I’m really curious about fungi that can survive in these conditions, because fungi many times break down inorganic matter into organic. It sounds natural to just drop some all over and check what’s up a couple of centuries later.
Yeah, and you want to explain to future generations why we could have had a happy relationship with Mars but no, we gave it a really bad yeast infection and now it never wants us anywhere near it? Hmmm? :-)
I heard an interesting speculative talk about why we should be putting hard microbes on every planet and moon in our solar system because we'll probably cause an extinction event and perhaps the other celestial body could get a head start on evolving a better form of intelligence.
Potentially a much greater filter is going from unicellular to multicellular life, no? If it likely took billions of years to get from unicellular to multicellular life on Earth, and only (hundreds of) millions of years to get to life that can conduct spaceflight, then perhaps microbes wouldn’t be the best way to attack this problem (I’m assuming you’re talking primarily about unicellular microbes, of course).
Well in the talk the presenter was talking things like tardigrades which are multicellular. The challenge with tardigrades (and any multicellular life) is that you want it to be reproducing (and hence evolving) so it has to be able to do so under conditions on the body you drop it on too. Again, since the talk was speculative there were various speculative ideas such as ice penetrators to put them into the liquid under the ice of moons like Enceladus.
Evolvable being the key of course. Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.
> Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.
That's the scientific community being parochial and self-interested, though. Their priority is writing more papers, and if that means holding the rest of us back, they're fine with it.
Didn't Carl Sagan (in Cosmos?) or someone propose leaving all of Mars as a nature preserve for the benefit of any microbes that happen to live there? That's just wasting the closest, best off-planet colonization opportunity.
> That's the scientific community being parochial and self-interested, though. Their priority is writing more papers, and if that means holding the rest of us back, they're fine with it.
Is it? To me, this sounds awfully similar in construction to 'The devs are always worried about tech debt and architecture, but they just want to polish their resumes to hold back the product' speech we are prone to hear from PM/MBA types.
Why would you prefer to believe a random outsider's view (scientists are holding us back) over people who have built professional careers working in the field(a.k.a scientists)? Especially when you provide no evidence to back up your claims?
Some things are better left as-is. Not everything is up for grabs. Seeing the grappling effects of "seizing opportunities" on the Blue Marble and thinking that we can continue doing the same everywhere we can touch is...
Spreading into new territory is a fundamental human instinct. It’s how we ended up being spread out across the entire planet. Tut tutting ain’t gonna change that, people are still going to follow the instinct. See: religion’s attempts to control sexual instincts in humans. We would at least need to respect the instinct and give it a robust outlet, not just expect people to suppress it for the good of… some rocks?
Minimizing our bad influence on our planet and wanting everything for oneself caused the problem we're currently in. Most humans know no moderation, and putting it out as "this is our instinct, innit? We can't do anything about it but to follow it, eh?" is the biggest continuous mistake we're doing as a species.
If we assume that we're the most advanced organism on this planet (which I doubt) which is meant to rule it once it for all (which I doubt), we shall do a hell of a better job of not burning it end to end and make it inhabitable for ourselves and everything else living on it.
This is shortsightedness, veiled as a god syndrome.
A god which cooks itself to death. For more money. A bitter irony.
> Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.
Their self-loathing of terran life, possibly the most fantastic thing that ever happened in the universe, is sad to see.
What is the point of a universe if there is no life to appreciate it?
To your point, one of the most remarkable things I've read about both Mars and Venus, is that there was a time billions of years ago when they had more moderate temperatures and liquid water.
In a way, it's a tragedy that human civilization has only emerged at a time when both Mars and Venus have become much more uninhabitable than they used to be.
The best time to start terraforming a planet is never. The idea is as absurd as a Dyson sphere/swarm. People should really grow beyond sci-fi ideas that were last fresh in the 1930's.
We still find evidence of life on earth from billions of years ago that was not erased by billions of years of their successors. I doubt you have anything to worry about.
But imagine the value of finding _any_ living RNA based life which is clearly not from earth before we travel to other stars.
It's one thing to know there was once life, and to know basically nothing about it. But being able to date it in the tree of life (or forest of life?) is monumentally more relevant to understand our place among the stars.
Mars is super short of hydrogen (and lacks the magnetic field to guard it). We'd need to crash a bunch of ice asteroids into it to get in the water and heat it up, then there could be a stab at terraforming it. So far we seem to be more likely to marsaform Earth.
I worked with these organisms from the space station. Their resistance to things like hydrogen peroxide (what we wash space probes with) is incredible.
At the end of the day, there are tons of organisms, many of which can survive epic conditions. My personal favourite is still Deinococcus radiodurans but there are many other contenders.
This here is odd because it seems to follow a "life must be everywhere". I never understood this. Aka NASA wants to find life elsewhere, but ... why? Life is already here and evolution occurs. See dinosaur. So, adaptability is an intrinsic property. Why does it have to be shown that yeast can adapt to martian conditions? Do we want to grow yeast on mars? And if the question is humans on mars, why would yeast matter? The conditions do not allow humans to live on mars, unless sheltered. Even genetically modified humans will most likely not be able to live on mars freely. The temperature alone makes this impossible:
You'd need to be in a suit all of the time or in some building with higher temperature. Mars is not Earth. What is the point of having some bacteria or yeast on mars?
The point is not to put yeast on Mars. The research isn't part of some terraforming or settlement program.
It is to understand whether Mars conditions are inimical to life entirely. Turns out that some common modern earth life forms can survive Mars like conditions.
That is interesting in and of itself and raises further questions on why life doesn't appear to have existed or survived on Mars today. It's just science, making small steps in our understanding of the universe.
I think by "survive" they mean that yeast spores can briefly be put in a "mars jar" and then be revived, not that they can become metobolicaly active, or even last for an extended time on mars
More seriously, they send only sterilized landers to Mars, to avoid killing all life there (if there is any), and to avoid the problem of finding in a few years the contamination we sended there. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection
Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%, Panspermia is starting to feel more and more likely.
Something to blow your mind with. The early days in the universe there were millions of years were the average temperature in the universe supported liquid water.
On the one hand, (primitive) life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions allowed it.
On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
>Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%
I'm fully with you that the sheer number of planets is one of, if not the most powerful data point we know for sure, that points toward the plausibility of extraterrestrial life. One thing I haven't heard discussed a whole lot though is, what if it's a tug of war, between a preposterously large number of planets, and a correspondingly preposterously small chance of life, that is every bit as impressively small as the number of planets is impressively big?
For whatever reason, it seems like the default attitude is to treat the sheer volume of planets like they more than compensate for the rarity of life. But what it doesn't work like that? There are different versions of this argument that apply to any life at all, and then to intelligent life, so take your pick for the more interesting question.
But in principle it seems like life, and especially multicellular and even more especially intelligent life, very well could be kind of vanishingly rare that's effectively a match in rareness to the universe's vastness.
I kinda like the optimistic perspective that humanity emerged preposterously early. Like the age of the universe is a mere ~14 billion years. It's basically nothing imo. Star formation is predicted to keep going for about 100 trillion years. So from that perspective we are only about 0.1% of the way through the current cosmic era.
When I think about our genomic complexity and how many neat little things are encoded in there, it's mindboggling to me how quickly it evolved. Like there are so many little wonders in the body. Just a few billion years of throwing shit at the wall?!
all of those theories depend on one assumption, that life and our existence are products of a purely random collision of events.
IMHO, "We don't know" is the only answer to the question of how many planets have life on them or the probability of some forms of live existing somewhere. 0 is as valid as 10^128 until more than one other life supporting planet or moon is found to establish some baseline for speculation. otherwise, we're talking sci-fi here, in which case I think stargate's version seems decent.
There is the old theory about how life is entropy accelerating, and therefore in a grand sense the emergence of life is thermodynamically favored. Though, that says nothing about the absolute chance of it occurring.[1] Our observable universe is far from infinite.
[1] Though maybe it does speak to life tending toward evolving more complex, energy consuming systems, and its propensity to spread out into the universe.
That's all.
I heard an interesting speculative talk about why we should be putting hard microbes on every planet and moon in our solar system because we'll probably cause an extinction event and perhaps the other celestial body could get a head start on evolving a better form of intelligence.
Evolvable being the key of course. Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.
That's the scientific community being parochial and self-interested, though. Their priority is writing more papers, and if that means holding the rest of us back, they're fine with it.
Didn't Carl Sagan (in Cosmos?) or someone propose leaving all of Mars as a nature preserve for the benefit of any microbes that happen to live there? That's just wasting the closest, best off-planet colonization opportunity.
Is it? To me, this sounds awfully similar in construction to 'The devs are always worried about tech debt and architecture, but they just want to polish their resumes to hold back the product' speech we are prone to hear from PM/MBA types.
Why would you prefer to believe a random outsider's view (scientists are holding us back) over people who have built professional careers working in the field(a.k.a scientists)? Especially when you provide no evidence to back up your claims?
Some things are better left as-is. Not everything is up for grabs. Seeing the grappling effects of "seizing opportunities" on the Blue Marble and thinking that we can continue doing the same everywhere we can touch is...
telling.
This is a perfect portrayal of what I'm talking about:
Minimizing our bad influence on our planet and wanting everything for oneself caused the problem we're currently in. Most humans know no moderation, and putting it out as "this is our instinct, innit? We can't do anything about it but to follow it, eh?" is the biggest continuous mistake we're doing as a species.If we assume that we're the most advanced organism on this planet (which I doubt) which is meant to rule it once it for all (which I doubt), we shall do a hell of a better job of not burning it end to end and make it inhabitable for ourselves and everything else living on it.
This is shortsightedness, veiled as a god syndrome.
A god which cooks itself to death. For more money. A bitter irony.
Their self-loathing of terran life, possibly the most fantastic thing that ever happened in the universe, is sad to see.
What is the point of a universe if there is no life to appreciate it?
How can you know? The absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence.
In a way, it's a tragedy that human civilization has only emerged at a time when both Mars and Venus have become much more uninhabitable than they used to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
It's one thing to know there was once life, and to know basically nothing about it. But being able to date it in the tree of life (or forest of life?) is monumentally more relevant to understand our place among the stars.
It seems unlikely to be possible to completely prevent all lifeforms from hitching a ride
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2011.0738
I worked with these organisms from the space station. Their resistance to things like hydrogen peroxide (what we wash space probes with) is incredible.
This here is odd because it seems to follow a "life must be everywhere". I never understood this. Aka NASA wants to find life elsewhere, but ... why? Life is already here and evolution occurs. See dinosaur. So, adaptability is an intrinsic property. Why does it have to be shown that yeast can adapt to martian conditions? Do we want to grow yeast on mars? And if the question is humans on mars, why would yeast matter? The conditions do not allow humans to live on mars, unless sheltered. Even genetically modified humans will most likely not be able to live on mars freely. The temperature alone makes this impossible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Temperature
You'd need to be in a suit all of the time or in some building with higher temperature. Mars is not Earth. What is the point of having some bacteria or yeast on mars?
It is to understand whether Mars conditions are inimical to life entirely. Turns out that some common modern earth life forms can survive Mars like conditions.
That is interesting in and of itself and raises further questions on why life doesn't appear to have existed or survived on Mars today. It's just science, making small steps in our understanding of the universe.
We could call it "The beer at the end of the universe"
Surely there's nothing for it to eat there yet though.
On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
i've yelled at the interns several times but none have been able to set up a haldane soup focus group yet
I'm fully with you that the sheer number of planets is one of, if not the most powerful data point we know for sure, that points toward the plausibility of extraterrestrial life. One thing I haven't heard discussed a whole lot though is, what if it's a tug of war, between a preposterously large number of planets, and a correspondingly preposterously small chance of life, that is every bit as impressively small as the number of planets is impressively big?
For whatever reason, it seems like the default attitude is to treat the sheer volume of planets like they more than compensate for the rarity of life. But what it doesn't work like that? There are different versions of this argument that apply to any life at all, and then to intelligent life, so take your pick for the more interesting question.
But in principle it seems like life, and especially multicellular and even more especially intelligent life, very well could be kind of vanishingly rare that's effectively a match in rareness to the universe's vastness.
When I think about our genomic complexity and how many neat little things are encoded in there, it's mindboggling to me how quickly it evolved. Like there are so many little wonders in the body. Just a few billion years of throwing shit at the wall?!
IMHO, "We don't know" is the only answer to the question of how many planets have life on them or the probability of some forms of live existing somewhere. 0 is as valid as 10^128 until more than one other life supporting planet or moon is found to establish some baseline for speculation. otherwise, we're talking sci-fi here, in which case I think stargate's version seems decent.
[1] Though maybe it does speak to life tending toward evolving more complex, energy consuming systems, and its propensity to spread out into the universe.