4 ms·

So... Now we have a way to commit an act of biological terrorism on the whole Milky Way? Just get a hundred of tons of moss spores to space and accelerate them

• Rooki 11mo ago
  Is it 100% certain that's not how they got here in the first place?
  • esseph 11mo ago
    Goldilocks theory is pretty interesting
• hatmanstack 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• askvictor 11mo ago
  It's pretty difficult to accelerate hundreds of tons (or even a lot less than that) of stuff out of the gravity well of the Sun. Let's start by terrorising things a bit closer to home (the moon, Mars)
  • hyghjiyhu 11mo ago
    A bootstrap station that can turn asteroids or space dust into probes sounds like a solution for that.
• lukan 11mo ago
  My definition of terrorism was always more in the lines of destroying life, not spreading it. Life might be very rare, even possible that life only developed here .. then our job might be exactly this, find ways to spread life.
  • kakacik 11mo ago
    Spreading foreign life that kills local life (even if by just out-competing on resources) sounds a bit like terrorism though. But I have hard time believing even hardened organisms like moss or tardigrades could survive millions of years of hard vacuum and extreme cosmic radiation. Maybe embedded in some properly protective envelope, 1 out of billion trillion might. And then that one has 1 out of billion billion trillion chance to land eventually on a place that could be called livable. Or add few extra zeroes.
    • lukan 11mo ago
      To kill local life, it first must exist, which is not confirmed at all. And if it exists, it is likely way better adopted to the local conditions. In genetal, nature works with small chances, look how many seeds a plant gives and how few of them will be a new plant. (Or how many sperms are created for 1 human) But sure, chances here are way, way lower.
  • hereme888 11mo ago
    You're wrong for many reasons, and I have no sense of humor.
    • lukan 11mo ago
      The latter is your problem I guess, but I am interested in the reasons why you think I am wrong.
      • hereme888 11mo ago
        I don't, at all. I thought it was a funny response to state the obvious: that terrorism is about killing, not spreading life.
        • ceejayoz 11mo ago
          Sure, but some forms of it - like weaponized anthrax - do both. (And terrorism is often more about causing fear than raw death counts.)
• b800h 11mo ago
  "Life on our planet was a delight, until the day the moss came."
• BuyMyBitcoins 11mo ago
  While spores seem hardened against the extremes of space, we haven’t shown that any of this hardy life is capable of colonizing a barren world. It seems like all life on Earth depends on some already functioning biosphere. In other words, even if we sent tardigrades to a world with oxygen and liquid water, what would they eat? Where would they get nutrients such as vitamin B? All the vitamin B we consume is created by bacteria, no animal produces it on its own. So we would have to send thousands of interdependent species. And I’m willing to bet the majority of them aren’t nearly as hardy. Sending spores to a planet that already has life might work. But I can’t help but think whatever life we introduce would be at a disadvantage. Maybe life on that planet never incorporated certain proteins, vitamins, or amino acids and whatever we send just ends up getting scurvy and dies out.
  • hyghjiyhu 11mo ago
    For a photosynthesizer minerals water, sun and co2 should be enough I think? Maybe oxygen is needed too unless it's able to store oxygen for respiration. Now eventually it might start running out of some resource or building up toxic levels off something so you gotta hope that that happens slow enough that evolution is in time to fix those issues.
  • metalman 11mo ago
    you missed something, in that it is impossible to get perfectly sterile living animals or plants, and all* of them are carrying a large vaiety of bacteria, viruses, spores, and other animals eggs, etc. everything is an inoculant * I am aware of various experiments that did attempt to raise animals in perfectly sterile environments, where they died, but the only way to sterilise and maintain sterility, are extream, and largely impossible while keeping any single lifeform, alive.ie: it is far from the default
  • adrian_b 11mo ago
    While animals could never live by themselves, some autotrophic bacteria can. A community of several different kinds of bacteria would have better chances than a single species, but for bacteria there is certainly no need for thousands of species. Autotrophic bacteria would need only an environment providing less than 20 essential chemical elements (most of which belong to the most abundant elements, a notable exception being molybdenum) and either solar light for energy, neither too little nor too much, or a chemical source of energy, like dihydrogen + carbon dioxide, which can be provided by volcanic gases or by the reaction of water with volcanic rocks. There would have been many places in the Solar System suitable for bacteria, except that where there is water, it is usually too cold, and where it is not too cold, there is no water.
• spragl 11mo ago
  The sheer number of civilizations, that it is normally believed there is in the Milky Way, pretty much guarantees that some of them, some of the time, do exactly this. For whatever alien reasons they might have. The Milky Way should be drizzling with moss spores already, or whatever exobiological life that can survive interstellar conditions.