Bacteria From Earth Can Survive In Space and Could Endure the Trip To Mars, Says Study (cnn.com) 65
AmiMoJo shares a report from CNN: A type of bacteria that is highly resistant to radiation and other environmental hazards survived outside of the International Space Station for three years, according to a new study. The Japanese Tanpopo mission involved including pellets of dried Deinococcus bacteria within aluminum plates that were placed in exposure panels outside of the space station. Deinococcus bacteria is found on Earth and has been nicknamed Conan the Bacterium by scientists for its ability to survive cold, dehydration and acid. It's known as the most radiant-resistant life form in the "Guinness Book of World Records." It can resist 3,000 times the amount of radiation that would kill a human and was first isolated in cans of meat subjected to sterilizing radiation. This mission was designed to test the "panspermia" theory, which suggests that microbes can pass from one planet to another and actually distribute life. Tanpopo means dandelion in Japanese. The study has been published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.
supports the theory of panspermia (Score:5, Informative)
Panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and also by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms. Distribution may have occurred spanning galaxies, and so may not be restricted to the limited scale of solar systems.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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> Wouldn't it have to survive extreme heat to pass through to our planet?
Today, yes. But there have been times when our atmosphere was much thinner so the heat of landing would've been less. I suggest it might be possible for bacteria like this to spread to a world where the atmosphere is non-existent and wait for volcanic activity to activate it. Can the bacteria survive 100,000 years in its dehydrated state? If so, it might not need shielding.
Alternatively, maybe there's a way to surv
Surviving a few years or decades to/from mars (Score:2)
... is a whole different ball game to surviving for literally millions or even 10s or 100s of millions of years floating around the galaxy until it bumped into a habitable planet and then survived re-entry heat.
I'm sorry, but the panspermia theory is just hippy bullshit. Life evolved on earth - it had far more water and 4x the surface area of mars plus more energy to drive reactions. Plus its looking more and more like mars was only wet for a very short period of time.
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One group of people have a theory, the best you've got is talking out your ass deriding it as "hippy bullshit".
Sure life may have evolved on Earth, but has Earth EXPORTED life elsewhere due to impact events here on Earth?
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Theory my arse. Its as much a theory as me saying distant stars are made of candyfloss. There's precisely zero evidence for it.
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There is plenty of evidence: google is your friend. ... good luck. Might be the most insightful 5 minutes on google in your life.
I'm pretty tired about ppl who think their ignorance is evidence that a "thing is not possible" or a "thing did not happen"
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Bacteria are often present inside of rocks.
If the rock is big enough, the bacteria might be able to survive a trip down to the planet.
We already knew fungal spores were durable enough to survive a similar journey. And fungi are way more complicated than bacteria. So the theory of panspermia remains a valid one.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's what happened, obviously. Nobody is saying otherwise. But it may well be how life arrived here. And as long as it remains possible then we have to take acc
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If the rock is big enough, the bacteria might be able to survive a trip down to the planet.
Sure, but what panspermia fans like yourself always seem to forget is that DNA has a half life of 500 years or so, so it would become unreadable in about 1.5M years, as metabolism would stop in the cold of space. And that's on Earth in ideal conditions. In space, the cosmic radiation that causes the degradation is a lot harsher.
Combine that with the fact that space is mindbogglingly big, and it would take millions of years to cross over to the nearest star system at non-relativistic speeds, and it should be
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Sure, but what panspermia fans like yourself always seem to forget is that DNA has a half life of 500 years or so, so it would become unreadable in about 1.5M years, as metabolism would stop in the cold of space. And that's on Earth in ideal conditions. In space, the cosmic radiation that causes the degradation is a lot harsher.
What about the Mir fungus? It thrived on radiation.
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radiation resistant.
or radiation tolerant.
resistant is useful.
tolerant is enviable
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One of the lovely things about single-celled organisms, is that they're not vulnerable to cancer or any other forms of degenerative cellular diseases. If something kills one of them, it dies, and its neighbor reproduces to fill the space left behind. Or if it mutates rather than dying... very rarely the mutation will give it an advantage that makes it more suitable for the harsh environment... otherwise it probably dies (see scenario 1)
That massive independence, and thus effective immunity to high-energy
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There are plenty of bacteria that live deep inside of rocks.
You can drill down several mils and pick up rock that contains bacteria that are actually millions of years old and living.
Nothing speaks against rocks from outer space being contaminated, and big enough, to land on earth with bacteria intact inside.
And what you say about earth vs. mars, most likely Mar - due to size - cooled down significantly more rapid than earth, and had as such an much earlier chance to form life.
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> Life evolved on earth - it had far more water and 4x the surface area of mars
*Has*, not had. Mars was quite possibly pleasantly like modern Earth around 4 billion years ago - life could well have evolved there, and then colonized Earth once the Earth cooled down enough to be more hospitable.
As for energy - the only energy that probably mattered for early life is the energy-rich chemical soup from geothermal vents - solar energy was lethal (at least on Earth, maybe less so on Mars) until life evolved w
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Perhaps it's not, perhaps we're just not listening hard enough. If a twin civilization to our own were orbitting the nearest star, we would be hard pressed to hear their military radar transmissions, and everything else would be too quiet to hope to hear over the radio noise from their star. And our transmission power is already falling (and more closely resembling white noise) as we develop more efficient broadcast technology. There's a very good chance that we'd need dramatically better technology to h
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Then again, we've already got decades of evidence of how faster social and technological change can increase the level of personal stress and social instability.
I feel like overall social stability in the world is higher than it's ever been, and stress near a low.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and also by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms. Distribution may have occurred spanning galaxies, and so may not be restricted to the limited scale of solar systems.
Well, three years is a long time, but it's barely a measurable fraction of the time it would take to traverse from start to star at sub light speeds. I still think it's highly unlikely that anything alive survives the hundred thousands of years between milky way star systems, much less between galaxies.
Life may be common in the universe, but we will be unlikely to ever find out before our Sun kills us so arguing about it is pointless....
or indeed survive what may be a (Score:2)
Good news (Score:2)
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exactly.
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They will soon discover life on Mars.
With the eventual question being - Did we find it here or bring it with us?
Duh (Score:1)
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Keyword: Dehydrated (Score:3)
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Indeed. There's far to many if's in the chain of plausability for panspermia to be anything other than science fiction.
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even if they survived entry and landing on another celestial body, they'd have to be exposed to water at the right conditions to revive them.
Bacterial spores can wait many years before the right conditions occur. So they can wait...
But this was inside Earth's magnetic field (Score:3)
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You forget how tiny a bacteria is ....
even if it is out there for millions of years, the likelihood it gets hit by a cosmic particle is still close to zero.
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You forget how tiny a bacteria is ....
even if it is out there for millions of years, the likelihood it gets hit by a cosmic particle is still close to zero.
Is it really? A million years is a very long time to be multiplying by... Isn't this long time frame thing necessary for say evolution to take place at current mutation rates? That took a few million years to get enough of those incredibly rare events to take place, but now you discount it when it doesn't support your desired outcome?
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Yeah and a small fist sized rock contains millions of bacteria. So to kill or mutate everyone the rock needs to be hit often enough that by chance every bacteria is hit: and hit it in a way that it damages/changes its genome.
Super unlikely.
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Very highly likely that even one bacteria would be hit very often. ...
Inside of a rock? Ha ha ha
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In addition, radiation does minimal damage when life is in spore form, and not replicating. This bacteria may actually have a means of minimizing it even further since it obviously handles radiation not only in space, but to the direct radiation that it was tested with here on earth.
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Well, they did have the link to the GBWR. What more do you want?
Guiness Book of World Records (Score:1)
I see that CNN is trying to write articles for Trump supporters. Why else would an article on space and bacteria include a reference to the Guinness Book of World Records?
An open letter to Millennial Posters (Score:1)
As a stupid piece of shit, you probably lack
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Dear single simpleton, claiming to speak for others:
Congratulations on your irrelevant ad hominem attack. It clearly highlights your ignorance and inability to stay on point. You may try being more concise. For example, if you are going to insult someone without any real basis, try something short and to the "point":
Your family tree is a cactus, because everybody on it is a prick. (And I suspect that "cactus prick" describes more than your personality.)
Do everyone a favor an
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That is interesting and all (Score:1)
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Longer than you, which is all that really matters.
They're coming for us now. (Score:2)
They already did (Score:2)
I for one welcome (Score:2)
our bacterial astronauts! And Overlords!
No, you may not dock, you're covered in mold (Score:2)
I can see it now, 50 years from now....
And when a dangerous version appears, exactly how are we going to sterilize it?
more "contamination" idiocy (Score:2)
The idea that we must not "contaminate" other worlds is moronic. It presumes that humanity should never expand to any other world, even if it's sitting there, unoccupied and full of resources. If we as a species are ever to set foot on any other world for anything other than a photo op (often called "boots & flag" missions) then we are absolutely going to "contaminate" the place. We certainly "contaminated" the moon when Neil and Buzz tossed their PLSS packs out onto the surface before liftoff - not tha
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The idea that we must not "contaminate" other worlds is moronic.
The idea from the scientific perspective is to avoid contaminating other worlds while the question of native life is still open. Whatever "native" life might mean in the context of possible panspermia. If we contaminate everywhere we've been, it makes it much much harder to tell if the life we detect on other worlds was there before our probes showed up or has been there all along.
Mars is probably a lost cause at this point. With so many surface rovers and landers across so many decades, the odds that we
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The biggest argument against contaminating other worlds with Earthborn life, is that it will make it much harder to find any native life (and there's obviously not enough native life to be easy to find). And if it exists, studying that native life is likely to be _by far_ the most valuable thing that world has to offer. I mean what else does Mars have to offer Earth? It's not like we're going to start mining gold and shipping it back to Earth, we'd struggle to break even. And besides, the asteroids are
Biohacker bait... (Score:2)
I realize the respectable scientific community would never consider human enhancement but surely biohackers should be ignoring the establishment and finding something useful in these genetics to upgrade human life for survival in space.
Look Out Martians!!!! (Score:1)
Well, in Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" the martians' had their butts kicked by bacteria when arriving from earth; now we think that bacteria can survive space flight. Wouldn't be the first time that we would spread bacteria to new places when colonising places where "nothing" exists right?