Common yeast can survive Martian conditions
phys.org
phys.org
That's all.
Let's face facts, Mars is now a dead planet that virtually no life can survive for very long. And even Elon Musk money is not enough to change this.
I heard an interesting speculative talk about why we should be putting hard microbes on every planet and moon in our solar system because we'll probably cause an extinction event and perhaps the other celestial body could get a head start on evolving a better form of intelligence.
Evolvable being the key of course. Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.
That's the scientific community being parochial and self-interested, though. Their priority is writing more papers, and if that means holding the rest of us back, they're fine with it.
Didn't Carl Sagan (in Cosmos?) or someone propose leaving all of Mars as a nature preserve for the benefit of any microbes that happen to live there? That's just wasting the closest, best off-planet colonization opportunity.
Is it? To me, this sounds awfully similar in construction to 'The devs are always worried about tech debt and architecture, but they just want to polish their resumes to hold back the product' speech we are prone to hear from PM/MBA types.
Why would you prefer to believe a random outsider's view (scientists are holding us back) over people who have built professional careers working in the field(a.k.a scientists)? Especially when you provide no evidence to back up your claims?
I am not sure why you are replying to an opinion, with even heavier opinion, but treating yours as if it means more.
There are trillions of planets in the galaxy. Uninhabited and highly uninhabitable planets everywhere we look in the sky. Life on the other hand, is apparently incredibly rare. Certainly vastly more rare than uninhabited planets.
Not using our closest, most potentially habitable, planet for the continuity of life and civilization, it is by far most suited to over any other location, would be a ridiculous waste.
Where would we go instead? Just wall ourselves in?
Mars is going to become habitable, by some combination of us adapting simple life to it, adapting ourselves, our life support technologies, and/or Mars. Probably all the above. With the only caveat if humans manage to help themselves into extinction first. But if we go instinct due to AI, or AI survives despite another catastrophe, AI won't hesitate to use Martian resources either.
And Mars it turns out, doesn't have an opinion on this at all.
What "random outsider's view"? It's my view. I've heard what they had to say, and I think their priorities are wrong, at least when it comes to keeping places like Mars "pristine."
> over people who have built professional careers working in the field(a.k.a scientists)?
Scientists are not some caste of priests, in tune with the one true POV (though some treat them that way). They're dudes doing a job, and the priorities of that job aren't the only priorities. Stating their POV while watching pictures of galaxies with Vangelis playing in the background doesn't change that.
> Especially when you provide no evidence to back up your claims?
Huh? That's a misplaced demand if I ever saw one.
Some things are better left as-is. Not everything is up for grabs. Seeing the grappling effects of "seizing opportunities" on the Blue Marble and thinking that we can continue doing the same everywhere we can touch is...
telling.
This is a perfect portrayal of what I'm talking about:
- Forests: "some" trees.
- Water bodies: "some" water.
- Agricurtural land: "some" soil.
- Causalities: "some" people.
- Whole ecosystems: "a couple of" animals.
If we assume that we're the most advanced organism on this planet (which I doubt) which is meant to rule it once it for all (which I doubt), we shall do a hell of a better job of not burning it end to end and make it inhabitable for ourselves and everything else living on it.
This is shortsightedness, veiled as a god syndrome.
A god which cooks itself to death. For more money. A bitter irony.
Then we can follow your footsteps by utilizing the experience you got from these endeavors.
We are not adapted at all for eva or really existing anywhere else in the solar system. This is far more challenging conditions than even Antarctica.
"Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you're going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you're doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it-we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There's simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see-as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it's bad faith, and it's not science." Her face had gone bright red during this tirade; Nadia had never seen her anywhere near as angry as this. The usual matter-of-fact facade that she placed over her bitter anger had shattered, and she was almost speechless with fury, she was shuddering. The whole room had gone deadly quiet. "It's not science, I say! It's just playing around. And for that game you're going to wreck the historical record, destroy the polar caps, and the outflow channels, and the canyon bottoms-destroy a beautiful pure landscape, and for nothing at all." The room was as still as a tableau, they were like stone statues of themselves. The ventilators hummed. People began to eye one another warily. Simon took a step toward Ann, his hand outstretched; she stopped him dead with a glance, he might as well have stepped outside in his underwear and frozen stiff. His face reddened, and he cracked his posture and sat back down.
Sax Russell rose to his feet. He looked the same as ever, perhaps a bit more flushed than usual, but mild, small, blinking owlishly, his voice calm and dry, as if lecturing on some textbook point of thermodynamics, or enumerating the periodic table. "The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a concatenation of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That's what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides." He paused to look around at them all. Nadia gulped; it was strange in the extreme to hear these words come out of the mouth of Sax Russell, in the same dry tone that he would use to analyze a graph. Too strange! "Now that we are here," he went on, "it isn't enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That's science, yes, and needed science too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It's too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we're on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won't destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won't go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars's beauty? I don't think it does. I think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind; if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So-" he held up a palm, as if satisfied that the analysis had been supported by the data in the graph-as if he had examined the periodic table, and found that it still held true- "we might as well start.""
It demands the reader to pay attention and think about what they read, though. I need to warn.
To add:
> Science is creation.
No. Science is knowing. How & why. You can create something with that knowledge, but it's up to you. You shouldn't create everything you can create (e.g.: mirror life, biological weapons, etc.).
> We can do it, so we will do it.
This mentality brought us up to here, but it's now harming us more than benefiting us. Maybe we should revisit this.
This mentality brought us up to here, but it's now harming us more than benefiting us. Maybe we should revisit this."
But if it comes coupled with this:
"The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. "
I very much agree to it. But thanks for the recommendation, will look into it.
As a scientist, I believe that we should go places and look closer to understand and know. However, with the current hubris, this endeavor is not a result of curiosity, but of greed, hence my opposition to "we will do it, because we can do it".
Moreover, colonizing other planets as a solution to global warming and other catastrophes we might be heading into shows that the people who wish to do this didn't learn anything from our species' collective mistakes.
Seeing a planet as a plastic water bottle which can be crumpled and thrown to a trash bin, then getting another one when feeling thirsty is not a healthy perspective to have. Consumerism with no bounds is not sustainable at any capacity. This should be stopped.
As a person, I did my fair share of my mistakes on that front, but I also see that consuming less (from water bottles to planets) is possible, and I'm trying to do my best to reduce what I consume and recycle (mostly glass and metal).
Oh, if we can be absolutely sure that Mars has no life on it, building a lab for more sophisticated experiments is something I can support, but I'll be still wary of allowing contamination of Mars in uncontrolled way.
We can be gentle.
How can we ever be, if life might be hiding deep underground in vulcanic active areas?
That would mean stopping the advance of life for academic curiosity reasons.
For me science is mainly there, to help humans understand the universe to better find a place in it.
So yes, be gentle where possible, but a planet cannot be transformed in a gentle way. Life is rough where it spreads, it doesn't conserve things.
However, we should also consider the need to avoid contaminating other worlds unless absolutely necessary.
One solution for both of these problems could be to launch some probes carrying a selection of extremophile bacteria and place them into Martian orbit. These probes would be capable of landing autonomously and releasing the bacteria onto the surface, but they don't do it as long as they receive a specific command from Earth at least once a year or so.
Their self-loathing of terran life, possibly the most fantastic thing that ever happened in the universe, is sad to see.
What is the point of a universe if there is no life to appreciate it?
How can you know? The absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence.
The same way we know that ghosts don't exist and you have not been abducted by aliens and Superman is a fictitious figure.
For context, it took an estimated three-quarters of a billion years to oxygenate Earth's atmosphere. Even a speed-run of that is ... considerably longer than a few centuries.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
(to be fair, Mars is quite rusty already, it has a head start on the Early Earth in that regard)
In a way, it's a tragedy that human civilization has only emerged at a time when both Mars and Venus have become much more uninhabitable than they used to be.
It seems not entirely unplausible that we have at some point in the scientific chain of custody assumed the “lesser” apes “evolved into” the “more advanced” human.
But a species could easily branch and have the branch lose its geographic portability features (e.g.ability to manipulate environment, most exogenous behavior learning-based) if they are no longer selected for in a particular environment, and I’m not aware of anything in the fossil record that firmly establishes directionality. Am I wrong?
It's one thing to know there was once life, and to know basically nothing about it. But being able to date it in the tree of life (or forest of life?) is monumentally more relevant to understand our place among the stars.
It seems unlikely to be possible to completely prevent all lifeforms from hitching a ride
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2011.0738
I worked with these organisms from the space station. Their resistance to things like hydrogen peroxide (what we wash space probes with) is incredible.
We could call it "The beer at the end of the universe"
This here is odd because it seems to follow a "life must be everywhere". I never understood this. Aka NASA wants to find life elsewhere, but ... why? Life is already here and evolution occurs. See dinosaur. So, adaptability is an intrinsic property. Why does it have to be shown that yeast can adapt to martian conditions? Do we want to grow yeast on mars? And if the question is humans on mars, why would yeast matter? The conditions do not allow humans to live on mars, unless sheltered. Even genetically modified humans will most likely not be able to live on mars freely. The temperature alone makes this impossible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Temperature
You'd need to be in a suit all of the time or in some building with higher temperature. Mars is not Earth. What is the point of having some bacteria or yeast on mars?
It is to understand whether Mars conditions are inimical to life entirely. Turns out that some common modern earth life forms can survive Mars like conditions.
That is interesting in and of itself and raises further questions on why life doesn't appear to have existed or survived on Mars today. It's just science, making small steps in our understanding of the universe.
Surely there's nothing for it to eat there yet though.
On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
i've yelled at the interns several times but none have been able to set up a haldane soup focus group yet
I'm fully with you that the sheer number of planets is one of, if not the most powerful data point we know for sure, that points toward the plausibility of extraterrestrial life. One thing I haven't heard discussed a whole lot though is, what if it's a tug of war, between a preposterously large number of planets, and a correspondingly preposterously small chance of life, that is every bit as impressively small as the number of planets is impressively big?
For whatever reason, it seems like the default attitude is to treat the sheer volume of planets like they more than compensate for the rarity of life. But what it doesn't work like that? There are different versions of this argument that apply to any life at all, and then to intelligent life, so take your pick for the more interesting question.
But in principle it seems like life, and especially multicellular and even more especially intelligent life, very well could be kind of vanishingly rare that's effectively a match in rareness to the universe's vastness.
When I think about our genomic complexity and how many neat little things are encoded in there, it's mindboggling to me how quickly it evolved. Like there are so many little wonders in the body. Just a few billion years of throwing shit at the wall?!
IMHO, "We don't know" is the only answer to the question of how many planets have life on them or the probability of some forms of live existing somewhere. 0 is as valid as 10^128 until more than one other life supporting planet or moon is found to establish some baseline for speculation. otherwise, we're talking sci-fi here, in which case I think stargate's version seems decent.
[1] Though maybe it does speak to life tending toward evolving more complex, energy consuming systems, and its propensity to spread out into the universe.