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Earth Microbes May Survive On Mars
Vicissidude writes "New Scientist is reporting that terrestrial microbes who hitch a ride to Mars on spacecraft may be able to survive under special circumstances." From the article: "...Mars's thin atmosphere allows such intense ultraviolet radiation to reach the planet's surface - triple that found on Earth - that any life inadvertently carried on the spacecraft is thought to be wiped out quickly...However, the bacteria were able to stay alive if they were shielded by just 1 millimeter of soil during the tests, which ran for up to 24 hours. Under such a protective coating, the bacteria could survive - and potentially grow - under the high Martian UV flux if water and nutrient requirements for growth were met."
So does this mean that if we are able to find suitable water deposits but either not enough life for it to foster or none at all, that we would be able to plant certain bacteria that would be able to start a green house effect to vent off ice caps into atmosphere and "seed" life on Mars?
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
Isn't it strange how the Martians brought us here before they were annihilated, and now we're sending life back to that planet?
Could this be a way to terra form mars for colonzation over a long period of time ?
'Martian Yoghurt' from Muller - the choice of the extraterrestrially cultured.
Baceteria can survive and grow if the right conditions are available. News at 11.
GWB will probably have NASA include a bunch of anthrax on board and then say that Iran got there before us and we now have to send troops there. Hey on 2'nd thought, maybe it is not so bad.
terrestrial microbes who hitch a ride to Mars on spacecraft may be able to survive
Religious leaders of the world: do not panic about your potential loss of relgious power over your flock! Our comments are expressly designed so that you can claim that any life found on any other planet was transported from earth within a wad of gum that an engineer stuck to the bottom of one of the landers.
Bacteria can be grown to be resistant to nearly anything, within reason, given enough generations. It seems that if we wanted to seed Mars with life, we could take a suitable microbe, expose it to martian level radiation until 99% of the organisms are eliminated, then allow it to regrow, then expose to radiation, regrow, and continue this process until the UV is no longer harmful. The nutritional substrate would have to be something similar to that found on the martian surface, of course, but it really does not seem that far fetched to me. the real concern would be, do we want to seed mars with life before we are certain that there is no native microbial life?
Batman can defeat any opponent as long as he has time to prepare.
..when the Apollo 12 crew brought back a camera from Surveyor 3. Some microorganisms survived a few years on the moon. See a nasa page for details.
"...may be able to survive under special circumstances."
well, heck, you could say that about just about anything.
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Tardigrades are incredibly resilient lifeforms, which may very well survive on Mars, it's a kind of "over-evolved" 0.1 mm beast, you can find everywhere.
if water and nutrient requirements for growth were met.
Since they haven't found water yet this shouldn't be a problem.GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
"terrestrial microbes who hitch a ride to Mars on spacecraft"
I don't understand how terrestrial microbes can slip through security so easily as to hitch a ride to Mars, and on spacecraft of all things. Obviously we need better security.
This calls for more RFID funding, I say. Mark of the beast time buddy boy!
Remember in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds how our germs were Earth's last best defense against the invading Martians? Good to know we're developing a first-strike capability...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
We should be doing this *now* with *every* mission to mars. Planting bacteria, microbes anything that can survive in the environment. If necessary doing a bit of genetic manipulation to create species which can survive there.
Deleted
Not just spacecraft: Earth microbes can hitch a ride to Mars on meteorites, too.
Just as meteorites from Mars are found on Earth (eg. in Antarctica), meteorites from Earth may reach Mars, and these meteorites may carry microbes. Some scientists think there's an exchange of biological material between the two planets.
The Mars rover Opportunity recently found an iron meteorite on Mars.
under the high Martian UV flux if water and nutrient requirements for growth were met.
These appear to be pretty large caveats on feasibility.
Sort of like saying (ala Dan Quayle) that people can survive as long as there is water, an atmosphere and enough food.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
That's actually possible only if the harmful environmental conditions are only UV lights on Mars. There can be several other non-earth problems that prevent living things to survive on Mars. Time should have shown those scientists that creating a population is such a hard thing that you need thousands of conditions to match together for a single colony to evolve or even survive.
Earth Microbes placed on Mars appear to be stuck in a sand dune.
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that these bacteria are going to be evolving quite fast. i mean, in the early earth stages, there was no ozone layer to protect us from the sun's radiation, and bateria evolved quite rapidly into animals we have today (if you believe in evolution). maybe if we send single cell bateria over to mars, in a couple million years, we may see intelligent creatures!
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Am I the only one thinking about how the colonists in the early age of American colonization whiped out entire tribes of Indians by bringing diseases with them? Isn't it possible that we have already put certain dangerous germs on Mars that are now whiping out life forms that we haven't discovered yet? Perhaps NASA should desinfect the probes prior to launch and make them germ-resistant or something. Like the cellphones...
don't we have enough problems with our own viruses mutating, now we gotta send them to another planet where they can mutate so we can pick them up later and bring em back...
/. has thought of that yet..
actually I just wondered why nobody on
Life is the most powerful force in the universe.
Gravity? Kid stuff. Kinetic energy? Boring. Electromagnetic radiation? It's for pussies.
Life is the force of non-being wanting to be so much that non-being converts to being.
Adam was made from mud, right? And what exactly made that mud get up and dance? Never mind the bronze-age cosmologies, let's just say that Life is more ... interesting than mud.
-kgj
-kgj
Now let's fly over there and find out ;-)
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According to Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", streptococcus was found on a lens cap brought back from the moon.
This article describes how Streptococcus was found living on the flag we planted with the Apollo 12 mission. I would assume that atmospheric conditions and UV radiation levels are very similar to those found on Mars.
Some people arealready thinking up how to terraform Mars. How can we start terraforming Mars if we are not even able to terraform Terra.
Let us first find a solution for the polution and changes going on here before we fuck up other places.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Why not just add mass to Mars until it has enough gravity to hold onto a suitable atmosphere.
Inspired by Apple, you can now return your Mars Rover to NASA for recycling, plus a 10% decrease in your budget for next year! Everybody wins!
"Sorry mindlessly eating and reproducing until there are no resouces left and you die only qualify as a very limited form of life for most people"
I've heard of anthormorphising but with *bacteria*?
Like it or not, life forms expand to fill their environment. That *is* life. Look at the red deer population in Scotland. The only predators now are man and their numbers have increased to the point that, yes, when they are not culled they die of starvation.
Frankly I don't particularly care if bacteria die of starvation and a food chain has to start somewhere.
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That might be an important distinction. I know squat about soil (or regolith) though. Anyone care to comment?
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
When the 1976 Viking experiments detected possible signs of life, one of the suspects was bacteria from Earth. Since it was believed that life wouldn't surive the trip to Mars, the validity of this hypothesis compared to the idea that the bacteria is Martian (or the idea that it was a false positive due to nonliving sources) has been the debate of scientists for a while. We'll have to wait until someone recovers the Viking probes to know the true source of that possible signature.
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- form spores; i.e. are drought tolerant
- use the martian soil as a nutrient source
- perform a modified form of photosynthesis
Normal photosynthesis releases O2 into the atmosphere, but it requires CO2 in an atmosphere to work. The idea is to create a microbe that gets everything it needs from soil, is powered by the sun, but has minimal light requirements. This type of microbe could use the energy from the sun to break down the iron oxide in the soil and rock to release O2, thus helping to create a habitable planet. It is a long shot, and would probably take a few centuries even if it did work, though.The bigger problem is that the gravity on mars (which is only 38% of the gravity on earth) may not be strong enough to keep an atmosphere we can use on the planet; i.e. the mass of mars may be too small to allow it to be effectively terraformed.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Our proposed Bill will create a score of new offences including failure to notify authorities about a damaged or defective card, refusal of a microbe to obey an order from the Secretary of State, failure to notify the Secretary of State of any change in cellular structure, failure to obey an order to mutate and providing false plasmids. Penalties range from mild exposure to radiation to two years solitary containment in an offshore government facility, with a maximum ten-year cryogenic imprisonment for possession of forged DNA.
We will also introduce new laws to help catch and convict those microbes involved in helping to plan terrorist activity or who glorify or condone acts of terror. New control orders will enable police and security agencies to keep track of microbes they suspect of planning terrorist outrages including bans on who they can meet or form cellular colonies with, electronic tagging and mitosis curfew orders, and for those who present the highest risk, a requirement to stay permanently at home.
Survival of the fittest is a concept that helps us understand natural selection and biodiversity. It should not be used as an excuse to shelve public health issues here on earth or in any larger public.
A much better guiding principle would be the Hippocratic oath: do no harm. Especially in space exploration, where we know so little about ramifications. We're still getting this wrong on Earth where we have much better understanding of the ecosystem---GMOs anyone?
Ah, that lovely word, "may". With the word MAY, everything is possible. Why, for all we know, unicorns MAY exist!
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That's taking the pet rock concept to a whole new level. You could make a million dollars! Patent it!
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Microbes may survive UV light if they are shielded from UV light... These researchers should be given a nobel prize!
No. A better guiding principle would be somewhere between do no harm and wanton harm. No harm to another ecosystem means never going there at all. You will squash, upturn, or otherwise kill something.
We're getting this "wrong" on Earth because you cannot "do no harm" and survive. Even a cow rips up weeds and grasses and munches the insects, frogs and other little critters it incidentally picks up. Harm.
"if water and nutrient requirements for growth were met."
And if yer grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon!
Nicole Ritchie, may be able to survive navigating themselves from Florida to California shielded only by their pink pick up truck, provided they are accompanied by a protective crew of camera men and a steady supply of cute boys.
They Might Be Giants already knew this.
Just remember- Mars can't be terraformed. The gravity is too low to retain a sufficient atmospheric pressure to make it "Terra-like". There isn't enough water. It's too cold. It has too weak a magnetic field. Life could survive there unprotected at a stretch- but we couldn't.
Agreed. Terraforming is a tedious stretch of the imagination.
But bacterioforming -- the reworking of a planet to support bacteria -- that could prove interesting.
Man is the measure only of himself, not of all things. Man will not inherit the cosmos. But the cosmos had better watch out, because Life is trying to spread itself everywhere, one way or another.
-kgj
-kgj
I wondered about this a long while ago when I took my undergrad in microbiology. I'm surprised nobody worried about this before, but then again, the NASA engineers had much more to worry about than whether the spacecraft were sterile before they were launched. Certain types of bacteria (especially soil bacteria) can remain dormant for decades until there is enough water for growth, so this could indeed be a problem. Also I know from firsthand experience how quickly bacteria evolve and adapt to new environments. It's too late to undo what has bee previously sent, but hopefully next time something can be done to prevent this.
...). They introduced strict standards for the production and processing of the food and identified "critical points" in the process that needed extra attention where the growth or introduction of bacterial pathogens could be prevented. This system is known as HACCP (Hazard analysis critical control point) and is now standard for food production in north america and probably many other places too (it's been a while since I read up on it...).
Interesting that this is not the first time microbiology and space travel are related. In the 1960s NASA developed a new policy for the production of food for astronauts to ensure that they did not get food poisoning (imagine the effects of projectile vomiting and bloody diarrhoea in Apollo 11
what kind of organism would survive the heat on the mars atmosfere entrance???? I think that carbonized organic matter could not reproduce.
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