3 ms·

Wouldn’t a disease-causing moon organism need to co-evolve with a host on the moon to infect?

• api 3y ago
  Not necessarily. Imagine a microbe that loves to eat lipids, proteins, and other complex organic matter but has itself an utterly alien biology that presents little or no attack surface for immune systems that have evolved to tackle Earth life. Known antibiotics and even most antiseptics have no effect and we don’t have time to find anything that works before we all die, then all plants, then all large animal life. Our biosphere is reset to the pre-Cambrian but with ruined cities and petrified forests. I’ve studied a fair amount of biology and don’t see a reason this is impossible. Would it be guaranteed to happen if we brought back an alien microbe? No. In fact the most likely scenario is probably that the alien microbe would not survive well in our biosphere. But it’s definitely a plausible scenario especially if alien life were some ultra tough extremophile that can handle a huge range of temperatures and chemical environments and metabolize all kinds of complex organic molecules. Evolutionary pressures in a radiation filled environment with extreme temperature cycles would select for something simple but very very hardy. This is why intelligent biological entities will never land here in person or vice versa. If we found a crashed UFO with bodies the prudent action would be to drop a hydrogen bomb on it since if they’re anything like us their bodies are walking microbe zoos. We will never shake hands with ET but could totally swap mp3 collections.