ISS Studies Show Bacteria From Earth Could Colonize Mars

As reported by Tech Times, research conducted aboard the ISS has shown that Earth bacteria could survive the rigors of travel to Mars better than might be expected. "Research into bacterial colonization on the red planet was not part of the plan to terraform the alien world ahead of human occupation. Instead, three teams investigated how to prevent microbes from Earth from hitching a ride to the red planet aboard spacecraft. It is nearly impossible to remove all biological contaminants from equipment headed to other planets. By better understanding what organisms can survive in space or on the surfaces of other worlds, mission planners can learn which forms of microscopic life to concentrate on during the sanitation process. 'If you are able to reduce the numbers to acceptable levels, a proxy for cleanliness, the assumption is that the life forms will not survive under harsh space conditions,' Kasthuri Venkateswaran of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-author of all three papers, said."

Comments

how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, group A wants to find extraterrestrial life. Group B wants to begin terraforming. How long must group B defer to group A?

Re:how long?

[RoLi]

Forever, because terraforming Mars makes no sense.

Just think about it: Here on Earth, we put more and more plants under greenhouse because greenhouses are simply better for plant growth than the natural environment.

Any terraforming of Mars would not only take almost forever but would result in an Antarctica-like climate were you would still need greenhouses anyway. It just makes much more sense to skip the terraforming-part altogether and just use greenhouses without any terraforming.

Re:how long?

[Barryke]

The greenhouses have waste products, like smoke. Where should these end up?
The sky would not stay clear enough to keep using greenhouses. The planet must have a way to stabilize itself as a huge waste-recycling plant / ecosystem.

Re:how long?

[sillybilly]

Trying to terraform Mars is like trying to terraform the Moon - like the joke I heard: have you heard about the new restaurant on the Moon? No? Well the food is great but there is no atmosphere. Because there aint enough gravity to hold one. Whatever you can do on Mars, you can probably do on the Moon, which is closer, except the security part, i.e. putting up a secret human colony on the other side of the Moon is not good enough if you can also do it on Mars, however Mars is not gravitationally locked to us, so there is no "secret" side to it, it keeps spinning, and you can't leave the lights on at night outside, if you don't want people from Earth with a telescope to detect you there.

Venus is the same size as Earth, it definitely has an atmosphere, but it has horrible weather. We can't really tow it to higher orbit to share the same orbit as Earth, it would take too many Tsar bombas squared shot at it from the proper side before it would budge a millimeter higher in orbit around the Sun. So we'll have to put up huge huge huge umbrellas at the Lagrangian pointss and hope to got the stay there and function well, to get the same solar irradiation as Earth, if we ever wanna live on it. Terraforming it shouldn't take billions of years, I was just kidding.

Re:how long?

[sillybilly]

Btw China just recently completed the most detailed surface scan of the Moon ever, especially the other side, so if my Jews got a colony up there, they either hid it well, or they don't got one at all. Expect China to eventually put up a colony then. And you're not gonna hear about the launch in the news, their space program is gonna be stuck in the past, officially speaking. That's my ultraparanoid side speaking, and ultraparanoid stuff is very far from reality, but there is a 0.0002% chance of being or becoming reality.

Re:how long?

[sillybilly]

If you're going to terraform Venus, you probably want to do the orbit shifting nuclear catastrophy first, if you ever plan to do it. Also, the Habsburg motto contains "for the realms which Mars awards to others, Venus transfers to you," and by that they mean wage love, instead of waging war, because it's more economical, waging war takes money, money, money, but waging love is pretty cheap. Still, Venus the planet is kind of their turf so they should be consulted on it. Whatever you do, whether you bomb Venus with ultraTsar bombas first to shift it into higher orbit around the Sun, or just bring the anaerobic bacteria in right away, you should send in probes to make sure there is absolutely no indigenous lifeforms of any sort present, which could be lost forever under assault, at a great loss to everybody. My forefathers must have been in pretty dire straits when they were forced to consume the last Mammoths, the ice age must have been pretty harsh, but imagine if the Mammoth survived and you could have befriended it like you befriended the horse and the wolf, how much richer your life could have been from their presence. It almost happened to the buffalo too, we almost lost the American Bison too.

Re:how long?

[flyneye]

Split the difference and send Yogurt cultures to Mars. It may not produce anything Earthlike, but, who could resist a YUMMY Red planet?

Re: how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to make sense, it just sounds like a grand and exciting project for an engineer.

Re:how long?

[flyneye]

Do not waste products from your greenhouse. There is NOTHING that comes from a greenhouse that is waste or you have been doing it WRONG.

Re:how long?

[AlabamaCajun]

Ironically, earth is a greenhouse, we waste just about everything.
---
Keep the humans off of Mars, we will infect it. As long as we clean out bots we send there we should be able to get by with remote surfing the sands of Mars.

Re:how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Venus needs is a moon to strip the excess atmosphere off. It's orbital distance is ok if you can get rid of all the nasty gas stuck to it. Both Venus and Earth would be solid blocks of ice without the greenhouse effect.

Re:how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

No we don't. We keep it all right here in the greenhouse for reuse and recycling.

Re:how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Group B defers to Group A until Group B grows a pair and does something about it.

Re:how long?

[jandrese]

If you could somehow break the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus it would be by far the best colonization option in the solar system outside of maybe the Moon (and only because the Moon is relatively close to us).

I have not done the math, but a good start might be slamming the mother of all comets into the planet to both blow most of the atmosphere away and to introduce a planet's worth of liquid water. Then dump massive amounts of engineered plankton on the planet to start fixing the CO2 and also start creating a biosphere. We're talking about a several thousand (probably million) year project here, but it's a lot easier than trying to ship and atmosphere over to Mars.

Re:how long?

[DigiShaman]

If the ice caps were nuked, wouldn't that throw up enough CO2 and water vapor? Would a greenhouse effect be sustainable for several generations (aside from having an ineffective magnetosphere)?

Re:how long?

[Bardez]

And the American Bison are more delicious and somewhat healthier than beef. I, for one, am very glad that they were not driven to extinction. Because now I get to eat them, too.

Re:how long?

[Cyberax]

Mars is capable of holding atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. Mars has more than enough gravity to hold together Earth-like atmosphere with negligible losses.

The main problem is the solar wind, it consists of fast-moving particles that can give enough push to ions and atoms in the atmosphere to achieve escape velocity. But solar wind is very thin, so it's not like it'll be an immediate threat.

Re:how long?

[sillybilly]

Mars' atmosphere is thin because of low gravity - it will never hold any kind of proper atmosphere. See http://scienceblogs.com/starts... for sizes. Venus is damn close to Earth in size. I don't have time to look up the atmospheric composition, but even if fully made Earth-like, it would have bad weather forbidding most space missions to it, because of greenhouse effect from water vapor. Venus is too hot, and once it's too hot it's got a lot water in the atmosphere to make it even hotter. You gotta put up some shades.

I really like your idea of diverting all comets to slam into Venus and put it into a farther, higher orbit from to Sun, as a cooling effect. The comets would have to come from their trip back from the Sun, on the way back to the outer parts of the solar system. Diverting comets with a tsar bomba while it's near Jupiter, it only takes a tiny detonation to create a large effect down the road in the trajectory. By the way even if you directly bomb Venus, any physicist would know that the detonations could not happen on the surface, because of conservation of momentum, whatever impact the ground gets, equivalent impact is absorbed by the atmosphere, and the whole planet doesn't move as an end result. In order to impart a change in impulse, momentum, you have to deliver momentum, by exploding the bomb in outer space in a way that it divides into two pieces, one half shooting directly down into the Sun, the other half shooting up directly at Venus.

Down the road we may get to the point where we compose a dozen or so Earth-sized planets, sharing Earth's orbit, from other planets like Saturn, or from the shooting star asteroid debris between Mars and Jupiter, by ping-pong pooling them into the proper orbit. Any stuff, any substance you can find that you can use to either build a planet from - or better, more efficient: a rotating cylinder artificial gravity space station - is very valuable, like gold, in the vast emptiness of outer space. The Moon contains a lot of stuff ripe to make space stations from, because it will never hold an atmosphere, and getting stuff off the Moon into outer space is a lot cheaper than lifting it out of Earth's gravity well. The first rotating gravity space station could be made profitable by soap-opera or reality show type things.

Re:how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Venus is the same size as Earth, it definitely has an atmosphere, but it has horrible weather. We can't really tow it to higher orbit to share the same orbit as Earth, it would take too many Tsar bombas squared shot at it from the proper side before it would budge a millimeter higher in orbit around the Sun. So we'll have to put up huge huge huge umbrellas at the Lagrangian pointss and hope to got the stay there and function well, to get the same solar irradiation as Earth, if we ever wanna live on it. Terraforming it shouldn't take billions of years, I was just kidding.

Why would you live on Venus when you could just build a floating city in the clouds?

Re:how long?

[stoatwblr]

Venus and mars are hopeless for long-term Terraforming. Mars mostly lost its atmosphere due to solar wind ablation and Venus will lose its the same way eventually. No matter how established we ever got there, we'd have to live close to radiation shelters for the inevitable solar burps due to the same reason the atmospheres are doomed - no magnetophere to divert the solar wind around the atmosphere.

Adding more water to Venus would probably make the atmosphere worse and even if that managed to be cleared the unfeasibly long day would make it a hellhole of unimaginable proportions.

Once you've estabilshed an economy in space, going back down a gravity well isn't high on the list of priorities. Raw materials and energy are fairly readily available without mining the moon.

Re:how long?

[Mars729]

I disagree. Mars is the only planet in the solar system where terraforming would be possible, and for that reason it should be done. Of course, it will take a very long time and won't even be started in our lifetimes. Humans may well live there for centuries until domes before terraforming starts. Terraforming provides opportunities to a solar system based civilization. It is a second life arc. Endangered species could be put there. Or experiments with new ecosystems and new lifeforms could be tried there as well. On Mars, some things can be done for life that simply can't be done on the countless asteroids we will colonize.

Re:how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

> We keep it all right here in the greenhouse for reuse and recycling.

Hmmm plastic birdssstumach hmmm..

Re:how long?

[sillybilly]

There is something nice about living on a planet, instead of outer space. Like the shooting-star meteorite burning atmosphere - on a space station it's a constant issue when you get hit by an object traveling 10-20 km/s, and the leak you have to patch - so they may have to be triple walled, with gradually dropping pressure zones, so the leaks take time, and then glass or transparent triple walls are very expensive to make meteorite resistant, so you probably have just solar panels or nuclear reactor, and fully artificial lighting. See on a planet you have days and nights, sundown and sunup, and on a fully artificially lit space station you don't. Down here on Earth is also only a matter of time before you get killed by a falling meteorite that didn't get fully burned up, but the chances are so small that most people make it to death safely. The chances on a space station are very small too, but orders of magnitude higher because of small objects, and on Earth somebody simply dies and life goes on, however ona space station you have to patch the hole. There is probably an optimum size for the isolation units even if the composed space station is huge, but each section cannot be large enough, simply because there isn't enough time or means to patch a hole instantly, and you have to let it go to full vacuum, til you can get to it. The larger the space station, the larger the chances of a meteorite hit.

The solar wind should not erase the atmosphere, because most of it should be deflected by magnetic van Allen belts. I think you get a van Allen belt if the inside of the planet is molten, and as almost everything in the solar system has the same average concentration of heat generating Th232, U238, K40 and U235, as long as you have a large enough size planet, the inside of it should be lava. (I must be maxing out the alarm signals at the CIA or whoever is watching when I say Tsar bomba, nuclear reactor, Th232, U238, K40, U235 - tee hee.) There is constant addition of atmosphere, and constant loss of atmosphere, and the dynamic equilibrium, the size of the atmosphere is determined by the gravity, the size of the planet..

I just read up on the atmosphere of Venus - it's sulfuric acid, and Venus lacks a magnetic field, and has winds up to 60 times the rotational speed, when Earth has max 10-20 time. Oxygen and nitrogen get blown off the surface by the solar wind, because a lack of a magnetic field. Damn. So Venus, even though it's the right size, it will probably be inhabitable until you make the inside of it molten. We don't understand how a magnetic field arises from a molten inside, but it and a nickel-iron core probably have something to do with it.

As far as moving it into higher orbit, instead of playing ping-pong with Venus itself, we could create artificial comets out of existing high-solar orbit stuff, like one of Jupiter's moons, or Saturn's moons, let it go around the Sun and on the way back smack into Venus knocking it higher. Also it's really difficult to control an explosion in outer space and make half of it go one way, the other half the other way, and matter is very rare and expensive, so an EM gun or Ion gun with a muzzle velocity of 10-20 km/s accelerating any material in two opposite directions might be a slower but better option, while trying to modify orbits from a distance. Also there are moons or objects with really hot insides - why is it that some objects have a higher concentration of inside heating elements than others? The hot ones should be selected to be sent down the Venus.

The sulfuric acid should condense if the planet temperature drops, but that's a very low pH, out of balance environment that has a sulfuric acid atmosphere, here on Earth we have a lot of lime and high pH silicate material on the surface, that would instantly absorb the acid. How come Venus is so different? I read Venus used to have an atmosphere like Earth. It may be a picture of what awaits us in a distant future, with runaway greenhouse effects. But we got a magnetic field for now, that w

Re:how long?

[sillybilly]

It's really difficult to patiently modify orbits with an ion gun, especially when you need a sudden move, at a specific position in a moon's orbit around a planet, or an asteroid's position around the Sun. You can keep sending a moon into higher and higher orbit, but then when releasing it toward the Sun, that probably has to be done suddenly. So the good thing is that if it's an object without an atmosphere holding back an explosion, a Tsar bomba exploded on the surface will send half of the explosion material directly into outer space, delivering a tangible momentum, a usable impulse. We all know a Tsar bomba is not strong enough, not big enough, but the design allows for more stages, instead of 3 present in it, the sky is probably the limit on how many stages you can compound, and you can deliver quite a punch with a tiny little thing, to a celestial object. The danger of this is that someone might be building these bombs pretending to use it for outer space ping pong, and then use it against his fellow men. Also there is some kind of danger with celestial ping pong that may not immediately be obvious, and even the best scientists, like Teller, advocated using bombs to shape things like the San Francisco bay, something that the rest of us balk at. No, the SF bay is fine, we can take the long way around. So these bombs have to be built not by a single nation, but an international community, and everyone has to agree without any vetoes to a ping pong game up there, so that if something goes wrong, no war breaks out down here.

Re:how long?

[sillybilly]

I just figured out how to fix the pH - all you gotta do is convert the sulfuric acid into pH neutral elemental sulfur. Which is what we have here on Earth, tons of elemental sulfur. Because of which, if the temperature gets out of hand here too, at high temperature, the stable state of sulfur is probably sulfuric acid, not elemental sulfur, so you ARE looking at the future of Earth, when you're looking at Venus, when Earth's magnetic van Allen solar wind protection disappears. How long until that? A couple million of couple billion years? It's probably economically unfeasible to keep the inside of Earth hot, so you, as the above poster said, you are looking at space station only long term life. Life on Earth is temporary, and the "economical" future looks like Venus looks today. Which is why we cannot afford technological decay and going back to horses forever, we can do that temporarily, but in a few million or few billion years the clock runs out, time is up, and you either have to fix Earth, leave Earth, or figure out a way to live under a 10 bar pressure very hot sulfuric acid tsunami atmosphere.

In any case, a space mission should be sent into that hellhole of a weather called Venus to make sure there are no lifeforms living in it, like some extremophile bacteria.

Re:how long?

[sillybilly]

Also the rotation of Earth keeps slowing, because of gravitational tides by the Sun - the Moon is already locked to the Earth, always showing the same side, because if it were rotating, that would create tides in its crust, and frictional heat, until the rotation stopped, like it already did. So if Earth's rotation stopped, one side would be really hot, the other really cold, so it's in our interest that it never happens, and get as much uniform temperature surface and living space as possible. The way to help that is to micromanage the shooting stars, in a Maxwell's Demons way, and only allow those to impact the atmosphere which deliver an increase in rotational speed, and deflect away those which would slow the rotation. I don't know what the natural proportion of these is, is it 50/50, or do more meteorites impact one way or the other - like when I flush a toilet, the whole thing starts spinning, and when the meteorites flush down into the Sun, they might be going in a spinning direction too. So we could start by playing ping-pong with the small asteroids, deflect the ones that have a chance to make it to dry land and hit somebody on the head, to at least drop into an ocean, away from shipping routes. The rotational speed dropping and the hours in a day increasing from 24 hours to 25 hours is not such a big deal, or even increasing to 1000 hrs is no big deal, but a million hours is a big deal, but it's never too early to start working against that, to maintain rotational speed, and the length of daytime.

Re:how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mars presently lacks a proper magnetic field. The generated atmosphere would be gone with the solar wind.

OK to leave a few bacteria

[penguinoid]

Everyone knows that sterile and almost sterile are close enough for government work.

Re:OK to leave a few bacteria

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's what I heard about harem eunuchs!

Re:OK to leave a few bacteria

[msauve]

You simply need to put everything through a Transporter, which has a biofilter.

Re:OK to leave a few bacteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that asshole really live in syracuse NY? Cuz I'm about 10 minutes from there and I'd like to anally penetrate him with a cement hosts file.

Re:OK to leave a few bacteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Stfu you pussy that posts by unidentifiable ac posts. Punks like you have no balls!

Re:OK to leave a few bacteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit projecting your own personal issues onto apk.

Re:OK to leave a few bacteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey mmell: Yer bein' called out (why ya runnin', "forrest"?) http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

terraform the alien world

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, right, uh huh. Might as well count the number of angels on the head of a pin.

Re:terraform the alien world

[binarylarry]

Oh but you haven't got any wings, sonny.

Re:terraform the alien world

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero angels can fit on the head of a pin. Angels don't exist.

Re: terraform the alien world

[Anonymous Coward]

They do if you think of angels as celestial bodies. Several astronomical objects fit wonderfully with christian lore, such as thrones or seraphs.

Re:terraform the alien world

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, infinite angels can fit too.

Re:terraform the alien world

[camperdave]

Angels don't exist.

There are several angry baseball players outside that would like to have a word with you.

Article summary doesn't match article content

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Title of TFA = "Bacteria from Earth can easily colonize Mars"

And article makes no such claim.

It says spores would survive to Mars, which isn't surprising.

Once there, then what?

No singificant amounts water, no source of nutrients to digest, no oxygen to convert sugar to energy. temperatures around -40 celsius, possibly toxic soil and atmospheric pressure low enough it might affect metabolism otherwise --- and little shielding from ultraviolet light (no ozone layer).

Article title is fun proof of what happens when someone with to no interest/education in science tries to interpret information and draw a conclusion.

Re: Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

The story is so recently stolen from the Reddit front page that it's still viewable there within a few "next page" clicks.

The real problem you're noticing is Dice and the hacks like timothy not giving a fuck about Slashdot, let alone education or science.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[tsotha]

That's what I was thinking. Putting earth bacteria on mars is like dropping naked people on the north pole and saying "go forth and multiply". I can't imagine them colonizing anything except in tandem with humans.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[aliquis]

like dropping naked people on the north pole and saying "go forth and multiply".

That sounds like my only chance!

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

Nature can surprise you... Given an energy source and materials to make copies with (mostly, water) bacteria can do pretty impressive things, and moreso if one gets in a groove and spreads across a new planet without competition.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

Article title is fun proof of what happens when someone with to no interest/education in science tries to interpret information and draw a conclusion.

Um, it's also S.O.P. in any 3D printing story or if there's even a glimmer of a mention of our species' glorious colonization of the universe.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[NatasRevol]

No singificant amounts water, no source of nutrients to digest, no oxygen to convert sugar to energy. temperatures around -40 celsius, possibly toxic soil and atmospheric pressure low enough it might affect metabolism otherwise --- and little shielding from ultraviolet light (no ozone layer).

And yet life lives here on earth under those conditions - middle of the desert, at the poles, thousands of feet under water.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[nbauman]

Title of TFA = "Bacteria from Earth can easily colonize Mars"

And article makes no such claim.

Article title is fun proof of what happens when someone with to no interest/education in science tries to interpret information and draw a conclusion.

You obviously know nothing about writing headlines.
https://www.arcamax.com/thefun...

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[mmell]

On the up side . . . if only one out of a million microbial hitchhikers actually survives on Mars, it could well be a start in the teraforming process. It'd sure screw the pooch on looking for evidence of (native) life on the red planet, but it also strikes me as step one in making it habitable by things like us.

Re: Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

The story is so recently stolen from the Reddit front page that it's still viewable there within a few "next page" clicks.

The real problem you're noticing is Dice and the hacks like timothy not giving a fuck about Slashdot, let alone education or science.

You're missing the whole point of /. which is discussion. Just like a call in talk radio show, the source material doesn't need to be entirely accurate, objective, timely, thorough or any other standards you'd expect of real news. It's just entertainment.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[mark-t]

The environment of Mars is positively paradise compared to the that of outer space.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[dryeo]

There's life that may well survive on Mars but what are the odds that it'll infect a spacecraft? Eventually we could send a cocktail of extremophiles and let nature do its thing but it would be nice to have a look around first.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

Bacteria has evolved to survive in NASA's clean rooms. In some ways Mars is a paradise compared to that. There is a water, oxygen and nutrients on Mars. There isn't enough of them to support human, but enough for bacteria.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[aXis100]

But we wouldnt be sending extremeophiles to Mars. They would be regular "goldilocks zone" contamination, like from someone's skin or a sneeze. These bacteria would not be adapted to Mars and would die instantly.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[TapeCutter]

Life permeates the Earth's crust down to the bottom of the deepest bores we have drilled, it gets it energy from minerals such as sulphur, and water. From what we know the surface of Mars appears to be dead due to the fact that water (the universal solvent) can not exist in liquid form on the Martian surface, but it can (and does) exist in liquid form just below the surface (due to pressure from the overlaying material).

We know that life arose on Earth pretty much as soon as the ocean formed, and there's a high probability it arose around undersea thermal vents, which provide the thermal gradient required to kick start the chemistry of life. Recent research has also postulated the porous rocks found around these vents may also have played a role. My personal theory is that "adam and eve" bugs are probably still spontaneously emerging near these vents but modern life living around the vents is gobbling it up as soon as it appears.

We now know with a great deal of certainty that Mars had oceans and volcanism in it's distant past. Assuming that the boffins are correct about how life arose on Earth, it would be surprising NOT to find Martian bugs permeating the crust down to several km across the entire planet.

The challenge in detecting life emerging around modern vents and life existing under the surface of Mars is the same, how do you prevent modern Earth life from contaminating the test equipment? As I understand it, this is one of the main reasons why the rovers do not include specific tests for microbial life, the uncertainty of the results makes them worthless.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

but it also strikes me as step one in making it habitable by things like us.

I doubt Mars will ever be directly habitable by us, but perhaps we can get it to a point where going outside only requires something in the lines of scuba gear in the right time of the year.

Re: Article summary doesn't match article content

[Barryke]

> You're missing the whole point of /. which is discussion. Just like a call in talk radio show, the source material doesn't need to be entirely accurate, objective, timely, thorough or any other standards you'd expect of real news. It's just entertainment.

A sad truth.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

Any concept of terraforming Mars by using bacteria first is very short sighted. Mars would need a bunch of additional mass and a spinning core to have an environment even close to that of the Earth. Then throw in a few hundred-million-trillion gallons of water and you're starting to get to where you need to be to introduce life. Even after all that the environment is going to be brutal for most life.
 
Terraforming may be an option someday but throwing life out there today isn't going to get it done.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[powerlinekid]

Yes but are there any microbes that survive all of those in an active form at the same time? I don't disbelieve that some inactive microbes could essentially hibernate on Mars indefinitely. However certain conditions need to exist for those microbes to flourish.

The little critters near the thermal vents in the bottom of the ocean are pretty tough but ultraviolet light isn't something they've ever had to deal with and its unlikely they have any protection against it. Same with anything in antartica. They can do -40 and they can do ultraviolet light but can they do 0 oxygen?

Its not about saying "Huzzah this can survive 3 out of the 4 requirements!". They need to survive all of them and that seems unlikely. Unless we were planning on digging a hole, dropping them in there and covering them back up. Again assume the soil isn't too different for them to adapt.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[NatasRevol]

Well, let's see.

There's some water at the martian poles.

Send a holder that can survive being plunged 10 feet into the martian surface shouldn't be hard.

LOTS of bacteria can survive, or even require, 0 oxygen - anerobic bacteria. I'm sure that a few of those can survive 1 or 2 other requirements of Mars.

Re:Article summary doesn't match article content

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey mmell: Yer bein' called out (why ya runnin', "forrest"?) http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

but sure some bacteria would survive

[MoeShawky]

bacteria produced earth's first oxygen allowing plants to live and mass produce oxygen , i think bacteria is the solution to begin a new evolutionary cycle in mars , we dont have to gain any thing now , we just should infect mars with life and watch life do it's thing , it would find a way to survive and may be even invent new ways and form a new type of creatures in millions of years ! you don't have to gain any thing just find a way to infect it with life

Re:but sure some bacteria would survive

[shikaisi]

we just should infect mars with life and watch life do it's thing , it would find a way to survive and may be even invent new ways and form a new type of creatures in millions of years ! you don't have to gain any thing just find a way to infect it with life

What could possibly go wrong?

Re: but sure some bacteria would survive

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what, I like your idea of scientific research. You should inject yourself with a vial of Courtney Love's blood, see whether or not the herpes or the drugs take you out first.

You know, just let life happen!

Re:but sure some bacteria would survive

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans is what.

I agree with infecting it with as much bacteria as we can throw at it that show signs of metabolising the environment and producing oxygen/nitrogen etc.

They can GET to Mars

[Geoffrey.landis]

Exactly.
The article says that they can GET to Mars... in ensporulated (inactive) form.
I can even believe that they can survive on Mars... in inactive form.
But can they metabolize and reproduce and spread once they get to Mars?? That's a lot harder. Mars is cold. Mars is dry. Mars is irradiated with UV.
I could imagine that some organisms that are simultaneously extreme cryophiles, and halophiles (any water that is liquid is going to be very saline) and also radiation tolerant might survive... but these organisms aren't likely to be the ones contaminating spacecraft, unless we assemble spacecraft in Antarctica.

Re:They can GET to Mars

[TapeCutter]

The question is not weather they will spread on Mars, the question is how do you prevent experimental equipment designed to detect Martian microbes from detecting Earth microbes that came along for the ride. Also they do not need to be exotic Earth species to survive inside the equipment, common lichen for example can survive the vacuum/radiation of space for at least a year, as demonstrated by experiments performed at the ISS.

Documentary on life discovered on Mars

[jphamlore]

I thought life had already been discovered on Mars, and a high production value documentary had been released to educate the public about the findings way back in 1998?

Our Sacred Duty

[Scottingham]

I would say that it is our sacred duty to SEED mars with as many types of bacteria that would stand a chance at living and prospering.

DNA is the home team. We are DNA. We should ensure that it has a chance in case Earth goes totally tits up. People always talk about that in terms of humans, but really it's DNA.
Europa, Enceladus, anywhere we can get it to survive and grow.

We should even be undergoing genetic engineering efforts to space-harden some strains. Or make viable capsules that could last millions of years.



tl;dr DNA Rulz.

Re:Our Sacred Duty

[Anonymous Coward]

EXACTLY. Why spend money on any type of sterilization? (Presuming they do anything special beyond space travel that is....). Mars has no life, what's the big deal if some from Earth 'hitches a ride'...that's a "net good thing"...the idea that we should make NO impact in any parts of our environment is absolutely nuts...sure if we somehow find intelligent life somewhere in the universe we need to be careful with them just as we expect them to be with us but absent that we need our type of life to proliferate so when it comes time we can move elsewhere.

Re:Our Sacred Duty

[symbolset]

Meteors have already done this work for us.

Re:Our Sacred Duty

[dryeo]

Be nice to have a look around first. See if life has already migrated there or begun separately.

Re:Our Sacred Duty

[Anonymous Coward]

Be nice to have a look around first. See if life has already migrated there or begun separately.

We already 'know' that there is no life on Mars, what we have left is the problem of disproving existence.

For the same reason you can't disprove the existence of a god you can not prove that there is no life on Mars. For place you can show i barren there will always be a 'But you haven't looked over there.'

Re:Our Sacred Duty

[Scottingham]

Gene alalysis would be able to tell if it was from Earth or not. Even if the other life did have DNA. Although, DNA could out-compete before we got a chance to study the ET life.

If that is the case then it

[Anonymous Coward]

Already is.

APK. APK.

[mmell]

Won't you please just go away?

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Reactivate Reagan's Star Wars program, aim the satellite born rontgen lasers to the accelerating probe and flood it's surfaces with purifying radiation.

Gut flora

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all the bacteria living inside us?

Re:APK. APK.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. you're trolls and scum that need to be adjusted to getting a bit of what you dish out and can't take.

Re:APK. APK.

[ShieldW0lf]

Won't you please just go away?

No. you're trolls and scum that need to be adjusted to getting a bit of what you dish out and can't take.

Could always file your complaints here:

info@start64.com

Or give him a call and ask him to fuck off... is it Peter Panisz, or Panisz Peter? Anyway, I'm guessing this is him...

http://website.informer.com/Pa...

Company: Panisz Peter
Address: Kossuth Lajos u. 51 Dunabogdany 2023 HU
Phone: +36.203367173
Fax: +36.203367173

2 most popular domains of this owner:
start64.com
android-x86.info

Re:APK. APK.

[Anonymous Coward]

APK is scum that goes trolling for small children to murder every lunch break. The only thing we know is that he likes to rape children and needs to be locked up. I encourage everyone to report that sick fuck to the police and get him removed from society until he stops destroying innocent lives. His name is Alexander Peter Kowalski and he lives at 903 East Division St., Syracuse, NY 13208 (he was born 01/31/1965; his mother is Jan Kowalski, born 12/03/1933. I encourage everyone to call his neighbors and warn them that he may have raped and\or murdered their children and uses HOSTS files to evade police detection when he looks at child porn. If anyone lives in his area, I suggest printing out some fliers and stapling them around his neighborhood with a large "PAEDO WARNING!" on the top.

How about cockroaches?

[ruir]

Find some sort of revenue which can be taxed/robbed and send some politicians in...

Why are they trying to prevent this anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like allowing bacteria to colonize Mars, whether it would be successful or not (likely not, but it can't hurt to try) would be the first step in terraforming it. Why exactly are we trying to prevent this, again?

Re:APK. APK.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit projecting your own personal issues onto apk unidentifiable no balls ac troll that you are.

Re:Happened 30 Years Ago

[crimson tsunami]

Unless the native Martian bacteria out-competed the Viking bacteria which seems pretty likely. Considering the Martian bacteria would have evolved to handle the native Martian conditions much better than some stray earth bacteria would. (Assuming there was any native Martian bacteria of course)

A suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be benficial to your mental health if you were to desist from this destructive behavior. Seek professional help.

Re:A suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

Seek a professional license + degree & years of psychiatric practice hands on loser. You need it.

Solvent

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Mddle of the desert on Earth supports a solvent (liquid water) and the poles of Earth have tons of water.

A basic "unit" of life on Earth is a "cell". A cell contains solvent (i.e. fluid).

Mars doesn't have the atmospheric pressure today to support most of the simple liquids available in any quantities in the universe.

Both water and ammonia would sublimate on Mars today ( solid evaporates directly to gas, skipping liquid phase like a block of carbon dioxide melting here on Earth) --- ammonia is sometimes suggested as a possible alternative biochemistry possibility).

Without liquids as possibility, would be very hard to maintain life or any kind of biochemistry since solvents act as transport.

Billions of years ago, Mars had more atmosphere and a good chance of liquid water and I'd be surprised if Mars didn't have simple life once --- but we don't see vegetation on Mars or lichen on rocks, and while we can't rule out Martian extremophiles existing today somewhere, if there was life on Mars once, it is pretty clear it didn't adapt to figure out a way to thrive there today.

That makes the odds for Earth bacteria attempting such a feat rather bleak, as any native Martian simple live would have the opportunity to adapt over decent timescales.

NASA May Put Greenhouse on Mars in 2021

[Barryke]

In other news:

NASA May Put Greenhouse on Mars in 2021
http://www.space.com/25767-nas...

Re:APK. APK.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey mmell: Yer bein' called out (why ya runnin', "forrest"?) http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Re:APK. APK.

[mmell]

The Start64 malware site shows the following:

Company: Panisz Peter

Address: Kossuth Lajos u. 51 Dunabogdany 2023 HU

Phone: +36.203367173

Fax: +36.203367173

But I think he's living at his mother Jan Kowalski's basement at:

Alexander Peter Kowalski

903 East Division Street

Syracuse, N.Y. 13208

Apartment #1, Lower Level

Somebody needs to visit this dude - it's Guiliani Time!

Visit me (I'll fucking END you)

[Anonymous Coward]

I shit you not, you miserable little punk! Why're you running from my challenge, Forrest -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ?

Hmmm?

* Is it since YOUR MOUTH WROTE CHECKS YOUR ASS CAN'T CA$H?

APK

P.S.=> Absolutely... & pay CLOSE attemtion to my subject: I mean it (won't be some "1st" either)...apk

Who are you?

[mmell]

The Start64 malware site shows the following:

Company: Panisz Peter

Address: Kossuth Lajos u. 51 Dunabogdany 2023 HU

Phone: +36.203367173

Fax: +36.203367173

But I think he's living at his mother Jan Kowalski's basement at:

Alexander Peter Kowalski

903 East Division Street

Syracuse, N.Y. 13208

Apartment #1, Lower Level

Re:Who are you?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think that but I know you're running from a challenge. I see that literally. Posting anoncoward intentionally joining in on the fun picking on mmell.

Re:Who are you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmell: Yer bein' called out. Why ya runnin', "forrest" http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ?