'Super bacteria' survives for three years outside space station [video] | Hacker News Reader

'Super bacteria' survives for three years outside space station [video]

bbc.com

70 pointspseudolus27 comments

If you just want to read about the bug, this was pretty interesting:

Biology of extreme radiation resistance: the way of Deinococcus radiodurans. - Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3685888/

About radiation: I once accidentally microwaved ants (trying to 'sterilize' potting soil) but they survived. Turns out more people microwaved ants and they found multiple reasons for their survival.

The main reasons are that they can transfer heat very easily and they do not contain much water relative to their volume.

So there is probably a lot more life that can withstand extreme conditions.

You're forgetting the wavelength of microwaves.

Wow. This significantly increases the probability of microbial life on Asteroids, and even Panspermia.

3yrs (projected 8) vs potentially thousands, hundreds of thousands, etc for interplanetary, or beyond, is still a ways to go.

Article mentions it would likely be buried in the rock though, so potentially different environmental conditions?

The fact we've found >100 rocks from Mars on Earth from meteorites is pretty cool though.

That's true, but that's a 'half life' like situation. Start with a large enough initial colony and there will be enough time to mutate for some individuals to develop a new bag of tricks. At some initial fragment size (say, a good chunk of a planet) you might end up with something that can make it to the next star system and still be viable in some way.

A big chunk of a planet hitting another planet would melt and sterilize both of them during the collision.

A BIG CHUNK turns into a range of manageable pieces over a star system. The bigger the chunk, the higher the probability of a piece existing that is both large enough needed to harbour microbial life and not so big as to melt and sterilise other planets.

We're talking about spores, no? Spores do not evolve.

Spores have to get to the point where they can be spores. So the organisms that give rise to the spores do evolve. And technically spores are still alive (they are single cells, just better protected than normal cells and they don't perform any reproductive activity while in their spore state).

Comets are mostly clumps of rocks and dust held together by ice. In the middle of those clumps the germs would be pretty safe.

And do they die or just become dormant, waiting for some heat..

A few years ago, someone asked a scientist if there could be life on the moon today. He answered of course there is life on the moon: We accidentally brought it with us when the moon landers left equipment behind.

From the NIH, raising the question of a cosmic origin

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7358766/

"Origin of new emergent Coronavirus and Candida fungal diseases - Terrestrial or cosmic?"

That's an interesting article title.

It's not from the NIH. Its a catalogued by the NIH.

A far-fetched hypothesis, but I enjoyed the science-fiction-like imagination and the facts used to support it.

> Both these enigmatic diseases make sense..under a Panspermia in-fall model and the evidence consistent with such a model is critically reviewed.

> ..an exceptionally bright fireball event was seen on October 11, 2019..[in] NE China.

> If a fragment of a fragile and loosely held carbonaceous meteorite carrying a cargo of trillions of viruses/bacteria and other primary source cells.., may have entered the mesosphere and stratosphere at high speed ~ 30 km/s, its outer, loosely-held envelope carrying a biological cargo may have got dispersed in the mesosphere stratosphere and troposphere.

> ..The possible link of sunspots with pandemics..is worthy of brief further discussion. The present cycle has seen the lowest minimum for well over a century.. Sunspot minima are associated with a weakening of the interplanetary magnetic field near the Earth, which in turn allows easy ingress of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) and electrically charged bacteria and viruses to the Earth.

Conspiracy theory: homo sapiens is just the result of a long-running breeding program shepherded by a bacterial conspiracy whose aim is to colonise the moon, and perhaps even mars?

This seems to basically confirm the likelihood that Mars has been getting living materials all along. And potentially the other way around[0].

[0]:https://archive.fo/SGTma

Do you think so? 3 years is not a very long time in space.

What’s the temperature in outer space? The ones my wife uses for long term storage of samples is -80C I think, and that’s good for years - but I guess “good” in this case may just mean “dna remains that can be processed”

Apparently the main thing this bug stands out for is its outstanding ability to repair damaged DNA. So what I found super interesting is that it might not be "dna remains that can be processed" when the mechanism of death is radiation damage. I assumed it was damaged DNA too.

"...the acute cell killing occurs by destroying the proteome’s functional integrity, not necessarily genome integrity, because even an excessively damaged genome can be fully repaired by an active proteome, even if it takes days (Slade et al. 2009), ensuring the perpetuation of cellular life." (from the Krisko and Radman article from Cold Spring Harbor above)

Temperature is a tricky concept in space, since you're in a vacuum and there's not much of a medium to really transport heat energy between objects. Therefore if you're in the light, it can heat you up. If you're in the shadow of something (or the side facing away from the light), it can get cold. This is why a lot of spaceships rotate to try and distribute the heat.

Also getting rid of heat is tricky, since there's no air to heat around you (and therefore take the heat away from the object). You can also get rid of heat by radiating it, so the ISS for example has radiators with big surface area for getting rid of heat.

In space though, you're also at risk of things like cosmic rays which could impact and destroy or damage DNA.

If you're far enough away from a star, it's a couple of degrees above absolute zero, or about -270C.

The temperature is going to highly depend on how you measure.

Theoretically, the gasses are extremely hot. But the pressure is so low that it doesn't matter.

The temperature of your thermometer will greatly depend on what it is attached to and whether it is in the sunlight or not.

Did the bacteria still have food/sustenance? Did they hibernate?

I'm not sure in what kind of conditions they survived in space for 3 years.

It is also worth considering the long-term evolution of microbial life in these environments; the health of those aboard and risks of contamination on return.

So what? I've lived for much longer than that outside the space station and I'm okay.

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