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Mars Space

Earth Microbes May Survive On Mars 142

Posted by Zonk from the bugs-in-spaaaaace dept.
Vicissidude writes "New Scientist is reporting that terrestrial microbes who hitch a ride to Mars on spacecraft may be able to survive under special circumstances." From the article: "...Mars's thin atmosphere allows such intense ultraviolet radiation to reach the planet's surface - triple that found on Earth - that any life inadvertently carried on the spacecraft is thought to be wiped out quickly...However, the bacteria were able to stay alive if they were shielded by just 1 millimeter of soil during the tests, which ran for up to 24 hours. Under such a protective coating, the bacteria could survive - and potentially grow - under the high Martian UV flux if water and nutrient requirements for growth were met."
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Earth Microbes May Survive On Mars More

Earth Microbes May Survive On Mars

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  • Planting life? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bagel2ooo ( 106312 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:15AM (#12722678)
    So does this mean that if we are able to find suitable water deposits but either not enough life for it to foster or none at all, that we would be able to plant certain bacteria that would be able to start a green house effect to vent off ice caps into atmosphere and "seed" life on Mars?

    • Re:Planting life? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:28AM (#12722724) Homepage
      The problem is holding on to that atmosphere. Mars has weak gravity and a weak magnetic field. That allows light atoms and molecules to escape into space, and it's aggravated by the solar wind.

      • Re:Planting life? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:44AM (#12722791)
        Right, this means that in a period of million years the atmosphere we put on Mars will be mostly gone.
        And the terraforming we're talking about will take what, 100-1000 years? When the atmosphere escapes into space, we can simply repeat the process (assuming no maintenance on the way).

        • Re:Planting life? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by aliquis ( 678370 )
          Except what is lost is lost, so the amount of water molecules, oxygen, hydrogen and so on will become less all the time.
          • How fast would it lose atmosphere, assuming the pressure and composition were suitable for humans? If it takes millions of years, redirecting the occasional ice asteroid to burn up in the atmosphere (say, every century or millenia) might be enough.
          • Venus has lower gravity than earth, higher mean velocity molecules (higher temp) and very little magnetic field. Yet its atmosphere is hundreds of times thicker than earth's. Why should mars be any different? (other than the fact that if it had an atmosphere once, it's gone now...) How much of mars' original atmosphere blew away vs. was absorbed in the surface? (If there was significant oxygen, it's all trapped in the soil now as oxides.)
        • Well we've got an asteroid belt right there. Plenty of mass and probably a good amount of water too. Perhaps we could devise some low-energy method to nudge a planet's worth of that mass into Mars. We should probably think about doing that before we send too many people there, since slamming a planet's worth of mass into the planet would tend to render it somewhat more inhospitable...
      • You just need one bad-ass gravity pump.
        • But wouldn't that take like, all the earth's money?

          We're not trying to move stars around, just hold some stupid air to a dippy little planet. A weak-ass gravity pump would probably suffice.

    • Re:Planting life? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:37AM (#12722760)
      I assume that "triple the UV that reaches Earth" is a mistake, as that would make it close to Australia -- and somehow, judging from pesky Aussies blabbing around on /., there is no massive dying there -- but, selecting species that can survive the radiation is not that hard. We have bacteria that can survive both at temperatures of nearly +100 degrees and -60, we have bacteria that don't need oxygen, we have those who can live in a chloric atmosphere. We wouldn't even have to do any direct genetic manipulation other than simply selection.

      This goes for surviving the UV. Getting water is something we are already able to do -- even if we don't have it in ready form, oxygen and hydrogen come in plentiful supplies. And for the nutrients, just take some protists with you. Heck, they most likely will be able to use the UV for photosynthesis.

      Terraforming Mars is more a matter of a huge engineering project, as the technology we need is already discovered.
    • We should be doing this *now* with *every* mission to mars. Planting bacteria, microbes anything that can survive in the environment. If necessary doing a bit of genetic manipulation to create species which can survive there.

      • No... we definetly should not.

        Not at least until we know more about mars's previous biosphere and if one currently exists.

        Doing so now prematurely would probablly make future generations call us "The Generation that destroyed Mars"

        • Re:We should be doing this *now* deliberately (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @10:25AM (#12723187)
          "Not at least until we know more about mars's previous biosphere and if one currently exists."

          Bugger Mars's previous biosphere.

          Have you never seen a lion eat a gazelle? How about a chimpanzee tear apart a monkey. Sharks eating seals, starfish eating coral, ladybirds eating aphids.

          Life kills and eats other life *all* the time. If you can't survive, your genes aren't good enough to exist. Any existing life on Mars doesn't deserve to live if it can't compete with Earth microbes.

          If everyone worried about what future generations might think, nothing would ever happen.

          • Which completely destroys the very reason we want to check out Mars in the first place.
            • I want a big house on Mars, somewhere to go on holiday. You might care but I really don't care about bacteria, Martian or not.

              • Let me guess... you're american. No, really, before we go and plant an ecosystem on Mars that will most certainly destroy the present one, we should research the planet as thoroughly as possible. It may offer essential scientific insight into matters such as the genesis of life itself - a chance we should not readily throw away.
                • "Let me guess... you're american."

                  You guessed incorrectly. Which is an especially poor guess because you could have clicked on my URL to find out exactly where I come from.

                  "we should research the planet as thoroughly as possible"

                  That argument is one for never doing anything. Perfect knowledge is impossible, a futile quest and a fearful excuse for stagnation. Life on Mars will offer no more insight to the genesis of life itself than life on Earth which is many orders of magnitude more abundant. Terraformi
                  • Okay, I apologize for the "american" assumption - it was an uncalled-for troll. (It would have fit with the cliché, though.)

                    "Life on Mars will offer no more insight to the genesis of life itself than life on Earth which is many orders of magnitude more abundant."
                    Life on Mars may or may not have evolved independently from life on earth. If it has, then Mars may well be our only chance to study truly alien life-forms - which would almost certainly prove to be an insightful and worthwile venture.

                    I kno
          • "Life feeds on life feeds on life" -- Maynard of Tool
          • If you can't survive, your genes aren't good enough to exist.

            Unfortunately, that's not true at all. Re-read Origin of Species - it is not the "best" genes that survive, but the ones most specifically adapted for a particular environment.

          • Thank you for that revealing demonstration of the difference between civilization and barbarism. "Devil's Advocate" can be an extremely effective rhetorical device.


            Of course, if you're serious, then you wouldn't mind if I came over to your house and murdered you and your family -- because after all, by your logic if I'm physically capabable of doing it, then I have every right to do so and you have no right to live.

      • One idea I've seen before is to genetically engineer microbes that
        • form spores; i.e. are drought tolerant
        • use the martian soil as a nutrient source
        • perform a modified form of photosynthesis

        Normal photosynthesis releases O2 into the atmosphere, but it requires CO2 in an atmosphere to work. The idea is to create a microbe that gets everything it needs from soil, is powered by the sun, but has minimal light requirements. This type of microbe could use the energy from the sun to break down the iron oxi

    • Or we could deposit some organisms from our own planet which can survive under tough conditions - cockroaches being an example - and watch the scene fold out from there. Of course, no-one wants a planet inhabited entirely by cockroaches, it sounds like some sort of bad sci-fi B-movie,

      • Re:Planting life? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by JDevers ( 83155 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @09:41AM (#12722999)
        Cockroaches may be hardy compared to most other higher life forms, but compared to many bacteria they have one foot in the grave and the other 5 on a banana peel the moment they hatch. The simple fact that they are eukaryotic means they are very fragile life forms with fairly rigid life requirements. Cockroaches aren't all that much more rad-hardened than us. They have the same potential problems as we do (direct DNA damage) and the same repair mechanisms so most of their "resistance" is as a species, not an individual. They are small, tend to live in places that would shield them somewhat from any sort of radiation, need very small amounts of food and water to live, the food they need can easily come from leftover human trash, and they reproduce prolifically. These things together make them a very hardy species, but without O2 they die quite quickly.

        There are MANY bacteria (including some of the best survivors) which need no gases to live. There are bacteria which need nothing but Fe2+ or elemental sulfur, water, and an inorganic carbon source to live. While the vast majority of life that you and I see every day uses the standard aerobic respiration of glucose or photosynthesis to survive, there are definitely a lot of other core catabolic processes at the bacterial level.
        • True. Prokaryotes are obviously the way to go. However, the main reason I didn't mention bacteria (apart from a brain fart) was that there is no real commercial/marketing/public interest in a planet of bacteria; obviously, biologists would be in their element but what's the gain? "Bacteria can live on Mars... ... ...great!"
          • True, but bacteria are far more capable of actually terraforming the planet. It would be a situation where you bootstrap the system and then put the simple to us but complex in the absolute form that people can still relate to up so that the public get interested.
          • Yeah, compared to cockroaches ;)
    • Sure, in about 50-100 years, when we send the first manned missions to Mars, they'll get to our probe landing sites and find the microbes have turned into huge slug-like creatures, just like in Star Trek: The Search for Spock.

      However, turning Mars back into a living world may not be possible. Most tectonic activity that fuels this planet is gone from Mars. I don't believe there are any active volcanoes, and it is likely that Mars will remain a dead world. No internal heat == No possibility to put a pro

  • Isn't it strange... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Isn't it strange how the Martians brought us here before they were annihilated, and now we're sending life back to that planet?
    • That really wouldn't be that strange. I imagine it would be the end goal of sending us here in the first place. Along the lines of panspermy, but on a more local level.
  • Could this be a way to terra form mars for colonzation over a long period of time ?
    • Why? do we plan to not visit for 10000 years?
    • You betcha! After 6000 years the life will come to worship us as their creators just as we worship the dude from Jupiter who terra-formed earth. It's like having your own pet, but they can feed themselves! It would be the best of both worlds.
    • No, Mars has insufficient gravity to support an atmosphere thick enough for humans to breathe.

      Yes, we could grow plants there and live in biodomes or something harvesting crops in space suits.

      • Re:Exploition for Terra-Forming (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        No, Mars has insufficient gravity to support an atmosphere thick enough for humans to breathe.

        There's the problem then; your humans need adjusting.
    • Why bother doing it this way?

      The best way imo, is to strap a very high isp rocket to phobos and slow down that mofo until it collides with mars. Although that might cause some problems in the short term by creating a small asteriod belt around the planet which would make landings dangerous... but that could be dealt with, with some kind of gigantic space fly swapper, or sending a smaller asteriod to impact mars which would end up picking up a lot of the particles, but woudldn't send them back up.
    • No. As far as I know (read this from a link from the Wiki Article on Terraforming which I can't find right now), unfortunately Mars doens't have enough gravity to hold the gasses in the atmosphere needed for our type of life to survive. They would just escape into deep space. In order to pad the planet to acceptable gravity you'd need to almost double the size of the planet.

      According to that article, Mars is much better Paraterraformed, used as a jumping off point for other planets, or used as raw mater
  • 'Martian Yoghurt' from Muller - the choice of the extraterrestrially cultured.

  • Oh! (Score:1)

    by rimmon ( 608966 )
    Baceteria can survive and grow if the right conditions are available. News at 11.

  • UV resistant cultures (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dukerobinson ( 624739 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:21AM (#12722700)
    Bacteria can be grown to be resistant to nearly anything, within reason, given enough generations. It seems that if we wanted to seed Mars with life, we could take a suitable microbe, expose it to martian level radiation until 99% of the organisms are eliminated, then allow it to regrow, then expose to radiation, regrow, and continue this process until the UV is no longer harmful. The nutritional substrate would have to be something similar to that found on the martian surface, of course, but it really does not seem that far fetched to me. the real concern would be, do we want to seed mars with life before we are certain that there is no native microbial life?
    • It might be useful to look at the top of Mt. Everst to see if there are bacteria that would do the job wonderfully. But yeah, sending bugs there makes no sense. Not yet.
    • I love this 'seed mars with life' statement. Putting bacteria up there is not seeding the planet with life, its seeding it with little eating machines with no guarantee they will do anything except consume all the resources they can.
      • "little eating machines with no guarantee they will do anything except consume all the resources they can."

        Yes, that's pretty much what life is. The next stage is to add something that consumes the bacteria.

        • Sorry mindlessly eating and reproducing until there are no resouces left and you die only qualify as a very limited form of life for most people (unless you are a very fat woman obsessed with having babies).

          Yes, that's pretty much what life is. The next stage is to add something that consumes the bacteria.

          Right, cos it always works out so well when we introduce new species to an enviroment here on earth. Life as we know it evolved from a massively complex series of interdependencies here on earth, n
          • "Sorry mindlessly eating and reproducing until there are no resouces left and you die only qualify as a very limited form of life for most people"

            I've heard of anthormorphising but with *bacteria*?

            Like it or not, life forms expand to fill their environment. That *is* life. Look at the red deer population in Scotland. The only predators now are man and their numbers have increased to the point that, yes, when they are not culled they die of starvation.

            Frankly I don't particularly care if bacteria die of s
      • "Putting bacteria up there is not seeding the planet with life, its seeding it with little eating machines with no guarantee they will do anything except consume all the resources they can."

        Hmm... but what eats can get eaten!
        I'd certainly want to have food available if I'm going to be colonizing Mars.

        I'd also want to have some nice girls around in order to do that... but that's another story.

      • Putting bacteria up there is not seeding the planet with life, its seeding it with little eating machines with no guarantee they will do anything except consume all the resources they can.

        I thought that would be called "colonizing" Mars.

    • "do we want to seed mars with life before we are certain that there is no native microbial life?"

      Um, sorry but f*ck the native microbial life. Survival of the fittest.

      • Survival of the fittest.
        Sure you say that now, but you won't be laughing in several billion years when the Martians take over the Earth!
      • Survival of the fittest is a concept that helps us understand natural selection and biodiversity. It should not be used as an excuse to shelve public health issues here on earth or in any larger public.

        A much better guiding principle would be the Hippocratic oath: do no harm. Especially in space exploration, where we know so little about ramifications. We're still getting this wrong on Earth where we have much better understanding of the ecosystem---GMOs anyone?
        • No. A better guiding principle would be somewhere between do no harm and wanton harm. No harm to another ecosystem means never going there at all. You will squash, upturn, or otherwise kill something.

          We're getting this "wrong" on Earth because you cannot "do no harm" and survive. Even a cow rips up weeds and grasses and munches the insects, frogs and other little critters it incidentally picks up. Harm.

  • Batman can defeat any opponent as long as he has time to prepare.

  • This already happenend on the moon.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by KingofSpades ( 874684 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:23AM (#12722707)
    ..when the Apollo 12 crew brought back a camera from Surveyor 3. Some microorganisms survived a few years on the moon. See a nasa page [nasa.gov] for details.
    • And this is why we need a proper ticketing and validation system, including using ticket conductors an all space flights to prevent these freeloading micro organisms taking advantage of our space travel. Saying its not cold enough here on earth at this time of the solar cycle is no excuse to just secretly jump on the next moon mission that come along.

      If you need to get off planet do it under your own power ya grubby little micro cheapskates.

  • "...may be able to survive under special circumstances."

    well, heck, you could say that about just about anything.

    • Yes, humans are able to survive under special circumstances too...

      Like if those circumstances involve being in a space suit, for example.

  • Tardigrades [tardigrades.com] are incredibly resilient lifeforms, which may very well survive on Mars, it's a kind of "over-evolved" 0.1 mm beast, you can find everywhere.

  • if water and nutrient requirements for growth were met.

    Since they haven't found water yet this shouldn't be a problem.
    • There's lots of water on Mars, in the ice caps. While it's likely that it's mostly frozen, I'm not sure that'd be an issue for some bacteria.

  • the best defense... (Score:5, Funny)

    by moviepig.com ( 745183 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:38AM (#12722763)
    ...terrestrial microbes who hitch a ride to Mars on spacecraft may be able to survive...

    Remember in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds how our germs were Earth's last best defense against the invading Martians? Good to know we're developing a first-strike capability...

  • Not just spacecraft: also meteorites (Score:5, Interesting)

    by colonist ( 781404 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:39AM (#12722770) Journal

    Not just spacecraft: Earth microbes can hitch a ride to Mars on meteorites, too.

    Just as meteorites from Mars are found on Earth (eg. in Antarctica), meteorites from Earth may reach Mars, and these meteorites may carry microbes. Some scientists think there's an exchange of biological material between the two planets [newscientist.com].

    The Mars rover Opportunity recently found an iron meteorite on Mars [nasa.gov].

    • I always find this idea strange. I mean, I suppose it's possible, but if you look at all the effort it takes NASA to get a rocket off the ground, all that lift and all that jet fuel, just to get off the ground, and you're telling me that a rock covered in bacteria is just going to fall off the planet and land on mars? Yeah, sure ;)
      • Rocks are expelled by high-energy events like erupting volcanoes and asteroid impacts. It doesn't happen every day, and the numbers are quite sparse, but rocks from the Moon and from Mars have been positively identified on the Earth's soil.
  • under the high Martian UV flux if water and nutrient requirements for growth were met.

    These appear to be pretty large caveats on feasibility.

    Sort of like saying (ala Dan Quayle) that people can survive as long as there is water, an atmosphere and enough food.
    • >>under the high Martian UV flux if water and nutrient requirements for growth were met.

      >These appear to be pretty large caveats on feasibility.

      That was my thinking also. Plus, there are certainly enough ifs there:

      ... if the microbes happen to survive a trip to Mars,

      ... if if a Mars rover fell off a cliff or a spacecraft broke open in a crash so that microbes inside might find a toehold for survival,

      ... if they were shielded by just 1 millimeter of soil,

      ... if water is available where
  • That's actually possible only if the harmful environmental conditions are only UV lights on Mars. There can be several other non-earth problems that prevent living things to survive on Mars. Time should have shown those scientists that creating a population is such a hard thing that you need thousands of conditions to match together for a single colony to evolve or even survive.

  • This Just In.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Evil W1zard ( 832703 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:44AM (#12722789) Journal
    Earth Microbes placed on Mars appear to be stuck in a sand dune.
  • that these bacteria are going to be evolving quite fast. i mean, in the early earth stages, there was no ozone layer to protect us from the sun's radiation, and bateria evolved quite rapidly into animals we have today (if you believe in evolution). maybe if we send single cell bateria over to mars, in a couple million years, we may see intelligent creatures!
  • don't we have enough problems with our own viruses mutating, now we gotta send them to another planet where they can mutate so we can pick them up later and bring em back...

    actually I just wondered why nobody on /. has thought of that yet..

  • Life is the most powerful force in the universe.

    Gravity? Kid stuff. Kinetic energy? Boring. Electromagnetic radiation? It's for pussies.

    Life is the force of non-being wanting to be so much that non-being converts to being.

    Adam was made from mud, right? And what exactly made that mud get up and dance? Never mind the bronze-age cosmologies, let's just say that Life is more ... interesting than mud.

    -kgj

    • Just remember- Mars can't be terraformed. The gravity is too low to retain a sufficient atmospheric pressure to make it "Terra-like". There isn't enough water. It's too cold. It has too weak a magnetic field. Life could survive there unprotected at a stretch- but we couldn't.
      • Just remember- Mars can't be terraformed. The gravity is too low to retain a sufficient atmospheric pressure to make it "Terra-like". There isn't enough water. It's too cold. It has too weak a magnetic field. Life could survive there unprotected at a stretch- but we couldn't.

        Agreed. Terraforming is a tedious stretch of the imagination.

        But bacterioforming -- the reworking of a planet to support bacteria -- that could prove interesting.

        Man is the measure only of himself, not of all things. Man will
      • That is a short sighted view. While getting Mars to the point where it can sustain human life with no other assistance may be infeasible, terraforming can still be immensely beneficial. Consider how large parts of the earth humans can't survive on without artifical stuff such as warm clothes and shelter - including areas where it routinely gets below -40 to -50 degrees celcius in the winter.

        Terraforming doesn't have to mean we can all walk around in shorts and t-shirts and marvel at the nice weather.

        Ge

  • Now let's fly over there and find out ;-)
  • According to Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", streptococcus was found on a lens cap brought back from the moon.

  • This article [nasa.gov] describes how Streptococcus was found living on the flag we planted with the Apollo 12 mission. I would assume that atmospheric conditions and UV radiation levels are very similar to those found on Mars.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Inspired by Apple, you can now return your Mars Rover to NASA for recycling, plus a 10% decrease in your budget for next year! Everybody wins!
    • How can we start terraforming Mars if we are not even able to terraform Terra.

      That's just an astonishingly silly statement... Earth has vast amounts of different forms of life, as well as a complex athmosphere that combined makes it incredibly hard to make beneficial adjustments that doesn't have bad side effects. Mars has no known life, and hardly any athmosphere, and noone currently living there to be affected by mistakes.

      On the contrary, terraforming Mars might provide useful data on the feasibili

  • That might be an important distinction. I know squat about soil (or regolith) though. Anyone care to comment?
    • Before life came about, the Earth was most likely regolith. If you got life to live long and reproduce for long enough, Mars would eventually have soil. Probably far different than our soil due to the massive differences in atmospheric and hydraulic profiles, but something would come about.

  • Viking experiment problems (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PxM ( 855264 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @10:35AM (#12723232)
    When the 1976 Viking experiments detected possible signs of life [wikipedia.org], one of the suspects was bacteria from Earth. Since it was believed that life wouldn't surive the trip to Mars, the validity of this hypothesis compared to the idea that the bacteria is Martian (or the idea that it was a false positive due to nonliving sources) has been the debate of scientists for a while. We'll have to wait until someone recovers the Viking probes to know the true source of that possible signature.
  • This is just another reason why microbes should be required to carry ID cards at all times. Microbial illegal immigration is crippling our economy and a burden on the tax payer.
    Our proposed Bill will create a score of new offences including failure to notify authorities about a damaged or defective card, refusal of a microbe to obey an order from the Secretary of State, failure to notify the Secretary of State of any change in cellular structure, failure to obey an order to mutate and providing false plasm

  • May Survive (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jazman_777 ( 44742 )
    Ah, that lovely word, "may". With the word MAY, everything is possible. Why, for all we know, unicorns MAY exist!

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