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Dormant Earth germs could spring to life in a Martian puddle
- danieltillett 10y agoWe are only 3.7 billion years too late to be worrying about this. Earth rocks containing viable microbes have been landing on Mars for billions of years. I can't find a reference, but my memory is the rate is around 100 kg per year. Edit. Found some references [1 - 3]. 1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11543506 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11543506 2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0101.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0101.pdf 3. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.0378.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.0378.pdf
- LukeB_UK 10y ago> Conley has a response to this argument. Even if a microbe on Mars shares the same deep origins as us, a few thousand years down a separate evolutionary pathway would still make them pretty alien indeed. But ultimately, the best case for caution, and for planetary protection, may be simply to point to all the ways in which our knowledge of Mars has changed just in the past few years. Curiosity ended up almost on top of possible liquid water because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. In a way, Conley’s deepest arguments boil down to a quote from Haldane: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
- danieltillett 10y agoAll caution and no action gets us nowhere.
- davidiach 10y agoBut if 100kg of Earth material makes it's way to Mars every year, it means Mars has already been contaminated this year as well as in 2015, 2014 and so forth. Personally I'm for being cautious as well but there are always trade-offs and we must understand that.
- brianshaler 10y agoThat's still the same argument. It's possible Martian life has already been decimated by microbes from earth, but does that possibility justify carelessly introducing new extremophiles? There is a short window, less than a century and perhaps only a couple decades, before we start sending humans in which we can study what may have lived on Mars, originating from there or not, prior to colonization. Conley is not trying to prevent Mars exploration or colonization. When we contaminate Mars, we should only do so as a deliberate choice, aware of the consequences, as there is no going back.
- danieltillett 10y agoAll the life on Mars is now going to be deep underground. It really isn’t possible to contaminate this even if we were to deliberately crop dust the whole planet in bacterial spores from Earth. It is not something we need to worry about. I would be much more cautious about some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that may have internal oceans. These could be contaminated if we are not cautious, but like Mars they have probably been contaminated by Earth microbes billions of years ago.
- jkot 10y agoIt takes easily a few million years to travel from Earth to Mars.
- danieltillett 10y agoThat might be the average, but some will do it in a few years. The ejecta from a large asteroid struck will be large and thrown out with enough energy for some rocks to make the journey in a short time.
- whack 10y agoDo your links support your conclusion? They seem to be optimistic about mars-to-earth transfer, but not the reverse. "The conclusion is that if microbes existed or exist on Mars, viable transfer to Earth is not only possible but also highly probable ... Earth-to-Mars transfer is also possible but at a much lower frequency."
- danieltillett 10y agoThe frequency is much higher from Mars to Earth, but you only need one Earth microbial spore to survive the journey to contaminate Mars.
- whack 10y agoDepending on where it lands, and how it interacts with the Mars environment, a large number of microbial spores can land on Mars without causing any problems. Given that what you're saying is possible, but not probable, it totally makes sense for NASA to take precautions to ensure that they don't destroy the Mars ecosystem through their Mars landings.
- danieltillett 10y agoThere is no way earth microbes can destroy the Mars ecosystem since both will have the same microorganisms. It is unlikely that a Earth rock landing on Mars now will land somewhere productive, but in the past when Mars had surface water it was much more likely. The really interesting thing is we know so little about the micro-organisms here on Earth that we would not even be able to tell if we find a new phylum of bacteria or archea on Mars if it was native or not.
- amelius 10y agoHow exactly does that work? Where do they get the energy from? How big are these rocks?
- danieltillett 10y agoThe rocks are ejected during large asteroid strikes. There have been many of these over the billions of years life has existed on Earth.
- yincrash 10y agoThis presents a mechanism of travel, but no proof travel has happened.
- danieltillett 10y agoThere is nothing that can prove this has happened other than to visit Mars and look for bacterial life.
- appelza1 10y agoFunny how you think that they would not have considered this.
- legulere 10y agoSite is blocked if you use privacy tools like ghostery.
- legodt 10y agoOddly enough, works fine with ublock and privacy badger though. Ublock makes wired jump halfway down and sometimes through articles on page load though which is strange.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoSite is fine if you use Ghostery, NoScript, and Ublock Origin together though.
- mrks_ 10y agoI think it's NoScript and/or Privacy Badger that's helping. I'm using uBlock and Ghostery and it blocked me halfway through.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoBeing careful is expensive, and as of this moment the people who are going to be landing on Mars first want to make a profit. Considering how we treat life that we're absolutely sure exists, and is a lot more complicated and near to us than alien microbes, I have no doubt at all how this will play out. Lets just hope that Mars is sterile when we get there.
- progressive_dad 10y agoNow I'm picturing martian sex tourism. Thanks.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoYou know, I'm not sure how appropriate this is for HN, but it fits the situation so perfectly and it's SFW so... http://45.media.tumblr.com/533291d1f4ccb721cd36baa04b97298e/tumblr_o0jmk1hHKk1ujuk5ho1_500.gif http://45.media.tumblr.com/533291d1f4ccb721cd36baa04b97298e/...
- frandroid 10y ago> Her official title is US planetary protection officer It's amusing that "US" has made it into her title, but it's pretty cool that there's a Prime Directive office.
- willismichael 10y agoThat is rather silly, kind of like being a Texas International Diplomat or something.
- progressive_dad 10y agoMore like being a UN human rights peace keeper.
- sevenless 10y agoI don't see why we're obliged to care about the sanctity of Martian life. It's not an ethical question, because it doesn't involve harming any sentient being: living species don't have any inherent right to exist. Species go extinct on Earth all the time, and we aren't obliged to resurrect them. Making humans better off (through advancing science, off-world colonization or mining) is an absolute good, and it should always take precedence over the possible extinction of non-sentient species.
- pop8row9 10y agoEthics is changing: living species do have an inherent right to exist, I assert. The only item which is an absolute good is the end of human killing and torture in all its forms.
- sevenless 10y agoSpecies evolve into other species all the time, and go extinct all the time. This is a natural, inevitable, and ethically neutral event. Probably billions of species have gone extinct in Earth's history. Nobody's rights are violated if it happens. If it were ethically bad, we would be obliged to somehow stop all evolution and extinctions from happening. Individual beings (humans, maybe some animals) have rights; groups of individuals are not individuals themselves, and have no rights, not even the right to exist. This is even the case if the individuals are humans; if they are bacteria, the case is much weaker, as bacteria have no right to life (we kill millions of them every second just by being alive).
- xapata 10y agoAre you trolling? The United States and most countries, AFAIK, have laws protecting endangered species.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoCute, fuzzy endangered species anyway.
- daveloyall 10y agoI thought we agreed to not post Wired stories until they stop punishing me for blocking (via a hand-maintained hosts file) hosts that serve ads.
- wastedhours 10y agoNo one agreed that - and it's getting exceptionally tiring the sheer amount of snarky comment space dedicated to espousing adblocker privilege.
- daveloyall 10y agoI don't use an adblocker. Wired is the problem. I already wrote a letter to their editor suggesting that they serve ads from their own domain--which I have not set to 0.0.0.0 yet, out of respect for their contributions to the development of my culture.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoSmall time bureaucrat throttling enterprising scientists.
- greglindahl 10y agoShe's a smart scientist who has published quite a lot of important research.
- ourmandave 10y agoHosing the Martian biosphere as an invasive species seems inevitable so we may as well do it right and plan the thing out. Rule 1: No single-point-of-failure (e.g. every alien in Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mars Attacks, etc.). Rule 2: Bio-Dome was a cautionary tale.