Antarctic fungi survive Martian conditions on the International Space Station
agenciasinc.es
agenciasinc.es
0.0060 atm (0.6%), to be exact [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth
What an interesting, but harrowing existence to be a part of. I don't expect humanity to last that long, but even if we did, then those would be quite the obstacles.
Life itself started about 3.5 bn years ago. So we’re well beyond the half-time of life on this planet.
What are we trying to find or learn that life from earth will permanently remove the chance of?
Species prove to be invasive all the time on earth when exposed to new ecosystems or environments, and usually that's at the expense of many potential discoveries about the life forms that are replaced.
Seeding the universe with life from our planet may make sense as a survival strategy, but there's no ceiling to the knowledge we can glean from life thats different from our own.
In short: we don't know what we don't know, and the gains from such knowledge could be endless.
Why should we? Microbes are not sentient.
> the gains from such knowledge could be endless.
Could be - but the gains from spreading Terran life around will be endless.
Besides, Mars is a lifeless hulk.
From there, https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aem.33.2.379-384.1977 is "Microbiological profiles of the Viking spacecraft"
Note things like:
> Approximately 1,300 colonies were picked from culture plates, identified, lypholipized, and stored for future reference. About 75% of all isolates were microorganisms considered indigenous to humans; the remaining isolates were associated with soil and dust in the environment.
So that if we do encounter that particular strain on Mars, we'll know its from Earth.
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One that's on the interesting side and has more than just an available abstract: Europa Clipper planetary protection probabilistic risk assessment summary https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00320...
https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2023/03/29/mold-in-space-the-hidd... has a picture of a wall panel covered in the stuff after astronauts hung damp workout clothes out to dry.
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2017/03/27/aggressive-fungu...
Thank you for the correction.
Space is not all that inhospitable to life. There are strong theories that after major cataclysms on earth, rocks in space with life attached then reseeded earth when they came back down.
But what are the odds an asteroid hitting Earth has already seeded life elsewhere in the solar system?
Our universe would seem to them like the universe on the verge of heat death does to us. To my knowledge, I don't know of any fiction that explores this setting--it's on my bucket list to write.
Can you point to any source for that? I've never heard of such a thing and can't find anything from a quick online search supporting that idea. Everything I read is that gravity will pull back any bacteria that get to the outer edges of the atmosphere, which makes sense because they'd need to have some force stronger than gravity to escape.
What information can you point to that supports the idea that we leave a "plume of life behind us"?
I think the idea behind an asteroid is that only something with that level of force could eject bacteria that could overcome the Earth's gravity to escape.
Edit: atmospheric escape [1] is a well-known phenomenon, but that's exclusively about gases, at the molecular level. It doesn't mention anything about bacteria, which are of course massive in comparison -- the factors that can cause a single atom or molecule to gain enough energy to escape gravity don't apply to things the size of bacteria.
Relative to the center of the Earth (average gravity) , the atmosphere ends approximately at sea level.
Small particles aren't escaping based on their own velocity from random collisions. Maybe from interplanetary scraft like Voyager.
Impact erosion seems like it would have enough energy to eject microbes from the atmosphere given the amount of life in the troposphere [1].
[1] https://nautil.us/the-surprising-importance-of-stratospheric...
That's why helium escapes pretty fast. The other gas molecules still escape, but far far slower. The Maxwell Boltzmann distribution applies.
Something like a virus is far far heavier again, so the rate of escape would be miniscule. Not sure if it's small enough to have never happened across the surface of earth though.
I wonder to what extent the scientists who study these evolutionary clocks are able to factor in increasingly (or decreasingly) capable DNA replication and repair mechanisms. More faithful DNA replication and repair would artificially show a slower rate of genome evolution.
Of course that likely doesn’t apply to life as we know it, assuming our estimates of the age of the sun and the universe are correct.
It is hard to imagine life without a large variety of atoms.
Stars with rocky planets during the habitable epoch "lie ∼8.5 standard deviations (σ) away on the exponential tail of the Gaussian probability distribution of initial density perturbations," though "their abundance could have been significantly enhanced by primordial non-Gaussianity."
It sounds like there is a chance some atomic fusion could have occurred at this time, but It would be isolated to a few instances in our light cone. This is a pretty different than the entire universe awash in favorable conditions to life.
Then again, he also wrote a lot about the self-transforming machine elves he met while stoned out of his gourd on DMT.
The Stoned ape theory "has largely been rejected by the scientific community, who cite numerous alleged discrepancies within his theory and claim that his conclusions were arrived at via a fundamental misunderstanding of Fischer's studies" on "psychedelic drugs, schizophrenia, the perception-hallucination continuum model of altered states of consciousness, and...gustation" [1][2].
I read something by a SETI researcher that pointed out that some research focuses on finding DNA outside of earth (e.g. Mars) that has the reversed chirality of DNA on earth (i.e. corkscrews the opposite way of all life we've found on earth). This would be an incredibly strong indicator for life that actually came from somewhere else and wasn't just contaminated from DNA from earth that got on the equipment. They said "strong" instead of "certain" as it's still possible for a "shadow biome" on earth where the chirality is reversed that we just haven't found yet. This is important as there is no reason that it should be one way or the other (at least that scientists are currently aware of). As far as they can tell it should be 50:50, so chirality makes for an interesting indicator. Note: this is what I read over a decade ago. I'm no biologist.
The authors suggest/speculate about the existence of some ionospheric updraft or electromagnetic phenomenon capable of elevating them to the upper thermosphere where ISS is located. If that's true, panspermia hypothesis suddenly becomes much less far-fetched, and also the "reverse panspermia" you're talking about.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2018/7360147/ - one of the papers related to the experiment
https://nplus1.ru/material/2020/02/21/iss-test-experiment - a pop-sci article and an interview with a PI of that experiment (in Russian, use a translator)
Let say I have a piece of bread that has mold on it. I leave it alone, the mold grows and consumes more of the bread. The mold / fungi is "alive" in that it is growing and consuming.
Let us say that the fungi here was from moldy bread. They shoot it into space, stuff it inside the lab and expose it to the same environment.
Does survival then mean that it keeps eating more of the bread while the experiment is taking place, so when they look at it afterwards there is a lot more of it? But 40% of it has died?
Or does it mean that the cells making up the mold are entirely dormant but is the DNA structure has remained intact for 60% of the mold and the hypothesis is that if you brought it back to earth it would start "being alive", growing, eating again?
>The most relevant outcome was that more than 60% of the cells of the endolithic communities studied remained intact after ‘exposure to Mars’, or rather, the stability of their cellular DNA was still high,”
If they were spores, they would test to see if the spores were viable.
If it was the mycelium body they would see if it was still viable to grow.
The paper, from 2015: https://doi.org/10.1089%2Fast.2015.1324
“The most relevant outcome was that more than 60% of the cells of the endolithic communities studied remained intact after ‘exposure to Mars’, or rather, the stability of their cellular DNA was still high,” highlights Rosa de la Torre Noetzel from Spain’s National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), co-researcher on the project.
Saprophytic means: it eats dead plants. Necrotroph means: it kills a plant, and then eats the dead plant.
I have heard the term saprophytic many times, always related to fungi, but it's the first time i have heard the term necrotroph. My browser's spell correction underlines it with red like a word not spelled right. It is probably a new term.
If you want to take these results to extrapolate whether there could be living and "thriving" fungi on Mars right now: there are radiotrophic fungi that can extract energy from ionizing (and possibly non-ionizing) radiation. There could also be fungi capable of chemosynthesis, the production of sugar and amino acids using oxidation reactions as a fuel source.
It is literally incredible, and the title is misleading.
The fungi was in some kind of box that was filled with a lot of CO2, a little O2 and H2O, and other stuff to simulate the atmosphere on Mars.
That box was then placed outside the space station.
It wouldn't survive if it was just growing in space, outside the space station. Believe me, I'm outside of it right now and it is not going to be fun[1].
1: I'm about to start doing my taxes-- blecch-- here on Earth, which is technically outside of the space station.
It also slightly raises the odds that genetically modified fungi and lichen might be able to metabolize and grow on Mars at least if suitably protected, which may have implications on astronaut food and oxygen production as well as, much more speculatively, terraforming. Further, it has implications on planetary protection – the measures we take to avoid accidentally infesting other worlds with Earth life.
Why else would people for example keep ant colonies in their home or grow kits?
Hopefully we are not alone and they come back soon. I have many questions.
I now ask you to imagine an analogy with a species that is as smarter, bigger, more powerful and radically different from us as we are to ants.
: In 2018, Mars Express located a large lake of liquid water under the Martian polar ice.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210902121223/https://earthsky....
: There is a chance that this dusty and dark ice might melt a few centimeters down. And any subsurface liquid water produced from melting will be protected from evaporating in Mars’ wispy atmosphere by the overlying blanket of ice.
Is it likely that Fungi would end up in the right places on Mars, and even then grow in these conditions? Probably not. But worth investigating given what is known of psychrophilic fungi.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11157-016-9395-9
: Fungi are able to grow and survive at low temperature and exist widely in polar and non-polar habitats. These cold regions are known for very low temperature, high ultra violet-B radiation, frequent freeze and thaw cycles and low water and nutrient availability.
The main user of oxygen is the mitochondria, and even some non-anaerobic fungi can survive fine after losing their mitochondria.
Then, there was some scientific curiosity about how certain life forms, such as complex plants or insects, might adopt to near-zero gravity. This was a bit harder to justify in practical terms, but interesting and hard to replicate by other means.
But what's the objective with this test? We can easily recreate similar conditions (pressure, temperature, illumination) here on Earth. So what have we learned to justify the cost? I'm not trolling, it's a sincere question.
Flagging an article doesn't do anything about the title, but kills virtually all further discussion if it's no longer on the front page -- which doesn't seem desirable.
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html