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]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: astrobiology, et, extremophiles, insects, iss, lithopanspermia, microbes, panspermia, plankton, space