Could an astronaut’s corpse bring new life to another world? | Hacker News Reader

Could an astronaut’s corpse bring new life to another world?

astronomy.com

117 pointsbenbreen73 comments

I can't find it now, but I recall an article which simulated interstellar transit times for asteroids. The conclusion was that something like the dinosaur killer asteroid could throw rocks into orbit. After 100M years, some of those rocks could have reached other solar systems (i.e alpha centauri)

Given that life on Earth is ~4 billion years old, there's good reason to be believe we've seeded rocks across a sphere ~100 or more light years across.

Whether those rocks reach another solar system is another question. Space is big, and even giant killer rocks are tiny.

Here's a paper discussing rocks from Earth being tossed all over the solar system after being ejected by impacts on Earth. It's from 2013, and references a lot of earlier papers on the topic.

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2013.1028

One of my favorite admittedly speculative evolutionary informatics papers agrees with you:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the...

It's probably true. The earliest rocks on earth show signs of life.

"Life originated on Earth" is probably the last remaining geocentrism. Literally every other geocentrism has fallen. My prediction is that this one will fall this century, probably with the discovery of simple microbial life elsewhere in the solar system followed by the genetic confirmation of common ancestry.

My favorite definition of life (courtesy of Dr. Christoph Adami and others in evolutionary informatics) is that life is a "phase of matter in which Turing-complete information processing dominates ordinary matter/energy dynamics." A phase of matter means exactly what it sounds like-- solid, liquid gas, life-- though life would be more of a rare exotic phase like a superfluid or a Bose-Einstein condensate or neutron star stuff (whatever that's called). I seem to recall him or one of his colleagues playing with terms like "computonium" or "Turium" (Turing-complete matter) for life.

Most phases of matter are found all over the place in the universe, but some places in the universe are more hospitable for some than others. Stars are great for plasma. Gas giants are full of gas. Cold icy outer planets are the ideal abodes of solids. Life, like other phases, is probably ubiquitous but Earth just happens to be a place that is peculiarly hospitable to it and a lot of it is found there. That's likely because it's at the edge of many phase boundaries (the water cycle, etc.) and it's been shown that Turing-completeness occurs in systems close to phase boundaries:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/langton_edge...

Pre-planetary solar asteroid ring had probably not the worst conditions for life to be created. Water is abundant in solar system now, probably not was then too.

Panspermia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Couldn't those rocks have come to us as well?

For more on this theory, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Reminds me of a book I recently finished (Death's End by Cixin Liu). A major plot element is sending a human brain to intercept an alien civilization that is en-route to Earth with the hope that the aliens will resurrect the person and use his knowledge establish a better dialog with humanity.

I recall reading another novel where one of the protagonists was resurrected far, far in the future by a seemingly incomprehensible race. (Little spiders, of sorts.) Unfortunately, due to unfamiliarity with humanity, they did a bad job, and his body only lasted a few minutes before dying again.

I wish I could remember what the book was.

Dennis potter wrote an intriguing take on this.

When Potter was dying he wrote Karaoke (which was about a dying writer writing a play entitled Karaoke who discovers his characters actually exist)

This is followed by Cold Lazarus which is set in a dystopian future in a lab working on the cryogenically frozen head of the author from Karaoke.

There is a fairly open question as to how much of Karaoke is a prequel and how much of it is a concurrent experience of the mind being experimented upon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaoke_(TV_series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Lazarus

At the very least, "poorly reassembled by incomprehensible aliens" is a plot element in the Star Trek TOS pilot. Granted, that character lasted more than a few minutes. And costumes for incomprehensible aliens are expensive, so big veiny heads will do.

FYI, these is Star Trek's episode "The Managerie" [0], and was original the pilot episode "The Cage" [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menagerie_(Star_Trek:_The_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cage_(Star_Trek:_The_Origi...

Rautavarra's Case by PKD is similar. After an accident, an alien race resuscitates one of the [EDIT: human] victims, leading to some interesting consequences related to differing conceptions of the afterlife.

Text: http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/rautaavara...

Synopsis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rautavaara%27s_Case

Probably not the one you're thinking of, but somewhat related.

My best guess that kinda, sorta matches your description: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

(I liked that one)

Your description sounds similar in some ways to The Last Legends of Earth, by A. A. Attanasio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Legends_of_Earth

I don't think that's it - the spidercritters play a very small role in the story I'm thinking of - but this sounds fascinating. Thanks!

I think I read this in a short story collection, but totally can't remember which one.

Sounds like a real life version of hell.

Reminds me of the opening of the movie Prometheus.

Spoiler alert, dude!

The book is 6 years old, what's the spoiler limit?

Did you know Darth Vader was Luke Skywalkers father?

Death's End (the english version) was released only very recently. The original publication date of 2010 is Chinese.

Well if they really cared they would have learned Cantonese

The metric is percentage of the population already having seen the movie or read the book. Not how long it's been out.

Not a lot of people read Plato but pointing out the horse was filled with troops isn't a spoiler.

I'm not a classicist but I'm guessing you meant Homer? Though Plato used the reference to said horse I think he did it on the basis that his audience knew the story already.

Ack, maybe I'm missing something here?

Your right, I was well on my way to Friday night drunkenness when I wrote that.

Well if you were worried about a spoiler, perhaps you should have stopped reading when he mentioned the book name and that he had finished it. Or maybe immediately after that when he said "major plot point"

Yes, that was ridiculous. I wish mods would just delete spoiler posts.

Seriously. I'm at the very beginning of the second book right now.

Creepy yet interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

After many sessions, my past-life-regression therapist and I agreed that I was once a very powerful and influential tardigrade on a glorious faraway planet and that given the prognosis of humanity, I may be once again, but there's more competition this time.

Reading through some of your other comments, I'm convinced you were P.G. Wodehouse last time around. Seriously though, do you write anywhere else online? Great stuff.

> you were P.G. Wodehouse

"Senator, I knew P.G. Wodehouse! You, sir, ..."

Hrm, ahem. Maybe the fellow who burned acrid poetry?

(Plum would never worry about a "multi-trillion-dollar black-budget", unless it were used to fund a comm network to exchange pics of Pekingese and tips on the care and feeding thereof ;-)

If you've any connections with academic (cognitive) psychological research opportunities, e.g [1], I might know someone with uncanny 'relations' to the aforementioned (and others).

1. http://dbem.ws/

You thrill me, sir! Sadly, my connections (such as they are) are far more banal. Even the mere thought of moving among such scintillating company sends me into gentle ecstasies!

What's this?! "One more coruscation, my dear Watson--yet another brain-wave!" I am transported back to a fleeting email exchange with Charles Tart in 2010. The very man you're after:

http://www.paradigm-sys.com

http://www.dojopsi.com/contactform-cttart.cfm

If the contact form does not avail, his email address (from back then, at any rate) appears to be a matter of public record: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cttart@ucdavis.edu%22

I appreciate the links and have archived them. Here's one for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_LeShan

Of Dr LeShan's works, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist I highly recommend, specifically the unabridged version. He worked a bit with Eileen J Garrett[1], the tales of which are quite intriguing. This guy was (and still is @96) 100% sincere. No quackery, no nonsense. I had the privilege of acquaintance with his close friend, Dr Hauser, who I'll always fondly remember. LeShan and Hauser met in the Army as young men and remained friends for life. They were both psychologists, but their focuses diverged.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_J._Garrett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFkcAH-m9W0

Man, I wish you lived in my neighborhood with that sense of humor. Seeing Johnny Cash say "I may simply be a single drop of rain", but "I'll remain" and "be back again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again...." had me heaving in a mixture of jovial convulsions and sincere frustration with this dadgum relativity conundrum that ultimately tears us all apart. Brings me to wonder; how many planets might Johnny Cash have thrilled with his reasonably excellent tunes? I just hope that Earth wasn't the only planet in the void to incur the equivalent wrath of Cash + Danzig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUWUY57ar18

PS: I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have a permanent national Mount Nelson, in approximate accordance with the video in which the concept thereof was reasonably placed slightly above the local peak. I mean, humanity always transcends its circumstances. Why not Willie?

I read a 'Last Man on Earth' short story in an SF anthology with, essentially, this premise. At the end of the story, the exhausted person dies while sitting on the edge of the sea... only to seed the next round of life from all of the lifeforms and organic materials contained therein. Creepy, heady stuff for a preteen. This was the 70's, so the idea has been around awhile.

Sounds like Alfred Bester's "Adam and No Eve" from 1941. It's included in https://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Unrealities-Fiction-Alfred-Be...

Do you remember the book? I'd be interested in reading that.

VerDeTerre came through, above. I read it in an anthology in the children's section of the public library (another good reason for public libraries), but the anthology title is long lost to /dev/null.

My guess: Adventures in Time and Space

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_in_Time_and_Space

My absolute favorite book growing up. Re-read it countless times. Highly recommended.

Killer, killer anthology. The anthology I read was shorter, but that's ignorable... everybody should go find a copy of 'Adventures in Time and Space', it's a classic full of classics.

I remember that story, too. Arthur Clarke?

This is an interesting concept and has been explored in fiction before, most recently (to my knowledge) in Prometheus. Not the best film, stunning cinematography but lacking good writing, but had a similar premise.

So where do I sign up to have my corpse sent to Mars after I die?

...Prometheus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(2012_film)

Stephen Baxter's Titan (a fairly bleak novel but not totally outlandish given current world events) ends with astronauts that long ago perished on Titan being resurrected by the sentient race that eventually evolves there. In preparation for the death of our star, they are preparing a rocket to send genetic matter from our solar system to other parts of the galaxy, in some way continuing our lineage.

Plants are faster to duplicate. Assuming the astronaut falls on a world with air and water, if s/he ate some vegetable food containing seeds before dying, they could grow on soil fed by his decaying body. The question then would be: what happens when all nutrients from the body are depleted?

Even more interesting, given heat, radiation and chemical energy could this corpse become a alive microcosm, with sped up evolution?

Simpson's did it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_VII#.22The...

Well, except for the space part. I honestly think it could happen. There's also a lot of gut bacteria and other micro-organisms that are alive on their own.

I'm wondering more if this spacesuit hit something like a comet, asteroid, or other small body before hitting a planet. If a part of the living ecosystem makes it to a secure nook or gets folded inside of the asteroid, it might survive landing on a planet.

> Well, except for the space part.

Well, Futurama did it again, this time in space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfellas

Oh god you're so right. And that was a brilliant episode. Well played.

To further quote South Park: "Everything was already done even before the Simpsons. In fact that was just a rip off of an old Twilight Zone episode". (I'm not sure if it really was, but sounds plausable!)

It definitely was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_People_(The_Twiligh...

In fact, a lot of the Treehouse of Horror skits are remakes of Twilight Zone episodes: http://twilightzone.wikia.com/wiki/Television_series_with_re...

If it would happen slowly, would a sealing agent bacteria appear?

Because of their resilience, tardigrades come to mind :)

Has anything like this been tried before? Maybe not a corpse, but some other organic matter?

We don't know if life exists or has existed on other bodies of our solar system, therefore we take great precautions to avoid contamination. Probes are sterilized, and some regions of Mars (Mars Special Regions) are barred from landings, until we can ensure better sterilization of what we send there. It would be a shame to contaminate life samples from other planets with our own before we can study it.

Maybe, but not on purpose. Nasa goes to great lengths to sterilize probes going to Mars. http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/technology/is_planetary_protection....

If Musk's Mars colonization plans come to fruition, all that trouble NASA went to sterilize their Mars probes will be for nothing.

Private parties still have to comply with planetary protection treaties. In fact any colonization plan, or even commercial flight, to Mars (or anywhere else in the solar system) from SpaceX needs to be approved by the US. It's not a free for all out there, space is governed by treaties.

That's a big hurdle to colonization and commercial exploitation. Because it means you have to show you're not contaminating alien life.

I would be really excited if we find traces of life on Mars but, at the same time, it would probably delay commercial exploitation and colonization for decades...

They'll have to comply, but they will probably cut corners.

It depends what the US allows them to do, the same way you cannot legally "cut corners" with FDA regulations.

Obviously you cannot sterilize astronauts. But they could be restrained to landings outside of the special regions, which are the most promising for astrobiology.

Assuming the commercial operator is in the US. China might cut some red tape.

China is bound by international treaties the same way.

Isaac Asimov, "Founding Father". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Father_(short_story)

https://what-if.xkcd.com/134/

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

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