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I'm not ssure it's ethical to deliberately send organisms to a distant planet. A novel organism can destroy all other life on a planet; it happened here. https

I'm not ssure it's ethical to deliberately send organisms to a distant planet. A novel organism can destroy all other life on a planet; it happened here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria

rapind 4y ago
Slow version of the Death Star. 1) Send Cyanobacteria out. 2) Wait a few billion years for a competitive animal to evolve and nuke the planet to pieces. 3) Profit! (mine the asteroids).
- mickdeek86 4y ago
  I hadn't even considered the Death Star as a giant version of mountaintop removal
spinlock 4y ago
I was thinking that I wouldn’t appreciate aliens sending crazy microbes to earth just to see what happens. It’s weird that NASA is funding the DEEP-IN part of the project but not the microbe part. IMO you cannot separate the two.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  You can separate them. You want to send probes with sensors and get the data back. Just don't send microbes.
mannerheim 4y ago
Doesn't sound like the probe would be landing on a planet. At a fifth of the speed of light, there's no slowing down enough to do anything more than a flyby.
- elorant 4y ago
  And what happens if the probe crashes on the planet with that much kinetic energy?
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    At least the c. elegans don't survive to fuck up the biosphere, as per the root comment.
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    If it's a few grams of mass and a few m2 of area, it will evaporate if it hits any atmosphere.
    - fallingfrog 4y ago
      It will be the size of a compact disc though. I'm not sure it will encounter enough atmosphere to absorb that much kinetic energy before it hits the ground. Meteors enter the atmosphere at 37 miles per second; this will be going a thousand times as fast. It will probably look like an instantaneous vertical spike of incredible brightness followed by a fairly large impact explosion. I imagine that at .2c the atoms of atmosphere would be essentially stationary, so the trail through the atmosphere would be a cylinder of total vacume surrounded by a rapidly expanding shell of exotic high energy particles. The air would be ionized and conduct a lot of electric current too, so this would be followed by a humongous lightning bolt. All that momentum is focused in a single direction, straight down- so I imagine the probe would penetrate pretty deep into the planet's crust, straight through to the mantle, maybe, which might cause a volcanic eruption. Would be quite a sight to see, I imagine. Like god's railgun.
      - kristjansson 4y ago
        This is the greatest thing I've read all week
        SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
        It's also way overestimating things. More like 10x the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177030 "Straight down" is odds against. Over a place that's not empty land or water is also odds against.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  If there's no plan to land, why the living cargo? But I agree, it isn't possible to land, except in a very high-energy crash. So again, why the living cargo?
  - mannerheim 4y ago
    I have no idea. Some sort of time capsule for aliens who catch it? Seems kind of pointless otherwise.
dclowd9901 4y ago
Since there’s no objective morality, I’d say, for us, thank goodness it did.
Balero 4y ago
To be clear, you are not suggesting that Cyanobacteria originated from extraterrestrial origins. But when it evolved on earth, it then wiped out all non-Cyanobacteria?
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > But when it evolved on earth, it then wiped out all non-Cyanobacteria? Most, not all were either wiped out or survive only in small anaerobic niches. It was a mass extinction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  No, I'm not suggesting that! When cyanobacteria evolved, they filled the world with molecular oxygen, which was toxic to most of the other organisms on Earth. The cyanobacteria could cope with the O2; so effectively, they terraformed the Earth into a place they could live, at the expense of the organisms that were doing very nicely, thank you, until the cyanobacteria turned up. I don't believe that life travels between stars. It can't happen by accident; it has to be done by a sophisticated civilisation. The only evidence I have of such a civilisation is ours, and it's only been able to launch space rockets for a few decades. And our civilisation was living in caves just a few millennia ago. I have no reason to believe we are more than a flash in the pan. I feel sure that in a few more millennia, if we're still around, we won't be interested in interstellar probes we fired-off in antiquity.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Not true: any old asteroid strike launches millions of microbe-bearing rocks into interstellar trajectories. Any that do reach another planet might take millions of years to get there, and be vanishingly unlikely to pick one that microbes can survive on. But it is wholly possible, and wholly possible that we got infected in exactly that way.
swamp40 4y ago
They should have included a way to kill it after the experiment was over.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  Impact at 0.2c will take care of that. Not impacting and sailing off into the dark for a few megayears is slower but also effective.
teeray 4y ago
Seriously… if a space probe filled with alien bacteria crashed into Earth and started wiping out life… well, we’d consider that an attack.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  What if one day we discover that bacteria sent from a distant star over here actually started life on earth?
  - teeray 4y ago
    The strawman would not change our reaction to a meteor filled with alien life that starts killing off the population.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > bacteria sent from a distant star I'm sort-of OK with the idea that life travels through space as fungus spores, or something like that. I'm not OK with the idea that they are "sent". So I can believe that life on Earth "fell from the sky". But I don't think that's really what happened.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Or maybe someone had a rounding/least significant digit error and was aiming at Mars but hit Earth by a mistake? Obviously, they'd be calling the planets other names like Kepler-186f assuming they had a similar honorific naming convention.
rnk 4y ago
This plan to spread organisms is criminal. It's insane, dangerous, should be blocked. We haven't even decided if we should do this in our own solar system, it's extremely controversial just going to Mars or other planets with only our earthly life known - we could impact life, including microbes on Mars, Europa or wherever it may be. Spreading living organisms far beyond our solar system is clearly a bad idea at this stage of development and knowledge. We could easily destroy other ecosystems. Imagine how we'd feel if the opposite happened. Of course anyone who pays attention knows that we have discovered all the precursors of life, the 4 genetic bases (one of them is different between rna and dna so there are kind of 5 but they found that 5th one too) - we've already detected them in space, which is amazing in itself. It's extremely likely there will be other places in the universe, almost certain based on the number of galaxies and stars, that other planets have life on them. We can't just dump a bunch of developed microbes there that might have unknown effects.
- MockObject 4y ago
  It's not obvious what ethics means outside the biosphere. By default, the biospheres exist in a state of nature with respect to each other.
  - rnk 4y ago
    I thought a lot about your comment. It's a very interesting comment. I think we should strive to leave alien life alone - it doesn't matter whether they are in our eco-system or off planet. Life should be allowed to be. It also helps us when someone comes here, but the reverse applies too. I think in a few years we'll find some kinds of microbes on mars or other bodies. If nothing else they came from earth, floating around, but more probably they are created everywhere naturally by dna molecules just randomly combining. Anyway, when we find life on mars, or Europe or where-ever, should we not allow people to send earth based microbes to do things. We could send lichen to mars to start growing, maybe it would survive and it might kill native microbes. Is that okay? I think it's not but it's pretty complicated and maybe inevitable. Also I think with meteors hitting mars they are probably knocking bits of dust into the air and eventually they hit here. Same for earth to mars but our atmosphere blocks them.
alkonaut 4y ago
And I’m sure no one would ever do that without careful consideration. And this, obviously, isn’t that. Not least because it’s passing at 0.2c with no chance of stopping. If it hits a planet by an extremely unlikely accident it will be converted into a very brief firework.
- mcguire 4y ago
  Why bother doing it at all? Do you have any reason to believe C. elegans or tardigrades will behave differently in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri? Wouldn't that mass be better used doing just about anything else?
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    What is the mass of a few hundred tardigrades?
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    Not sure tbh (might be clarified in the article). Could be just the combination of whether they survive the travel and a reasonable milestone for the trip? I doubt there is any combination 1) between including living organisms and 2) passing a specific place in space. My hunch is that it’s two separate goals done on the same trip.
BurningFrog 4y ago
On the plus side, it could seed life on a lifeless planet. The probability that some earth bacteria would outcompete the local fauna on a planet it was not evolved for seems impossible to know. But my guess is very close to 0.

rapind 4y ago

Slow version of the Death Star. 1) Send Cyanobacteria out. 2) Wait a few billion years for a competitive animal to evolve and nuke the planet to pieces. 3) Profit! (mine the asteroids).

mickdeek86 4y ago
I hadn't even considered the Death Star as a giant version of mountaintop removal

spinlock 4y ago

I was thinking that I wouldn’t appreciate aliens sending crazy microbes to earth just to see what happens. It’s weird that NASA is funding the DEEP-IN part of the project but not the microbe part. IMO you cannot separate the two.

spaetzleesser 4y ago
You can separate them. You want to send probes with sensors and get the data back. Just don't send microbes.

mannerheim 4y ago

Doesn't sound like the probe would be landing on a planet. At a fifth of the speed of light, there's no slowing down enough to do anything more than a flyby.

elorant 4y ago
And what happens if the probe crashes on the planet with that much kinetic energy?
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  At least the c. elegans don't survive to fuck up the biosphere, as per the root comment.
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  If it's a few grams of mass and a few m2 of area, it will evaporate if it hits any atmosphere.
  - fallingfrog 4y ago
    It will be the size of a compact disc though. I'm not sure it will encounter enough atmosphere to absorb that much kinetic energy before it hits the ground. Meteors enter the atmosphere at 37 miles per second; this will be going a thousand times as fast. It will probably look like an instantaneous vertical spike of incredible brightness followed by a fairly large impact explosion. I imagine that at .2c the atoms of atmosphere would be essentially stationary, so the trail through the atmosphere would be a cylinder of total vacume surrounded by a rapidly expanding shell of exotic high energy particles. The air would be ionized and conduct a lot of electric current too, so this would be followed by a humongous lightning bolt. All that momentum is focused in a single direction, straight down- so I imagine the probe would penetrate pretty deep into the planet's crust, straight through to the mantle, maybe, which might cause a volcanic eruption. Would be quite a sight to see, I imagine. Like god's railgun.
    - kristjansson 4y ago
      This is the greatest thing I've read all week
      - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
        It's also way overestimating things. More like 10x the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177030 "Straight down" is odds against. Over a place that's not empty land or water is also odds against.
denton-scratch 4y ago
If there's no plan to land, why the living cargo? But I agree, it isn't possible to land, except in a very high-energy crash. So again, why the living cargo?
- mannerheim 4y ago
  I have no idea. Some sort of time capsule for aliens who catch it? Seems kind of pointless otherwise.

dclowd9901 4y ago

Since there’s no objective morality, I’d say, for us, thank goodness it did.

Balero 4y ago

To be clear, you are not suggesting that Cyanobacteria originated from extraterrestrial origins. But when it evolved on earth, it then wiped out all non-Cyanobacteria?

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> But when it evolved on earth, it then wiped out all non-Cyanobacteria? Most, not all were either wiped out or survive only in small anaerobic niches. It was a mass extinction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
denton-scratch 4y ago
No, I'm not suggesting that! When cyanobacteria evolved, they filled the world with molecular oxygen, which was toxic to most of the other organisms on Earth. The cyanobacteria could cope with the O2; so effectively, they terraformed the Earth into a place they could live, at the expense of the organisms that were doing very nicely, thank you, until the cyanobacteria turned up. I don't believe that life travels between stars. It can't happen by accident; it has to be done by a sophisticated civilisation. The only evidence I have of such a civilisation is ours, and it's only been able to launch space rockets for a few decades. And our civilisation was living in caves just a few millennia ago. I have no reason to believe we are more than a flash in the pan. I feel sure that in a few more millennia, if we're still around, we won't be interested in interstellar probes we fired-off in antiquity.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Not true: any old asteroid strike launches millions of microbe-bearing rocks into interstellar trajectories. Any that do reach another planet might take millions of years to get there, and be vanishingly unlikely to pick one that microbes can survive on. But it is wholly possible, and wholly possible that we got infected in exactly that way.

swamp40 4y ago

They should have included a way to kill it after the experiment was over.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
Impact at 0.2c will take care of that. Not impacting and sailing off into the dark for a few megayears is slower but also effective.

teeray 4y ago

Seriously… if a space probe filled with alien bacteria crashed into Earth and started wiping out life… well, we’d consider that an attack.

squarefoot 4y ago
What if one day we discover that bacteria sent from a distant star over here actually started life on earth?
- teeray 4y ago
  The strawman would not change our reaction to a meteor filled with alien life that starts killing off the population.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > bacteria sent from a distant star I'm sort-of OK with the idea that life travels through space as fungus spores, or something like that. I'm not OK with the idea that they are "sent". So I can believe that life on Earth "fell from the sky". But I don't think that's really what happened.
dylan604 4y ago
Or maybe someone had a rounding/least significant digit error and was aiming at Mars but hit Earth by a mistake? Obviously, they'd be calling the planets other names like Kepler-186f assuming they had a similar honorific naming convention.

rnk 4y ago

This plan to spread organisms is criminal. It's insane, dangerous, should be blocked. We haven't even decided if we should do this in our own solar system, it's extremely controversial just going to Mars or other planets with only our earthly life known - we could impact life, including microbes on Mars, Europa or wherever it may be. Spreading living organisms far beyond our solar system is clearly a bad idea at this stage of development and knowledge. We could easily destroy other ecosystems. Imagine how we'd feel if the opposite happened. Of course anyone who pays attention knows that we have discovered all the precursors of life, the 4 genetic bases (one of them is different between rna and dna so there are kind of 5 but they found that 5th one too) - we've already detected them in space, which is amazing in itself. It's extremely likely there will be other places in the universe, almost certain based on the number of galaxies and stars, that other planets have life on them. We can't just dump a bunch of developed microbes there that might have unknown effects.

MockObject 4y ago
It's not obvious what ethics means outside the biosphere. By default, the biospheres exist in a state of nature with respect to each other.
- rnk 4y ago
  I thought a lot about your comment. It's a very interesting comment. I think we should strive to leave alien life alone - it doesn't matter whether they are in our eco-system or off planet. Life should be allowed to be. It also helps us when someone comes here, but the reverse applies too. I think in a few years we'll find some kinds of microbes on mars or other bodies. If nothing else they came from earth, floating around, but more probably they are created everywhere naturally by dna molecules just randomly combining. Anyway, when we find life on mars, or Europe or where-ever, should we not allow people to send earth based microbes to do things. We could send lichen to mars to start growing, maybe it would survive and it might kill native microbes. Is that okay? I think it's not but it's pretty complicated and maybe inevitable. Also I think with meteors hitting mars they are probably knocking bits of dust into the air and eventually they hit here. Same for earth to mars but our atmosphere blocks them.

alkonaut 4y ago

And I’m sure no one would ever do that without careful consideration. And this, obviously, isn’t that. Not least because it’s passing at 0.2c with no chance of stopping. If it hits a planet by an extremely unlikely accident it will be converted into a very brief firework.

mcguire 4y ago
Why bother doing it at all? Do you have any reason to believe C. elegans or tardigrades will behave differently in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri? Wouldn't that mass be better used doing just about anything else?
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  What is the mass of a few hundred tardigrades?
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Not sure tbh (might be clarified in the article). Could be just the combination of whether they survive the travel and a reasonable milestone for the trip? I doubt there is any combination 1) between including living organisms and 2) passing a specific place in space. My hunch is that it’s two separate goals done on the same trip.

BurningFrog 4y ago

On the plus side, it could seed life on a lifeless planet. The probability that some earth bacteria would outcompete the local fauna on a planet it was not evolved for seems impossible to know. But my guess is very close to 0.