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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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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
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
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.
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."
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:
> 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?
r s/970603.html
No.
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answe
Vacuums are basically harmless. There isn't much difference in the forces involved between being in a vacuum and being at twice ordinary Earth pressure. In fact, humans can survive being unprotected in space for short periods of time, with no permanant damage:
You will of course die if you don't get some oxygen fast. Don't even try holding your breath to get an extra few minutes - the pressure will damage them. Just let the air escape and hope for rescue.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Well, there is always a chance that they may miscalculate the scale of us Earthings and get swallowed by a small dog upon arrival.
I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
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The worms were in canisters, the canisters were in a spacecraft designed to (even if it didn't actually) withstand the stresses of reentry. The spacecraft had already endured most of the heat of reentry and was torn apart by atmospheric stresses, not thermal. The canisters would have rapidly decelerated to their terminal velocity after the orbiter's breakup. In short, the survival of those worms is not so much a demonstration that organism can survive reeentry, than it is a demonstration of stupidity on the part of the scientists who used the fact they survived the accident to posit that organism can survive reentry.
I'm not suggesting than no organism can surive reentry, just that this isn't a valid precedent.