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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.
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
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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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.
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!
because that's easier said than done? It'd be a massive job just to put a ton of materials on Mars from Earth, much less enough to increase its mass to sustain an atmosphere. We'd have to build a system to pull rock from the meteor belt and hurl it at Mars, then pray that after the enormous expense we don't shift the orbit of the planet or alter its rotation too much. We're talking about an impossible task just due to the amount of resources it would consume to increase the mass of Mars -- not that it's a bad idea, I just don't see how it'd be feasable.
meteor belt... lol. Sorry, I meant asteroid belt.
"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.
- 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
Adding a large amount of mass probably risks changing the orbit of mars noticably as well though. Most likely this would be in predictable ways, but the changes could be problematic.
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?
About the correlation of planetary gravity and athmospheric pressure: Ever since the Cassini/Huygens mission, there's one thing that's been puzzling me to no end.
Titan's mass is less than one tenth of the earth's. Yet it possesses an athmosphere much denser than ours - how can that be? According to Wikipedia, Titan has no magnetic field either. Might the tectonic/volcanic activity have anything to do with it?
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
There's also the fact that the asteroid belt has a mass of only about 2.3 * 10^21 kg, while Mars has a mass of about 6.42*10^23 kg. In other words, even if you flung EVERY SINGLE ASTEROID at Mars, the mass increase would essentially just be rounding error. The only way to increase Mars' mass substantially is to fling another planet at it (I'm looking at you, Mercury). Of course this would entirely defeat the purpose of making it more hospitable for life.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
Only if you ram them into it at high speeds.
Gravity and inertia both increase as mass increases.
Since the orbital distance is the balance between inertia and gravity it will not change.
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.
another stupid /. political joke:
In the year 3 billion A.D., after the Martian microbes have had a chance to evolve into an intelligent life form and invented a Martian internet, they will have a discussion on whether or not life exists or ever existed on Earth. Some probe will go there and find evidence of a large number of nuclear explosions having occurred 3 billion years in the past and killing all the life that was present on the planet. Some martian will then write a science fiction novel about an evil leader, known only as "W", who built up a massive stockpile of fission-based weapons, then used them against all the other people of Earth, which he considered "threats to security" but ironically he ended up killing everyone including himself and his own people. Nobody will take his story seriously because it will be seen as being too absurd to have any chance of being true, and the Martians will go on believing that asteroids triggered the explosions, or something.
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I have a feeling that by the time we are considering flinging one planet into another, things on good old happy Earth are gonna be sucking pretty hard...
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
According to my astronomy teacher, when the Sun started fusing hydrogen, it blew out the light and volatile material from the inner solar system. That's why the inner planets are mostly rock and iron. When you get to Jupiter and beyond, the planets captured most of the light and volatile material. Titan's surface temperature is very low, so that helps reduce the rate at which it loses its atmosphere. Its atmosphere is mostly molecular nitrogen, which is a relatively heavy molecule. It may have already lost almost all of the hydrogen and helium that was in its early atmosphere.
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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'd imagine two reasons:
1) Titan's surface temperature appears to be about -178C (-289F). These temperatures mean that different gasses would be present in the atmosphere, although Nitrogen still appears to be the primary gas.
2) Since Titan is further away from the sun, it experiences less solar pressure. Solar pressure would tend to blow an atmosphere away.
Other possible contributing factors could be the age of Titan (can't verify right now... for some reason firefox isn't opening up new windows properly) and capturing some gases which were lost by Jupiter. I suppose the age would mainly affect the atmosphere due to, as you previously mentioned, techtonic activity. Oh, and titan may have a strong magnetic field helping hold the atmosphere in (or rather preventing ionic winds from blowing it away.) As Titan is techtonically active, one can assume that it has a molten core. This could set up a dynamo system similar to that hypothesized to creat the Earth's magnetic poles.
Okay, I guess that ended up being a lot more than two reasons.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
That's just an astonishingly silly statement... Earth has vast amounts of different forms of life, as well as a complex athmosphere that combined makes it incredibly hard to make beneficial adjustments that doesn't have bad side effects. Mars has no known life, and hardly any athmosphere, and noone currently living there to be affected by mistakes.
On the contrary, terraforming Mars might provide useful data on the feasibility of controlling and "correcting" large scale climate changes that could help us better safeguard the climate on earth.
what kind of organism would survive the heat on the mars atmosfere entrance???? I think that carbonized organic matter could not reproduce.
---- Where is my mind?