The International Space Station is growing mould, inside and outside
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
[0] http://tsniimash.ru/science/scientific-experiments-onboard-t... (in Russian, but Google Translate seems to work okay on this one)
[1] https://www.energia.ru/ktt/archive/2015/01-2015/01-03.pdf
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254812/Hundreds-fi...
Sounds pretty good if you like aircraft tech and the like
I find it totally believable that some micro organisms could survive the ride on such rocks and possibly thrive on other bodies, if the environment is suitable.
Anything growing on mars surface would burn, only an hypothetical floating microbe could land in this rock after cooling, but would be like expecting a bacteria landing in a bullet, surviving the impact and then sticking to the surface whereas still alive (and much later surviving a second impact against earth after years in outer space). Seems unprobable.
We could fit 56 planet mars in row in the distance between the moon and the earth, so... not. Really unlikely
Also interesting to see if we can deduce the DNA changes that lead to this resistance. It would be an advantage for astronauts to be highly resistant to x-rays and other DNA damaging events.
Of course I always think of "The Andromeda Strain" when I read things like this. At least this mold doesn't seem to "eat" radiation for energy.
Random observation: I guess the Canadians spell mold as 'mould' ?
The movie isn't bad either.
I'd definitely skip reading anything newer than Lost World. Like Tom Clancy, at some point (and $) you lose the fire to write.
See "The Art of the Deal". He says he wrote it. He genuinely believes he wrote it. Some people think talking to the ghostwriter, giving them the broad strokes and signing off on the final work, constitutes 'writing a book'. It is not that different than saying "I built a hotel".
She vehemently denies it. Quoting an interview at https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/608.Danielle_Steel :
> Goodreads Author Patti Roberts would like to know if you work with a ghostwriter.
> DS: It's a shocking question. I've been asked by my fans, "Who writes your books? Does someone help you?" And I said something to my editor not long ago, "It's so insulting that people would even say that." She said, "Yeah, but you are one of the few authors left who doesn't use somebody." There is a very, very famous best-selling author who has apparently eight writers. He writes the outlines, gives them chapters to write, and doesn't write his own books—I was so shocked. And there is not just one. I don't know if the public knows that or not. Maybe I'm the last idiot on the planet, up until 4:30 in the morning typing my own work. It's just incredible. Then you are not a writer; you are some sort of scriptwriter. Nobody writes my stuff. I find it a shocking concept. It's different if a celebrity wants to write their memoirs, and they have no writing ability. OK, then they use a ghostwriter. Otherwise it's like becoming a tennis pro and having a stunt double. What's the point of that?
She's also well known for her decades-long habit of spending 20 hours a day working on a book.
This comment: "at some point (and $) you lose the fire to write."
I had noticed the same thing with another author. And at the time I was working with Jerry Pournelle[1] helping him with things he didn't need or want to do with his BYTE column. I asked Jerry about it. His response was fairly enlightening so I share it here.
Jerry said that writers were arrogant, and in their arrogance they despise editors because editors tell them what they wrote doesn't read well, or isn't necessary for the story, or has the wrong character point of view and demand that the writer rewrite it. When a writer is young and hungry, they do this because they have to, if they don't they won't get published. But if they become successful, they get more sway with the publisher. At some point they have enough sway to override what the editor says and have them publish it the way they wrote it. And that is when you find out if they are a good writer, or if they are only a good story teller and without an editor their writing is sub par.
That made so much sense to me at the time and it was also the basis for Jerry's oft used phrase which was the secret of good writing was re-writing.
Were they the main component of success? Or simply the most visible participant?
My rationale has always been that writing (or art in general) is hard. And that people are lazy. And that few people able to afford not working hard are still willing to pursue it with the same dedication.
But I really like your idea too. "The invisible team" makes a lot of sense.
Extant (2104-2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3155320/
This makes me wonder if we've accidentally already started terraforming Mars.
Venus has the opposite problem sitting much closer to the sun and with much higher atmospheric pressure.
Also, we think we'd be able to tell pretty easily whether any life detected is from Earth (i.e. we brought it along with us). Life that isn't descended from the same tree of life as us is likely to be radically different.
The bottom of the ocean would be far more habitable if we faced any type of extinction event.
We could create an oxygen atmosphere on Mars much more quickly than that, because we'd be sending life explicitly for that purpose that's ready now, and we'd also be importing gases and digging up in-situ resources and turning them into gas.
No, it wasn't. Photosynthesis that released O2 evolved relatively quickly, and was more efficient than other forms of photosynthesis. Then it took another billion years for oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere. Mind you, we had an entire planet with oceans teeming with photosynthetic life. That will be next to impossible to replicate on Mars.
There are two oxygen sinks on Earth that reacted with oxygen released from photosynthesis: the first was the ocean, the other was minerals on land. This is the reason that it took so long for atmospheric oxygen to accumulate. Mars will have a lot of oxidizable minerals and compounds that will react with oxygen before it can accumulate in its atmosphere. Even then, it will escape into space without a sufficient magnetosphere to trap an atmosphere.
If we ever find ourselves in a situation where we cannot survive on a planet where food literally grows out of the ground, with abundant liquid water and atmospheric oxygen at 1 atm, how on Earth would we survive on a planet that is devoid of life, has no liquid water, an atmosphere that's 1% the pressure of Earth's with no atmospheric oxygen, and little to no sources of energy?
Again, the bottom of the ocean is far more habitable than Mars, even if we experienced a similar extinction event similar to the one we experienced 65 million years ago.
Earth is habitable now. There are plenty of plausible non-anthropogenic disasters that may make that so not so. Some typical examples include megavolcano eruption, coronal mass ejection, and asteroid impact. It would be good to not have all of our eggs in one basket here on Earth.
And it's for exactly the same reason of having redundancy that it would be a good thing for Earth to continue to remain habitable, i.e. we should stop ruining the planet through climate change.
It's not a moral hazard at all; the two outlooks are congruous.
Even after any of those events, the bottom of the ocean would still be more habitable than Mars.
> It's not a moral hazard at all; the two outlooks are congruous.
The moral hazard is that we'll begin to think of Mars as a backup, when it isn't one at all. The Earth is very likely to be the one shot we have at a home. If we can't manage to make Earth habitable in the face of catastrophe, there is little hope to make a cold, barren rock that's millions of miles away habitable.
Yeah, space has a coolness factor, and there are things about the origin of the universe we can't learn from the bottom of the ocean, but an underwater station is one of the most underrated projects humanity could pursue.
Oceans are phenomenal shields against radiation, extreme weather, or even the temporary combustion of the atmosphere, should things get that bad. The opportunity to learn about groups surviving in isolated habitats, or about megastructures that have to survive hostile external environments, could even provide really useful lessons for space.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy[0] deals with this a great deal, the early scientists pretty quickly devolve into two camps, terraformers and preservationists. There's a lot of other things going on as well, but this is one subplot.
At one point in the book, a terraformer made the argument if we discovered life on Mars we'd never know how or when it got there anyway. The monkeys in South America are an interesting parallel - total mystery. Best hunch is that some survivable population "rafted" across the Atlantic at some point - under conditions somehow rare enough to have happened exactly once in 40 million years.
KSR doesn't explicitly take a side, but seems to think that terraforming will be inevitable, so we might as well get on with it.
On the other hand, Mars may not be terraformable.[1] The challenges there are so extensive as to possibly be insurmountable. Consider that we are so accustomed to certain environmental conditions that changes so subtle as working extended hours in a popcorn factory can give us cancer.[2] Mars just has toxic soil, a low enough gravity as to probably prevent a sustainable atmosphere, and is constantly bombarded with radiation.
But who knows, futurism is hard because humanity is pretty ingenious.
Isaac Arthur has an extended video on terraforming that's worth watching if you want to dive deeply into this topic.[3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Challenge...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchiolitis_obliterans#Diace...
I don't want to give any spoilers, but the weirdest part of Blue Mars (?) seems to take a side on the existence of life on Mars. Or am I misremembering.
And that we ought to be spamming as much life as we can, the hardiest Earth organisms, as far as we can onto any body where they stand a chance of taking hold - Venus, Europa, Martian poles, comets, lobbing things at distant stars with planets intending them to crash land. If humans can't make it off Earth, something might be able to, and it needs our help.
Spreading live across the universe being a good way to keep some of it going seems plausible. I'd obviously prefer intelligent beings like humans doing so, since so far evolution indicates this development path to have the best chances long term. But if not possible or too costly, spreading the next closest thing to us that is possible makes sense. At least as a form of backup. And sending microbes seem quite easy...
I am not making this up. There are physicists who believe this. Explode your head: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/revie...
But, the universe has been getting more complex all the time - every stage of its history over billions of years has moved towards more things, more complex interactions, more abstract organizations - fundamental forces splitting off, plasmas, galaxies and stars, fusion and heavy elements, solids and liquids and planetary systems, chemistry tectonics and weather systems and day/light cycles, LIFE, multi-celled life, biological systems and their interaction with weather, communication, socialization, organization, co-operation, industrialization, it just gets more abstract and more involved.
Unless you think a God exists and put a barren radiated rock somewhere for a good reason, then you may as well conclude that the universe is trying to get more complex. Like you can say that humans moved grass over the ocean for our own benefit, you can also interpret it that grass got humans to move it over the ocean for grass's long term survival benefit. There is only one known life-o-sphere and if one-day it is going to outside Earth, it needs a highly intelligent species to appear and move all the rest of it. That could be us, it could be why it looks like we're screwing up the planet - because long term, the point is not for us to stay here as bucolic agriculturalists, but to be an ignition chamber for something (probably silicon) to burst out and go forth.
What makes it our job is that nobody else can. Whales cannot do it. Cows cannot do it. Oak trees and crickets and fungus and cockroaches and E.coli aren't going to. Only humans can escape Earth intentionally, so humans have the obligation to do that on behalf of all life.
Compare how many humans think life is important (a lot), with how many humans think it important that Mercury stay barren until it gets swallowed by the Sun at the end of its fuel supply (the number of people who have even considered the idea in all human history, rounds to zero).
What makes it important? WE make it important, because - in the absense of a deity giving orders to us - who else can give meaning to anything, except humans? If nothing else, a more populated universe would be more interesting for us. Eventually.
No. Mars has a weak magnetic magnetic field which is incapable of containing an atmosphere that would support us. It also took Earth over 1 billion years for atmospheric oxygen to accumulate in significant amounts.
In any case I'm really wondering how it grows outside, which the article didn't really explain. It's one thing for the spores to survive in vacuum, another altogether for it to actually grow in vacuum. Or did I misunderstand something?
Because TFA says nothing about it growing outside.
"We now know that [fungal spores] resist radiation much more than we thought they would, to the point where we need to take them into consideration when we are cleaning spacecraft, inside and outside," Cortesao said in a statement.
emphasis mine
Funny nobody mentions that.
When a home has a mold problem, the solution often isn't even to clean up the mold. The solution is to figure out why the mold is growing, which is usually humidity problems or leaky pipes or poor ventilation, and deal with that. Once you've got the moisture problem handled the mold issue pretty much goes away.
(don't astronauts have suppressed immune systems or something btw?)
I wouldn't mind tasting some space-alcohol.
It looks like it's just beer in a special bottle that they say will work in zero-G.
The yeast will breed and die while fermenting, so the yeast you finish with will be different to that which you started with.
So its more like 'yeast whose forebears had gone to space'.
And do they save and reuse the batch of 'space yeast' or send a fresh batch to space for each brew?
"In 1999, several Russian sources reported that Laika had died when the cabin overheated on the fourth orbit. In October 2002, Dimitri Malashenkov, one of the scientists behind the Sputnik 2 mission, revealed that Laika had died by the fourth circuit of flight from overheating."
At the time, and for decades after, everyone assumed anything on the outside would dessicate and die immediately.