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Bacteria Found On ISS May Be Alien In Origin, Says Cosmonaut (independent.co.uk)
Kekke writes: Lots of buzz around this. Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov took routine samples from the outside of the International Space Station during a spacewalk. These samples were analyzed and found to contain bacteria that must have come from somewhere other than Earth or the ISS itself. "Bacteria that had not been there during the launch of the ISS module were found on the swabs," Mr. Shkaplerov told TASS Russian News Agency. "So they have flown from somewhere in space and settled on the outside hull." He made it clear that "it seems, there is no danger," and that scientists are doing more work to find out what they are. The Independent writes, "Finding bacteria that came from somewhere other than Earth would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of science -- but much more must be done before such a claim is made."
They have miniature DNA sequencer on board, they can find out if it matches at all with any sequenced earthly strain. (I have one also, it is a MinION by Oxford nanowire technologies. Although not perfect it should be capable of sequencing this).
If it truly of extraterrestrial origin it should be immediately obvious as it is would have diverged very far from the âoeTree of Lifeâ (thatâ(TM)s assuming there are any similarities at all).
It, would also be incredibly valuable and not just from a scientific standpoint. Just a single completely novel protein has caused multi-billion dollar biotech revolutions. Here would be an organism with potentially thousands.
The ISS orbit is so low it is within the upper reaches of our atmosphere. That is why it has to be given regular boosts to keep it in orbit. Though super thin, it does encounter enough atmosphere to induce drag.
Just as we have found unusual organisms in the deepest oceans and even miles down in rock, we should expect to find bacteria at the limits of our atmosphere and even beyond. It should also be expected that they have evolved dramatically, as organisms living off of heat and sulfur deep in our oceans have done.
There are some out of this world organisms right here at home. I'm not even sure how you could prove extraterrestrial origin. Almost anything you find could just be evidence of a previously undiscovered unique ecosystem 100+ miles up.
It's sort of neat to imagine the possibility of some life form surfing around on the auroras in the thermosphere.
It's called Panspermia, if it really is non-terrestrial, but odds are very high that it's terrestrial.
Despite sterilization we have found bacterial colonies many times on our space hardware, and they've always been from Earth.
Not only does it only take a single bacteria to survive and reach that location, as the article mentioned, there are things that can loft microorganisms to insane altitudes. I have doubts they can go as high as the space station, but there are rockets they can hitch a ride on, and again, it only takes one to start a colony.
Don't forget that "just because it wasn't there before" only means that it was undetected for some reason, maybe because it was too small.
And also, even if they don't have a match to a known terrestrial DNA sequence, still doesn't mean it's alien. It could just be that their database isn't complete. Actually we know the database of microbial DNA is not complete, so that's a given.
Now if it doesn't match anything from Earth, and it's not close enough to be related to any known microbe, and an analysis of it's DNA doesn't show any real matches of any terrestrial DNA sequences at all, then it might be alien. (There are lots of shared sequences among all life on Earth, since they all share common ancestors, it's just some are more closely related than others.)
If it's DNA uses something other than AGCT or AGCU, then it's almost guaranteed it's non-terrestrial/alien.