Dormant Earth germs could spring to life in a Martian puddle | Hacker News Reader

Dormant Earth germs could spring to life in a Martian puddle

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54 pointslegodt48 comments

We are only 3.7 billion years too late to be worrying about this. Earth rocks containing viable microbes have been landing on Mars for billions of years. I can't find a reference, but my memory is the rate is around 100 kg per year.

Edit. Found some references [1 - 3].

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11543506

2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0101.pdf

3. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.0378.pdf

> Conley has a response to this argument. Even if a microbe on Mars shares the same deep origins as us, a few thousand years down a separate evolutionary pathway would still make them pretty alien indeed. But ultimately, the best case for caution, and for planetary protection, may be simply to point to all the ways in which our knowledge of Mars has changed just in the past few years. Curiosity ended up almost on top of possible liquid water because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. In a way, Conley’s deepest arguments boil down to a quote from Haldane: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

All caution and no action gets us nowhere.

Some caution and some action gets us where we are.

Sending robots to Mars is hardly "no action".

But if 100kg of Earth material makes it's way to Mars every year, it means Mars has already been contaminated this year as well as in 2015, 2014 and so forth.

Personally I'm for being cautious as well but there are always trade-offs and we must understand that.

That's still the same argument. It's possible Martian life has already been decimated by microbes from earth, but does that possibility justify carelessly introducing new extremophiles? There is a short window, less than a century and perhaps only a couple decades, before we start sending humans in which we can study what may have lived on Mars, originating from there or not, prior to colonization.

Conley is not trying to prevent Mars exploration or colonization. When we contaminate Mars, we should only do so as a deliberate choice, aware of the consequences, as there is no going back.

All the life on Mars is now going to be deep underground. It really isn’t possible to contaminate this even if we were to deliberately crop dust the whole planet in bacterial spores from Earth. It is not something we need to worry about.

I would be much more cautious about some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that may have internal oceans. These could be contaminated if we are not cautious, but like Mars they have probably been contaminated by Earth microbes billions of years ago.

It takes easily a few million years to travel from Earth to Mars.

That might be the average, but some will do it in a few years. The ejecta from a large asteroid struck will be large and thrown out with enough energy for some rocks to make the journey in a short time.

The interesting thing is, this represents a snapshot of Earth lifeforms over a period of a million years. If there is a mass spectra of such ejecta out there, who knows what it may yield ..

Do your links support your conclusion? They seem to be optimistic about mars-to-earth transfer, but not the reverse.

"The conclusion is that if microbes existed or exist on Mars, viable transfer to Earth is not only possible but also highly probable ... Earth-to-Mars transfer is also possible but at a much lower frequency."

The frequency is much higher from Mars to Earth, but you only need one Earth microbial spore to survive the journey to contaminate Mars.

Depending on where it lands, and how it interacts with the Mars environment, a large number of microbial spores can land on Mars without causing any problems.

Given that what you're saying is possible, but not probable, it totally makes sense for NASA to take precautions to ensure that they don't destroy the Mars ecosystem through their Mars landings.

There is no way earth microbes can destroy the Mars ecosystem since both will have the same microorganisms. It is unlikely that a Earth rock landing on Mars now will land somewhere productive, but in the past when Mars had surface water it was much more likely.

The really interesting thing is we know so little about the micro-organisms here on Earth that we would not even be able to tell if we find a new phylum of bacteria or archea on Mars if it was native or not.

How exactly does that work? Where do they get the energy from? How big are these rocks?

The rocks are ejected during large asteroid strikes. There have been many of these over the billions of years life has existed on Earth.

This presents a mechanism of travel, but no proof travel has happened.

There is nothing that can prove this has happened other than to visit Mars and look for bacterial life.

> Her official title is US planetary protection officer

It's amusing that "US" has made it into her title, but it's pretty cool that there's a Prime Directive office.

That is rather silly, kind of like being a Texas International Diplomat or something.

More like being a UN human rights peace keeper.

Hosing the Martian biosphere as an invasive species seems inevitable so we may as well do it right and plan the thing out.

Rule 1: No single-point-of-failure (e.g. every alien in Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mars Attacks, etc.).

Rule 2: Bio-Dome was a cautionary tale.

Being careful is expensive, and as of this moment the people who are going to be landing on Mars first want to make a profit. Considering how we treat life that we're absolutely sure exists, and is a lot more complicated and near to us than alien microbes, I have no doubt at all how this will play out.

Lets just hope that Mars is sterile when we get there.

Now I'm picturing martian sex tourism. Thanks.

You know, I'm not sure how appropriate this is for HN, but it fits the situation so perfectly and it's SFW so...

http://45.media.tumblr.com/533291d1f4ccb721cd36baa04b97298e/...

Site is blocked if you use privacy tools like ghostery.

Oddly enough, works fine with ublock and privacy badger though. Ublock makes wired jump halfway down and sometimes through articles on page load though which is strange.

Site is fine if you use Ghostery, NoScript, and Ublock Origin together though.

I think it's NoScript and/or Privacy Badger that's helping. I'm using uBlock and Ghostery and it blocked me halfway through.

uBlock Origin alone is equipped to handle Wired's anti-blocker.

I live in a combination of bliss that uBlock Origin exists, and mortal terror that it's eventually going to go away.

I thought we agreed to not post Wired stories until they stop punishing me for blocking (via a hand-maintained hosts file) hosts that serve ads.

No one agreed that - and it's getting exceptionally tiring the sheer amount of snarky comment space dedicated to espousing adblocker privilege.

I don't use an adblocker. Wired is the problem. I already wrote a letter to their editor suggesting that they serve ads from their own domain--which I have not set to 0.0.0.0 yet, out of respect for their contributions to the development of my culture.

Small time bureaucrat throttling enterprising scientists.

She's a smart scientist who has published quite a lot of important research.

I don't see why we're obliged to care about the sanctity of Martian life. It's not an ethical question, because it doesn't involve harming any sentient being: living species don't have any inherent right to exist. Species go extinct on Earth all the time, and we aren't obliged to resurrect them.

Making humans better off (through advancing science, off-world colonization or mining) is an absolute good, and it should always take precedence over the possible extinction of non-sentient species.

Ethics is changing: living species do have an inherent right to exist, I assert.

The only item which is an absolute good is the end of human killing and torture in all its forms.

Species evolve into other species all the time, and go extinct all the time. This is a natural, inevitable, and ethically neutral event. Probably billions of species have gone extinct in Earth's history. Nobody's rights are violated if it happens. If it were ethically bad, we would be obliged to somehow stop all evolution and extinctions from happening.

Individual beings (humans, maybe some animals) have rights; groups of individuals are not individuals themselves, and have no rights, not even the right to exist. This is even the case if the individuals are humans; if they are bacteria, the case is much weaker, as bacteria have no right to life (we kill millions of them every second just by being alive).

Are you trolling? The United States and most countries, AFAIK, have laws protecting endangered species.

Cute, fuzzy endangered species anyway.

None of those laws apply on Mars, or anywhere else outside the Earth ecosystem.

The only people who might be negatively impacted by destroying any (or all) native Martian organisms are research biologists and pharmaceutical manufacturers, and they still have plenty of work to do with Earth species.

We can afford to debate the ethics of genociding xenospecies on other planets after we have replicated the Earth biosphere on a second planet. It sucks for Martian life--if it exists--but Earth needs Mars before exporting Solar life to other star systems. Martian species can either evolve enough to make a useful contribution--or at least enough to ask for mercy--or they can die and get out of our way.

That is the cost here. Are you willing to sacrifice every living human (or human successor species) in existence a few billion years from now for the sake of some suspected xenobacteria now? I am not. Protect Martian species at the expense of Earth species at your own peril. Attempting a Greenpeace-style "save the xenobacteria" sit-in will just get you thrown out of the airlocks.

> None of those laws apply on Mars

The article states that the US and the Soviets signed a treaty to protect alien life, so I guess they're saying we have an international law that applies on Mars.

Yes, I know the Soviet Union doesn't exist any more.

> sacrifice every living human

... I don't think you read the article thoroughly.

I didn't think it required a thorough reading. The Planetary Protection Office is a farce, in my opinion. Even if there were species on Mars to protect, they're going to have to fend for themselves against potentially superior Earth organisms. That's how life works; red in tooth and claw. I am actually of the opinion that we should intentionally infect all of our space probes with as many extremophiles as we can before sending them up, on the off chance that if Earth were destroyed tomorrow, that one lonely surviving bacterium might give the next planet a head start on DNA-based life.

And I was referring to the eventual destruction of Earth itself by the expansion of the sun. Or any other mass-extinction event, really, but that's the nearly guaranteed, almost inevitable one.

If humans do not transplant Earth life to other planets as quickly and cheaply as possible, out of fear of potentially destroying any native xenospecies that may exist, the gap in expenses and technical requirements may prevent that transplantation from ever occurring on a grand enough scale to matter. Earth life will then be destroyed when Earth is destroyed. I'm not going to doom trillions of organisms on the possibility that they might infect other planets. Colonizing other planets is the biggest point in favor of having a space program!

In the US, a treaty requires implementing legislation to be binding on the subjects rather than just the government. Any such law would only be de facto applicable to American or Russian [0] subjects returning to Earth (and specifically the US or Russia) from Mars. Anyone remaining on Mars could simply renounce citizenship and thumb his or her nose at the blue planet. Without such a law, the US would be responsible for breach of the treaty, and the person doing the act that triggered the breach would be blameless.

It would be analogous to attempting to enforce English colonial laws in Boston after 1783, except it would take the cops 2.5 years to get there before they could even begin to try to arrest you.

[0] I think Russia is the designated successor state to most, if not all, USSR treaties.

> I didn't think it required a thorough reading.

I guess you missed the part where Conley talked about how short her time-frame is for observing any (potentially) undisturbed aliens, because she assumes we'll be sending humans to Mars in the next few decades.

She also didn't discuss the ethics of killing aliens. Instead the article explained the scientific benefits of analyzing alien life.

This looks like a comment surprisingly devoid of intellectual curiosity. Leaving all matter of ethics aside, how could anyone be for destroying possibly the only alien life we might discover in our lifetimes in search for resources? Earth has plenty of resources to support mankind; we just need to manage them better.

I'm sorry, but your comment just reeks of arrogance.

The implicit argument you are making is that off world colonization or mining is more valuable to our species than finding alien microbes.

Space mining is fun in sci-fi movies, but it makes very little economic sense. More so when you are talking about lifting resources out of a planet's gravity well.

Colonization is interesting, but in the early years it will primarily be focused on science and not building a second place for us to live. Destroying the exact thing we came to study seems dumb.

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