DailyDirt: All Kinds Of Bugs Living In Outer Space?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Panspermia isn't a crazy idea, especially when we seem to keep finding extremophiles that can survive in very harsh environments. The components of life may be traveling between planets or solar systems at a non-zero rate, seeding the universe with living materials. That said, life is still relatively fragile, but there may be some optimism in finding living specimens elsewhere than Earth. (First, though, we have to make sure we're not the ones contaminating our own solar system.) Here are just a few links on various organisms that might survive a trip in space -- without a space ship.- The International Space Station (ISS) may have microorganisms living on the outside of the station, and evidence of sea plankton has been found on the exterior surface of the ISS. No one knows exactly how sea plankton could have gotten on the ISS, but contamination on interplanetary objects (eg. comets, asteroids, etc) could spread life farther than previously suspected. [url]
- Astrobiology researchers are just starting to figure out which known organisms can survive the harsh conditions of space. Spore-forming bacteria (eg. Bacillus pumilus SAFR-032) have been seen to survive in simulated space environments, and similar organisms could support lithopanspermia theories suggesting an extra-terrestrial origin of life as we know it. [url]
- Biologists can make very tiny space suits for insects if they really wanted to. In order to study live insects in a scanning electron microscopes (SEM), biologists can coat bugs with a polymer film that protects them from drying out in a vacuum chamber (and lets them live while they're being bombarded with charged particles). [url]
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Filed Under: astrobiology, et, extremophiles, insects, iss, lithopanspermia, microbes, panspermia, plankton, space
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And sure, some spores can survive 18 months in space. That's fine for getting to or from Mars. But does that translate to surviving the centuries or millennia it would take to actually get to another solar system on something that doesn't have propulsion? And does that translate to surviving an uncontrolled reentry?
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Some microbial life (some virii, for instance), revert to a nonliving form when in environments that don't suit them. They become, in essence, a clump of chemicals. They could, in theory, survive that way indefinitely and reconstitute when conditions become favorable again.
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Setting aside whether a virus is "life" or not... even if a virus were to survive travel to another solar system, once it got there it wouldn't have anything to infect, so it would remain dormant forever. I'm therefore going to say that a virus doesn't count. Even a "clump of chemicals" can be affected by the cold/heat/radiation/physical force/time involved in an interstellar trip followed by a crash landing.
But the sheer distance involved means that even if something capable of surviving the trip is launched, the odds of actually hitting something are vanishingly low - everything is so far away that almost no paths will actually hit anything. According to the latest XKCD What If (which is about whether a beam of light will hit something) "89,999 times out of 90,000, your beam will pass right out of the galaxy without hitting anything. When it does hit something, it will almost always be the Sun or the Moon." "The odds of hitting one of Jupiter's moons, for example, are on the order of one in a trillion. Stars are even worse. Your odds of hitting any star at all on your way out of the galaxy are almost zero, even if you aim for the core."
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Time to test out the Streptococcus Mitis therory once and for all
Reports of Streptococcus mitis on the Moon
Countervailing evidence against the secondary contamination hypothesis is the fact that, according to Lieutenant Colonel Fred Mitchell, lead author of the original 1971 paper there was a significant delay before the sampled culture began growing: this is consistent with the sampled bacteria consisting of dormant spores, but not if the sampled culture was the result of fresh contamination. In addition, according to Mitchell, the microbes clung exclusively to the foam during culturing, which would not have happened had there been contamination. Furthermore, if fresh contamination had occurred, millions of individual bacteria and "a representation of the entire microbial population would be expected"; instead, only a few individual bacteria were sampled, and only from a single species.
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