular organisms or did they develop independently of each other. If there is a link/common ancestor, then the currently weak theory of panspermia (life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores) would have a big boost in support. Also see this article about possible space bugs written over 2 years ago.
Linux at home
Here is John Polkinhorne's website. Has a list of his books, as well, complete with amazon links.
Think about it: if it's adapted to live at -200 degrees, it will boil at room temperature. Same as our bacteria will die on Venus. Or our bacteria from hot sulphur streams down in the ocean would probably die on the surface.
Haven't these scientists ever watched an episode of the X-Files? You NEVER thaw out anything that you find in ice. Or touch any mysterious black oil spots in a hole in Texas. Or stay in a small town in the forests of Colorado. Or visit a logging camp in Oregon. Or.....well you get the idea.
This just appeared online in the past hour or so:
Space Probe Finds Frozen Sea on Mars
"Itsa 32,000 year-old Twinkey!"
Table-ized A.I.
Uh, check your facts budy. Here's a link since you obviously can't use google.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
We have 32k year old bacteria discovered in Antarctica that wake from the deep freeze and people take this time to bash religion for inciting violence and being a mental crutch for the weak willed. Very easy to make statements like that on slashdot, but try doing it in a forum where a majority of the people you're speaking to are "crippled". I'm tired of hearing it, and I'm sure people are tired of responses to responses like mine, condemning said responses with a conscending moral tone.
BTW I can't help but parallel this story to Jesus's life, crucifixion, and resurrection. I for one, welcome our new microbe lord.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
I am getting my flame thrower ready right now.
Did anyone else read this as Microbees Alive After Being Frozen for 32,000 Years. Sure they were slow PCs, but damnit they'll recover from crashes eventually...
1. It's "possible ice sea", not "ice sea". The paper hasn't even been peer reviewed yet, let alone actually examined for the presence of ice, let alone liquid water. There is just as much reason to believe that it's *not* an ice sea (similarity to regions viewed as volcanic flows, the rate of sublimation of even insulated ice as Mars' equatorial temperatures, and greatly exaggerated claims about things like the viscosity of ice vs. lava).
What's with this culture of "one scientific team says so, so it is an absolute fact"? That's why you all were suckered by the "methane from life" claim that turned out to have been a misinterpreted overheard conversation at a party.
2. Why was Mars even mentioned at all? We're talking about Earth life here; if there is any life on Mars, it will likely be playing by significantly different "rules" at a molecular level. This discovery on its own was neat; no need to try and jazz it up by trying to distantly connect it with Mars.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Just read this:
* Temperature--Tardigrades can survive being heated to 350 K and cooled to less than 30 K.
* Radiation--They have been known to withstand 570,000 röntgens of x-rays (500 röntgens would be fatal to a human).
* Pressure--They can withstand being in a vacuum and in pressures that are many times greater than atmospheric pressure.
More likely these things aren't up to the 1337 5ki112 today's evolved fauna (bacteria,virii,fungi) and wouldn't last long outside the petri dish. Makes for some what sci-fi, but what you have today is the stuff tough enough to last through whatever nature and errant meteorites have chucked at it.
On another note, immortality is overrated. Survive 32K years and you get to swim around a petri dish among strangers. Hmph.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 years
This is obviously a meaning for the word new I hadn't previously come across
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 years in the Arctic was ready to swim, eat and multiply instantly upon being thawed ... just pop 'em in the microwave for two minutes and enjoy. Yum!
Or
Bacteria 1: "Yawwwn...good morning..."
Bacteria 2: "ZZZzzzzZZZzzzz..."
Bacteria 3: "Morning!"
Bacteria 1: "Hey, wake up!"
Bacteria 2: "ZZZzzz...aaahhh...morning. How long this time?"
Bacteria 3: "Uh...looks like...32,000 years."
Bacteria 1: "Well that's a lot shorter than last time."
Bacteria 2: "Yes, it is. I wonder why things warmed up so quickly."
Bacteria 3: "Well any-hoo, you boys ready?"
Bacteria 1: "I most certainly am..."
Bacteria 2: "Let's get it done quickly, I want to go back to sleep."
Bacteria 3: "Okay then, let the next Extinction Commence!!!"
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Bill Gates.
Seriously, from the business point of view they better grow them here on Earth 'cause's ceaper.
Is it just me who reads "Microbes" as "Microsoft" (I guess it's because the latter is much more common on Slashdot than the former)? Read it that way twice already, actually. And it even makes sense!
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
maybe they are good at cobol for the next millenium! just kiddin...
I for one welcome our new martian sea monkey overlords.
I wish I will too multiply at the age of 32000...
BTW The microbes can be said to be the oldest living things on earth we know! The oldest Giant Pines in California and Nevada are just over 4000 years old. http://www.rmtrr.org/oldlist.htm
Who knows what relics of the past one might unleash(!)
It may very well surviving pieces from the plague that haunted The Ancients
Is there by chance any documentation of that? It seems like a very striking finding, and I've never heard of it.
This is not anything new, scientists have found bacteria from millions of years deep down in the earth and ice caps. they have even found bacteria that can survive over 256 oC water. the bacteria found really deep down in the earths depths tends to have a metabolic rate 99% slower then what it would be if it was on the surface. this wasnt really known about bacteria untill 20 or 30 years ago. since then some people have come up with the idea that bacteria could travel across the galaxy(maybe due to a comet or something hitting a planet) over millions of years to seed life on another planet or even to reseed destroyed life on the planet that the bacteria came from.
Ooh, never mind, found it. Yay for google scholar:
= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7538699&dopt=Citation
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber.
Cano RJ, Borucki MK.
A bacterial spore was revived, cultured, and identified from the abdominal contents of extinct bees preserved for 25 to 40 million years in buried Dominican amber. Rigorous surface decontamination of the amber and aseptic procedures were used during the recovery of the bacterium. Several lines of evidence indicated that the isolated bacterium was of ancient origin and not an extant contaminant. The characteristic enzymatic, biochemical, and 16S ribosomal DNA profiles indicated that the ancient bacterium is most closely related to extant Bacillus sphaericus.
might thrive in the ice sea announced on Mars yesterday.
Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to announce this ice sea here on good ole' planet earth? Do we really need to be supporting the Martian tourist industry with these thinly vieled vacations to other planets for government officials? We shouldn't be supporting these Martian bacteria when we have so many unemployed Terran bacteria here at home.
paintball
they woke up to have sex.
:) /moak
I always new that the scene in Alien (the movie) was a lie, after a cryo sleep you dont want to eat Spaghetti.
frozen for 32,000 years and springs back to life. yippee ;)
Try being alive for 16 million years!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4291571.stm
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
... a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 years in the Arctic was ready to swim, eat and multiply instantly upon being thawed.
Shouldn't that be an old type of bacteria?
I watched a show, probably on the Discovery Channel, months if not a year or so ago. They had retrieved some dead, frozen mammoth tissue from the tundra somewhere in North America (I want to say Alaska). They brought it backto the lab, and amongst the ice0destroyed cells of the mammoth, they found some ultra-small things they thought were maybe just junk. However, when they inspected them further, they were cells -- and when thawed, they came back to life. And they divided. I's as if they were some sort of spore-like stem cell from the mammoth spread throughout the tissues.
I don't remember muchmore about htis show, but I'd really like to see it again and learn more. Does anyone else remember this show? I googled but couldn't find anything remotely close.
This is no biggy. The BBC has a report today on microbes found 400m below the earth's surface inside solid rock that are at least sixteen million years old. That's right, the same actual cells, not the colony, individual bacteria cells... 'practically immortal', as the article says. The discoverers speculate that life may originally have evolved underfound as the surface was being regularly sterilised by impacts in the early epochs of earth's history. I leave the implications for life on Mars as an exercise for the reader ;)
Actually Martian bugs are a win/win situation - if there is no common ancestor then we'd get to see how similar they are - like if they use DNA with a different "instruction set", or a different molecule, or maybe even a completely different mechanism for storing their genes. My guess would be that truly alien life, with no common ancestor would be very different indeed.
As you point out, if there is a common ancestor then panspermia gets a boost. Panspermia between Earth and Mars seems fairly plausible to me - I read articles that calculated the amount of rock transferred by impacts between Earth and Mars in the last few billion years. Even with worst case assumptions, it was possible for viable bacteria to have been transferred.
Plus, you might actually get funding for my favourite mission, one that checks the Europan sea for life. I reckon you'd have a much better chance of finding truly alien life on Europa than Mars - the amount of rock transferred from Mars/Earth to Europa should be fairly minimal. Also, since the seas on Europa are kilometres beneath the surface it should be fairly well protected against 'infection' from meteorites.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Think the flu brought to America by the conquistadors/missionaries/colonists/etc. Something that for the europeans was just a flu, was deadlier to the Indians than the black plague back in Europe. It killed more of them than the conquistadors, wars, and inquisition combined.
"The differenter the better" is good and fine, but at one point it becomes "different enough to not be detected". The immune system and its cells aren't a complete genetics lab, complete with a team of top-notch scientists, fully analyzing every cell and deciding if it belongs there or not. It reacts to certain patterns, but doesn't react at all to others. Things that they never had to detect, they might not. Or not reliably.
Or to put it otherwise, that too is the result of evolution, rather than intelligent design. Being able to detect and solve problems that actually could kill the animal before it reproduced, were obviously favoured by natural selection. Having an immune system that reacts to viruses and bacteria you meet every day, now that's the kind of thing that natural selection is all about.
On the other hand, having an immune system capable of reacting to fundamentally different stuff, that's never even been there in millions of years, that's something _not_ enforced by natural selection. You can be born, grow up, reproduce, and die, without ever needing to heal from a martian flu.
In fact, au contraire: there's a good evolutionary reason to _not_ evolve an over-reacting immune system. See the auto-immune Type 1 diabetes where your pancreas is destroyed by your own immune system. Individuals with an immune system even more strict than that, got themselves out of the gene pool.
And evolution can be even more perverse than that. There are a whole bunch of genetic diseases or other disfunctions, which didn't get filtered out by billions of years of selection, nor get defenses evolved against them, because they made no difference in reproduction rates. Either because:
A) The're very rare recessive genes. Individuals could be "the fittest", even while carrying these genes. Or
B) They kill you after the age where you've already reproduced. E.g., skin cancer. Stuff that could kill you in your thirties-fourties wasn't a priority to evolve defenses against, when those hominids lived less than half that.
Basically all I'm saying is: I wouldn't be _that_ sure. There are good chances that, yes, the germs from mars would be the first against the wall. But as history shows, there are also non-zero chances that they won't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hasn't anyone ever read Andromeda?? Don't thaw them out!!
The frozen bacteria they find on mars could have been what killed those little dudes we used to see in movies all of the time, but strangley don't anymore. (Last time I saw them was in Mars Attacks, and they were obvious fakes..)
Or is the explanation that the God mysteriously planted the evidence to throw us off the trail?
Sounds like a very old frozen dinner that can do math!
Perhaps the most amazing find is the bacteria staying in a dormant state inside liquid inclusions in salt crystals for 250 million years (BBC story).
In fact, that finding by Vreeland and Rosenzweig is apparently not the first one of bacteria that are alive after hundreds of millions of years in a dormant state, but it has caught the attention of other researchers because they seem to have been particularly careful to avoid contamination.
Nevertheless, until those findings are more widely accepted, they will need to get replicated a lot more by many more groups, and the sequence data will have to be examined very carefully.
However, between all these findings, it seems pretty much clear that bacteria can stay dormant for a long, long time. One implication of that is panspermia, namely that life didn't evolve on earth but arrived here from space in the form of microbes, perhaps even traveling interstellar distances.
There is something like 100 times the mass of bacteria on/in/above the earth than eucharoyte & multicellar life combined. Bacteria have been found in the deepest rock drillhole, sandwiched in snow and ice, floating in the atmosphere. About 5-10% of human being weight may be benign bacteria.
Famous last words.
As has been noted above, this is a very Science Fiction like area (ooo..Andromeda Strain and so on). Occasionally, reading such short fiction pays off so I can say: I'm not sure this is entirely news to anyone.
My "factual" basis for this is a spectacular novella by Dominic Green called "Send me a Mentagram" (originally published in Interzone), which was also included in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction 21.
Read it..and consider.
---
This has been a 'my world is informed by science fiction' announcement.
Dozens of Martian meteorites have been found on Earth without looking too hard. Thousands of lunar meteorites have been found on Earth. Though it may take tens of thousands of years to travel between planets, this article shows bacteria can easily survive the time. There have been thousands of opportunities over billions of years.
If life is found elsewhere in this solar system, I expect it to resemble Earth life, because interplanetary infection is so easy. In fact, I suggest bateria probably evolved on Mars first, because of its smaller size, it stablized sooner. Then it infected earth, maybe Venus, the Jupiter atmosphere, the European oceans, and so on.
-kgj
The religions that will have the problem are the Fundamentalist Protestant religions such as some (but not all) of the Southern Baptist churches. Mainstream Christianity and Islam will be fine with it as will many other religions that have nothing to do with the bible.
Finding microbes are cool and all, but I don't think proving their existance will change anyone's opinions much on how special earth is. I'm not a fundy, but I think earth is pretty special - besides being in the extreme minority of planets in supporting life it has life which is smart enough to get off the planet and look for life on other planets (or to have discussions on the subject of god and whether or not the earth is special).
Now if we landed on Mars and found a martian airport complete an airport bar full of odd xenomorphs... now that might change some peoples opinon on things.
But you know, alien beings might be every much as religious as humans.
Yeah, if the likely problems of salt in the martian see [sic] can be solved for these critters, maybe.
Well, care to explain why microbes--let alone certain types of small shrimp--that can live in salt evaporation ponds, where the salt level is many times higher than seawater? Go to the salt evaporation ponds at the south end of San Francisco Bay and see what I mean.
"Researchers are excited because they're the sort of microbes that might thrive in the ice sea announced on Mars yesterday"
Was the announcement made on Mars? Hmmm...
I can see it now ... Manned mission to Mars, retrieve samples of ice, bring back samples to earth, samples unleash bacteria into population, human population is obliterated.
I RTA and could not find how they dated the ice to ~2^15 years. I am always skeptical of dating methods as they can vary so much and oftentimes depend on dates that are dubious to begin with.
Nevertheless, for the Carnobacterium pleistocenium to survive freezing is definitely interesting for medicine. Prolonging the life of donated organs could benefit from the research of this bacterium.
[in the vein of the In Russia...]
On Earth, invading aliens go out to bring deadly microbes back to their home planet? or something...
They, for many, welcome their new ape-descended unthawing scientist overlords.
(and yes, I do know we've been around rather more than 32,000 years)
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
has anyone welcomed our new microbial overlords, yet?
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
It'd be like someone showing up at a Black Panthers reunion in full Klan regalia. With a blinking light on top and a sign that says "kick me".
If you got a significant quantity of Martian microbe on you, you might have to worry about anaphylaxis or something, given the total novelty of the antigens, but going unnoticed by your immune system is not the problem.
My... live science's page is ugly... 1998 called they want their webpage back. A team of trained monkeys in html design indeed!
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
This already happened to Mulder and Scully back in '93.
"We are not who we are".
How old does a microbe have to be before more time won't inflict more damage? I mean, at some point a spore will be as desiccated as it can get under the conditions it's stored in. If that takes 10 years, do another 500,000,000 years make a difference? Do parts of their dried-up little bodies have half-lives?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
To the "INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYSTEMATIC AND EVOLUTIONARY MICROBIOLOGY"? Here is what I assume is the abstract relating to the find. http://ijs.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/55 /1/473
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Things that i haven't come across in the posts yet:
/.
1. In Soviet Russia, bacteria freezes YOU.
2. Could you imagine a Beowolf cluster of these?
3. I, for one, welcome our thawed bacterial overlords.
4. Nazi reference in the scope of religion.
5. Enough mod points to seriously deter people from starting a religious argument on
IANALOOA
I've had this link on my page for a L O N G time.
pay heed
...i read "Microsoft"
Jurassic Park in a Petri Dish! Be careful with reviving microbes from other planets. They've made about 2 dozen horror flicks about this sort of thing going horribly awry. It might be worth it though if they grow up to look as hot as the chick from "Species."
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
take that, David Blaine!
INSIGHTFUL!!!
It's a new type of bacteria, that's 32,000 years old...
Note that that case refers to *spores*, not to frozen bacteria. I don't think spores are considered alive in the same way a bacteria is. Think seed versus plant. Reviving the latter is a much bigger deal.
IA ! F'Tagn ! When the stars are right I shall walk again.... And I'll be bringine my bacteria back with me.
Cthulhu
well it looks like star trek history will come true once again. Where in there it said back in the 21st century kryogenics was developed and humans tried it out. It soon died out though as it was only a fad. This was from Star Trek TNG Season 1 Episode 25.
My Gawd WTF...
That article reads like the opening scene to an outbreak movie. "Hey the bacteria from the ice are swi... *ack *ack... Arrrrgh!" Cut to Oval Office: "Mr. President, there's a situation."
scott king
I saw some birds sitting on a stop sign. That is significant, because Mars is also red. If life can thrive on a red stop sign, it is that much more likely to thrive on Mars also.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....