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Bacteria From Beer Lasts 553 Days In Space
An anonymous reader writes "Some specific bacteria colonies from Beer (the place, not the beverage) left for several days outside the ISS actually survived extreme temperatures, UV and other radiations, lack of water and all the like. They were later brought back to Earth for examination: such resistant bacteria may be the base of life support systems or bio-mining on colonies off Earth, and of course for terraforming, eventually. No clue in the article about how dangerous those bacteria might have become after the exposure or when they'll start eating their examiners."
Just goes to show how difficult it will be to confirm whether or not any life found on Mars was there to begin with, or was introduced accidentally.
The survival capabilities of various earthly extremophiles are, indeed, extremely impressive. Particularly the ones resistant to extreme dessication, the evolutionary changes for which often happen to confer substantial radiation resistance.
The trouble, though, is that for this to be useful to us, they need to do more than survive(if survival were an issue, we could just put them inside the spaceship, not outside), we need them to be capable of metabolism and reproduction in extreme environments. You can transport in a climate controlled spaceship, and grow in a biodome; but if your tardigrades or bacteria just shrivel up and go into stasis when you put them outside they aren't going to get much done.
There are a fair number of organisms that basically shrivel up into an invincible spore, resistant to just about everything, when life starts to suck. If you put them outside on mars, they'd probably be just fine a century later if taken in and re-hydrated. It's just that they would have done basically nothing during that time...
i begin to think less about the idea that we can seed the universe with hardy bacteria
and i begin to think less about the idea that life on earth was seeded exobiologically
i begin to think less about sending life out there, or about how life got here, and i instead think more about the idea that it simply doesn't matter, that it's been a wide four lane two way street forever, and everywhere, that life is boringly common
i begin to entertain the notion that the reality that is most likely, as we explore more and more outside our planet (and eventually, our solar system), that we're just going to find that the basic chemical machinery of life everywhere, dormant or vaguely active, is on the surface of everything, waiting to seed and grow on anything it touches
that life is simply mundane and ubiquitous (although mostly hibernating and waiting and unable to realize its full potential)
and then the REAL story will be looking for and finding what i'll call "complexity magnifiers": special intersections of energy source and hospitality (like liquid water and a sun) where the machinery of life is allowed to turn into amazing agglomerations of increasing complexity... until things like us humans can become reality
and then the real search, the ultimate game of discovery, will be to classify, find, and otherwise make contact with other "complexity magnifiers," wherever they may be or whatever they are, across the universe. and that this will be our ultimate promise in existence, what you could call our purpose (self-discovered)
whether we choose to exploit and destroy those "complexity magnifiers" and whatever or whomever we find there, and grow like a virus, or whether we choose to communicate with whatever is there already, as take care to hold our darker nature in sober check: that will be the ultimate commentary on the entire existence of homo sapiens: tragic mistake or wise benevolence?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Pff, bacteria... A couple years ago we had animals survive the outer space - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade . It was just for 10 days but nobody is sure how long they really can survive - they can enter some kind of stasis state where they don't need water for decades.