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So Earth bacteria will go out and contaminate Mars. sooner or later it would happen. We could still study the original Martian biome, if that exists.
by credit_guy 9y ago
So Earth bacteria will go out and contaminate Mars. sooner or later it would happen. We could still study the original Martian biome, if that exists.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThe problem is, with Earth life present on Mars you can no longer be sure that the life you find there wasn't brought in by colonists.
- coldtea 9y agoWell, if they could be that alike, then it's not much worth studying anyway...
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt would be worth studying - if they were much alike, the first obvious questions to answer would be "why" and "which came first".
- Ntrails 9y agoWorth studying is an interesting term. I've got a bunch of things which are worth fixing, but none of them get prioritised. Would you say that it would be preferable to block the creation of a colony on the basis that it interferes research that might happen one day? Personally I'd say no.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoDidn't mean to imply it; I'm probably the last person on this site to argue against a colony on Mars. But it would be worth it if, during initial construction of the colony and preferably before sending men, we could send over some studies.
- Angostura 9y agoI think you've just made a compelling case for why we can make every species on earth extinct, apart from us and 'nothing of value would be lost'.
- coldtea 9y agoIf that's sarcasm, I think you've exemplified the slippery slope fallacy and the straw-man argument.
- Angostura 9y agoNot at all. Your point was that if it is difficult to tell whether a particular organism was of terrestrial or martian origin, it must be so similar to Earth organisms as to be unworthy of study. If so, why bother studying more than one terrestrial organism?
- credit_guy 9y agoThat's such a simplistic view of life. We would be able to identify an extraterrestrial cell as surely as if it was carrying flashing lights and screaming "I'm an alien". While all life is based on information, and information needs to be somehow encoded in a, let's call it, genetic code, would that code be DNA and RNA based? would in encode proteins, and if so, would the building blocks be the same 20 amino acids that we have an Earth. Would the genes be encoded using the same nucleotites, and would "letter" in the genetic code be encoded by 3 nucleotides? If so, would always the same 3 nucleotides encode the same aminoacid as on Earth? etc, etc. There are so many places that life could be different, that the chance of mistaking Martian life for terrestrial life is vanishingly small.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoWhat if it turns out that Earth's life and Martian life share the same origin?
- credit_guy 9y agoEven if it turns out to be the case, there would be two forms of life separated by billions of years of evolution. Mistaking them would be much less likely than mistaking a cell from the wing of fruit fly from an onion peel cell: while on the outside they may look similar, the DNA of the fruit fly has about 170 million base pairs, while the DNA of the onion has 16 billion of them.
- ianai 9y agoBut would one kill off the other? They would probably still compete for scarce resources.