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Earth Bacteria May Hitch A Ride To The Stars
An anonymous reader writes "Space.com has an article on how old rocket stages are carrying bacteria from Earth to interstellar space. For example, four upper rocket stages were used to boost deep space probes Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and New Horizons. The spacecraft were sterilized, but the rocket stages were not, and they now carry the bacteria of the engineers who handled them. If the rocket stages hit a habitable planet, and the bacteria survive the journey, they would be able to reproduce and colonize the planet ... not that there's a high liklihood of that. 'In 40,000 years, this wayward 185-pound (84 kilogram) lump of metal will pass by the star AC+79 3888 at a distance of 1.64 light-years. ... Given the sheer expanse of time that lies ahead of the four discarded rockets, at least one is likely to eventually encounter a planet. But even if that planet's environment is conducive to life, the long dormant bacteria will not just gently plop into some exotic ocean. No soft landing can be expected.'"
...we'll send all the telephone sanitisers after the discarded rocket stages to clear up any unwanted bacteria. Get 'em loaded in the arc!
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In space, no one can hear bacteria scream
The chance of a bacteria surviving out there is 1:2 to the power of 276,709. Then again, the bacteria does have 30 seconds...
Maybe if this sig is witty or clever enough, someone will love me...
And then some poor alien life forms will contract an illness from the bacteria. This in turn kills off the only other sentient beings besides humans. We will learn of this tragedy from messages recieved from SETI with aliens cursing humans. Oh the irony. Smallpox blankets in space. :P
My humor is probably your flamebait
.. why couldn't we have strapped Dells telesales team to the darn thing? 40,000 years of corporate peace sounds like bliss.
Dear Mr Johnson, We are contacting you from the planet Xunxu as you owe twenty five million dollars in child support charges for your population of contribution to our planet.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Being exposed to the near-vacuum of space for an extended period of time, aren't the bacteria likely to be "pulled apart" at the molecular level?
civilization? Perhaps, we should consider GAing some bacteria with more of our genome (and other plants/animals) and sending them to the stars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hopefully, the bacteria won't be deemed a biological attack by the technologically advanced (yet extremely vengeful) inhabitants of whatever planet the rocket stage hits.
If planet is habitable, it got to have the atmosphere. Here is a pretty good chance that the stage will just burn-up on entry. I doubt that any bacteria will survive the temperature at which the metal burns.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't they know that a fiery explosion is what the bacteria need to escape!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I, for one, welcome our future alien bacteria overlords.
More likely for them all to end up in a star/black hole than a planet, or a huge gas giant than a nice habitable planet with water oceans.
It's unlikely to just happen to pass through the "disk" around a star where the planets are at near parallel angle, more likely to come from "above" so to speak and hence unlikely to hit much - of course my understanding of astronomy approaches zero.
Not to mention sterilized by close encounters with a radiation source (like say a star)...
To quote the late Douglas Adams:
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
Will the bacteria hitch-hike to the stars by sticking to towels? After all, a towel is the most important thing for anyone hitchhiking thru the galaxy
First of all the probability that these rockets hit a habitable planet rather than a star or jupiter like object is going to be extremely low no matter what the article claims. The vast maority of bodies in the universe are not habitable and when you add this to the fact that the really heavy (hence gravitationally powerful) ones aren't habitable the odds become really low. Add in the requirement that the planet not only be habitable but actually habitable by earth bugs and that they land safely after a long radiation filled interstellar journey and it starts to get really unlikely.
:-) ).
But even if this is the case what's the big deal. The big reason we want to prevent contamination of mars and similar bodies is for our scientific interest (don't mess up our later experiments). If these organisms colonize some distant planet why is this a bad thing? Now some planet that didn't have any life at all now does. Maybe in a billion years it will evolve spaceships and explore the universe (hell maybe that's how we happened
Either life is common in the universe in which case we just foster a little bit of microbacterial competition (our diseases aren't going to infect complex multicellular aliens) or life is uncommon and we seed a planet with life that might not have otherwise had it. Either way whats the problem?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
We should be actively sending microbes/bacteria etc to the other planets in our system with every mission. Survivors will only make the terraforming process faster and easier.
Deleted
The writers of this article forget that space is mostly empty. It's obvious that something escaping our solar system will come within a few light years of a star. On average there is about one star per 3 light years cubed (1 star per cubic parsec). Even if the rocket stage passed very close to a star, the likelihood of impacting a planet is very slim since a solar system is again, mostly empty space.
If (and I mean "if") the bacteria survive an interstellar trip across the great vacuum of space *AND* they survive the immense heat of re-entry *AND* the explosive impact they deserve to live. It's highly unlikely that the bacteria are even still alive in the cold and after the heat of the rocket. Those earth bacteria are pussies.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
What are the changes that the bacteria and such will start growing while on the booster itself and maybe even evolving some there?
Look, it's just a random throwing-it-out-there speculation. That's what comments are for in Slashdot, surely - not actual stories!
[rant]
Meta will eat itself
And what of the 99.999999999...% of the other bacteria in the environment (which includes the Stratosphere and beyond)?...
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
Where's your prime directive when you really need one?
nt
Maybe they'll write a "guide" book.
What?
I, for one, hope that they welcome their new rocket-dwelling, bacteria overlords.
After 40,000 years the bacteria will have super mutant powers and come back to earth to rule us all!
What's the big deal? How do you think we got mushrooms?
As all great discoveries start with "gee that's weird.." we can thank the Space Shuttle Columbia for proving to us that bacteria can survive an atmosphere entry and planet impact. http://www.cmu.edu/magazine/03fall/wormsurvive.htm l
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Oh yeah... Wrong site. NM. Digg him down then.
We have 40,000 years before even one of them come within 2 light years of a planet. I'm sure within 35,000 years some homeless space man will take his space shopping cart full of them to the recycling center for the 10 cent return for us.
If chances are that these probes will hit a habitable planet are good then the Sun must surely hit a habitable planet as it moves about the galaxy. In fact every Sun must hae a good chance - they are all moving at roughly the same interstellar speed as the stages, they are much bigger so they have a much bigger change of hitting something ... doesn't seem so likely now? the chances of those stages hitting any planet are ... well astronomical in the best sense. Love that line - space is very big.
The Earth (and Mars) shed rocks over time, due to meteor strikes, and some of those will escape the solar system, so it's not like this hasn't been happening over geologic time. Some of the rocks from Mars were ejected gently enough that bacteria would have survived inside. While inefficient, I bet that literally megatons of biologically active rocks have been ejected in this fashion.
By the way, they missed one. Pioneer 10 and 11 were identical spacecraft, both had upper stages that have left the solar system.
Intense cold can't be good for them
/frank
Intense vacuum should just about completely desiccate them.
Intense radiation should destroy any genetic material in the bacteria
Exposure to all of these for how many years?
pfft.
And the worms ate into his brain.
... in 40K years, we'll have the technology to retrieve those discarded items from our distant past thus nullifying any hypothetical outcome we are already discussing here.
Jonathanjk.com
Given the sheer expanse of time that lies ahead of the four discarded rockets, at least one is likely to eventually encounter a planet.
how did they come up with that?
thats like saying, am throwing up 4 balls in the air, am sure one of them will hit the moon.
space is curved, there are gravitational fields everywhere. chances are that the rockets would be locked in an orbit of some sort or crash somewhere due to the fields.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I thought the nearest star (after Sol, of course) was Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years? Is this one closer?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
C'mon, be serious and look at the chances. There's space. It is huge. It is mostly black. And all that black is a big nothing. And in between of those big areas of nothingness there are a few tiiiiiiny little stars. And those few tiiiiiny little stars have even tiiiiiiiiiiinier little planets.
Now, let's be generous and say that this piece of space junk somehow gets into the gravity of one of aformentioned minuscle pieces of light. Let's take this almost improbable chance into account. Now our piece of space debris has a good chance to either get too close to said light source, goes poof and increases the metallicity of the star by some unmeasurable percentage. If (and only if), said piece of junk comes close enough to one of those stars, this is actually what would happen with almost certainty.
Now, let's be even more generous and say that this doesn't happen. It actually hits a planet. There are those big gas balls, in which our space brick goes not poof but crunch, 'cause those balls tend to be heavy and have a gravity that matches that of Oprah. Survival unlikely.
But I have my really generous day today when it comes to probabilities and thus we're gonna hit a rocky piece of space ball. Said ball should have at least something resembling an atmosphere or at least a gentle star or the rays from said star might be too much for our poor, stressed bacteria to handle.
Now, a bacterium, to live, wants to eat. And when bacteria have the munchies, they either resort to photosynthesis or eating other crap. To eat crap, crap has to exist. And that requires other stuff that lives to exist. Or at least something that once lived. Or at least any kind of source for carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and all the other little goodies that make life worthwhile. And, of course, in some useful organisation, I for one wouldn't be too happy with some carbon dioxyde and a bit of NO2.
For photosynthesis, you'd need light, but not too much or you get burned. Too little and you starve to death. Juuuuuust right is what it should be! And of course that's not all, that's just the energy source, now you also need some carbon, oxygene...
In other words, I think NASA and all the other space faring organisations can rest assured that their pollution will not cause too many interstellar wars.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You don't have to hit a planet to kill a Base-Star full of Cylons. They only have to intercept your probe in space. That would seem to increase the odds of doing damage by sending out unclean derbies from Earth.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
....then will born a entirely new _intelligent_ specimen that will worship a _GOD_ that created them , but what they never will figure out is that this god was a pile of human spacial-junk. Now the poll, what created us? I bet about some kind of fecal or a;n;a;l bacteria from another specimen.
As the booster enters the atmosphere of the planet it will burn up into dust. If any chunks do survive, they will have already reached the same temp needed to sterilize it.
Best-case scenario is some poor sod on a distant planet gets the hover-car in his driveway crushed by a chunk of a booster, with the NASA logo on it, and getting noted in the local paper as the guy that found the space debris with the fossilized bacteria attached to it.
---
** Error 0
Error:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
"First of all the probability that these rockets hit a habitable planet rather than a star or jupiter like object is going to be extremely low no matter what the article claims. The vast maority of bodies in the universe are not habitable and when you add this to the fact that the really heavy (hence gravitationally powerful) ones aren't habitable the odds become really low."
Well, we're talking bacteria here, gravity won't make the slightest difference. It's quite possible that some Earth bacteria could live on a Jupiter-like planet (maybe one that's a bit warmer - as most large extrasolar planets we've found are - and perhaps with different composition). It's also possible that life could evolve on such a planet and be pissed off at meeting Earth bugs.
Still, some other poster got it right. Probability of going close to a star and getting melted >> probability of hitting a planet.
It is likely that Mars become more hospitable to life earlier than early by solidifying sooner. Dozens of Martian meterites have been discovered on earth. Perhaps there have been thousands or millions Martian meteorites over the eons. Bacteria have been found living five miles deep in earth where they may have been cut off from the surface from tens of millions of years or longer. They either live extremely slowly or metabolize other nutrients inside rocks. Rocks are excellent insulators from the heat and pressure of bombardment. Some meteors hitting earth are cool inside, even though their out layers have evaporated away from the heat.
Some these all together and you can make a case for bacteria first evolving on Mars and then infecting earth through meteroic hitchhiking, this happening billions of years ago. then they evolved on Earth while Mars became hostile to life.
..woudlent that kill the bacteria ???
You raised my hopes and dashed them quite expertly, sir. Bravo!
I thought the nearest star (after Sol, of course) was Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years?
Actually, the article is incorrect. Pioneer 11 will get within 1.65 light-years of the red dwarf AC+79 3888. That will happen sometime around 42,400 AD. Currently, it's about 16.6 light-years away from the sun.
Interestingly, by the time Pioneer 11 reaches AC+79 3888, the red dwarf will only be about 3 light-years away from us (as it's hurtling through space in our general direction).
Have they turned it into a blog where any moron can write a story and get it on the front page?
The only way this improbable event will ever happen is if there was a nice cup of really hot tea powering those boosters.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Do any of these actually have enough energy to get far outside the solar system? Even if they did, would they get outside whatever the next level "cluster of stars" is (I assume there's something between our solar system and the galaxy as a whole)? Escape velocity is pretty fast I thought - how much "fuel" (of whatever sort) did they put on these things?
Bacteria isn't really the matter, spores are a much greater threat to contaminating the rest of the universe and can happen easier than through space launches.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
Spores can survive in space for a fari amount of time as they are resistant to much of the radiation they might encounter there. Furthermore, is is supectec that they already are capable of floating in the air to the upper atmosphere and leaving earth's gravity well. If that is the case then we have been spraying spores all over the universe for millions of years. At worst, it would require a meteor strike that would eject planetary material out of the gravity well. Some people suspect that Earth and Mars contaminated eachother in such a way, even speculating that life originated on a young Mars which contaminated Earth later.
Oops.
So you're saying theres a chance?!
nil
They only have to get to the Altara nebula before Khan fires the genesis device. But sadly the Klingon's will poke their eyes out in the next movie. Nobody appreciates good bacteria anymore.
0x7279727972797279
Aside from all the aforementioned problems, we have a small design flaw in our form of organic life: DNA is inherently unstable. Thymine dimerization is energetically favored, and is catalyzed by UV and other forms of radiation. But even apart from radiation, these dimers will form given the passage of time and non-absolute-zero temperatures. Our DNA-based life requires constant molecular upkeep to repair these problems. Any putative bacterial hitch-hikers would have had to sporulate to be able to continue existing without any metabolism, so no upkeep will be possible. Even if they become detached from the booster and are able to avoid a fiery re-entry onto a hospitable planet, they still have to hit it within a few centuries or their information will be irretrievably corrupted.
Ah yes, and the advanced life that got them into space was who? Oh, and who got into space to make the one that made them, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. Panspermia is a horrible theory, somewhere life had to sprout for it to get spread around, all the hand waving in the world wont make that go away, and if it evolved someplace else, it is no more or less likely that it evolved here.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Wouldn't the deep freeze of space plus the burning re-entry effectively "pasturize" the space debris?
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
So basically, when we finally do arrive at planet x-379a the aliens there will have just as stinky feet as we do. Time to invest in odour eater stock.
To assume that earth is home of the first beings in the universe is quite an odd assuption.
If you assume that other beings have intentionally or inadvertently sent objects into space then the likelyhood of spreading life surpases that of evolution from scratch.
...Space Boogers!
I drank what? -- Socrates
it'll be Earth that it will hit and any bacteria will overcome all immune defenses...
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Slashdot editors shouldn't let lame speculative BS like this get posted in the first place. There is not a serious response.
Its just like the War of The Worlds, only sending it to our potential enemies. This way, Earth shoots first ;-)
Why do I care if my bacteria end up on another planet or not? Does it make any difference? Is it that we might not be able to tell if "life" we found on some other planet is indeed "extra-terrestrial?" Quite honestly, I don't care. This is a big "whoop-de-do" over nothing.
Hope the bacteria rolls a natural 20.
if it impacts a distant planet does it still make a noise?
God always washes his hands before handling rocket stages.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Perhaps most of our deadly diseases came here in the same way...
Just think about what the missionaries brought to the "savages".
Why, yes! I AM new here.
Ok enough of the scare mongoring.
Scientists have known for a long time that the wind currents,in our atmosphere are capable of moving micro organisms to the outer limits of the atmosphere. From here, they get picked up by the solar winds and distributed through out the solar system and quite possibly beyond.
If we are so worried about infecting other planets, then lets start by sterilizing our own planet. Otherwise, don't worry about it because nature does a fairly good jopb of exporting our micro organisms already.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Oh, sure, it's easy to dismiss three slow-moving rocket boosters, even if the engineers who worked on it were known to add their own "special payload" to the payload, if you know what I mean. 'Cuz, yeah, they were *rocket scientists* who figured out long ago that these boosters would carry their juice into the stars.
/. carried the story that astronomers have observed an unidentified booster-shaped lump of metal drifting through our solar system? Would you lobby for a mission to intercept it? Would we bring it to earth, or park it in orbit and send robots to do experiments? Would we study it then toss it toward the sun?
But enough of that. Time for a thought exercise:
What if tomorrow's
infecting a universe near you...SOON!
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
First of all the probability that these rockets hit a habitable planet rather than a star or jupiter like object is going to be extremely low
But if it does hit a gas giant, it is fairly likely to survive because of the thick, fluffy atmosphere. I think hitting a gas giant is more likely than a star because anything entering a star's solar system will still likely have angular momentum and thus orbit the star. This is where Jupiter-like objects will snag it.
Now, it may be possible that once Jupiters are infected, the bacteria may find a way to hitch a ride to a rocky earth-sized planet. The problem is that gas giants are gravity wells and stuff would have a hard time escaping. Except, what about something that merely grazes the atmosphere of a gas giant (GG) and picks up hitchikers? For example, a comet could partially melt due to a close encounter with a GG, the atmospheric "bugs" hop in, and then it refreezes after passing GG. Then it may slam into the rocky planet (and kill alien-dinosours?). But, the probability of this is probably shakey. However, it increases the number of pathways to infection of rocky planets. The bottom line is that infecting (initially) only a gas giant may not end the story.
Table-ized A.I.
I think they evolved and already are trying to contact us.
Table-ized A.I.
Given 40,000 years, the bacteria will have time to evolve to at least the level of the average Republican congressman. Then, they'll assume power over the guidance system of the craft and promptly steer it into the nearest star. Problem solved!
With the luck of Teela Brown, some will manage to survive.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
> least one is likely to eventually encounter a planet.
Not unless there are thousands of things headed starward. Given stars have thousands of times the cross section of a planet, the likelihood of hitting a star is thousands of times greater than a planet. Therefore statistically you could expect thousands to hit stars per single one hitting a planet.
Now throw into the mix just getting near a star would heat it so much it would be sterilized, and you're up to hundreds of thousands or millions or even billions of star "near misses" per legitimate planet hit.
Now let's presume that we must hit a planet going in our general direction (i.e. away from Earth, not towards it) to stand any chance of surviving re-entry (well, entry, as it never left that planet!) You've cut it down by half, if not quartered it.
Now plug in some of the Drake Equation variables, like percent of planets that are Earthlike and percent of planets that are in Earth's "sweet zone" (which would be required for Earthlike bacteria to survive), and so on, and you're really looking at god knows how many billions of rockets/booster modules/probes needed per successful "touchdown".
It's wishful thinking, far worse than hoping that you, and exactly you, win the lottery.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
We all know the purpose of life is to reproduce, so it looks like we (the planet) has just done it fellas. Now where were we? Ah yes, nuking ourselves to oblivion. Now without the guilt.
Of some foreign chunk of obviously alien manufactured metal came flying towards earth, I think we would guarantee it gets a soft landing. We should have written something cool on the discarded rockets, like "Make your time. All your base are belong to us."
or else!
Nice. Let's wipe out whole civilizations we don't even know about yet!
This has already been filmed.
And a good one, that is.
www.horsesonmars.com
[denial on]
Prove it! They ain't my children !
[denial off]
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
That explains the bacteria that have become the overlords in Washington DC, but not the tacit agreement of the fools who follow this bacteria.
"In 40,000 years, this wayward 185-pound (84 kilogram) lump of metal will pass by the star AC+79 3888 at a distance of 1.64 light-years. ... "
I *live* at AC+79 3888, you unsensitive clod!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Ever get the feeling the universe is a vast lab and all the petri dishes have been very carefully separated to preserve the integrity of the results?
E Proelio Veritas.
oh, was that your network plug ?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..