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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."
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.
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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.
Of course the bacteria were entirely dessicated, not just frozen, so it's a better model of the martian situation.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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