'Astrobiodefense:' Thinktank Calls For Defending Earth From Space Bugs

[maximus otter]

NASA is set to offer its response to that hard-hitting report issued last September by the Mars Sample Return Independent Review Board, including the rolling out of next steps for the program.

On April 15, NASA shared the agency's recommendations regarding a path forward for the costly Mars Sample Return initiative. Indeed, such an enterprise has long been a major goal of international planetary exploration for the past two decades.

The quest to bring samples back to Earth from Mars has been met with controversy in some quarters as the threat that ecologically-hungry Martian microbes might pose to our biosphere continues to be a topic of concern.

The Andromeda Strain – the 1971 movie, but how real for a 21st century return to Earth of Mars samples? (Image credit: Universal Pictures)

The Houston Chronicle published an opinion piece on April 11 titled "Is the U.S. ready for extraterrestrials? Not if they're microbes. How to defend Earth from space bugs."

While many debate the possibility of advanced, intelligent life elsewhere, few consider the probability of non-intelligent alien microorganisms. These life forms could exist on other planets or moons, hitchhike on spacecraft, or move through the universe in the asteroids they inhabit.

They could also be Earth microbes that mutate or evolve in response to the stress of spaceflight, becoming more virulent, resistant, or invasive. Either would seriously threaten the public health, safety, and security of humans, animals, and plants operating in space or living on Earth.

https://www.space.com/mars-sample-return-op-ed-astrobiodefense

maximus otter

 

[Kondoru]

If they were alien, DNA must be very different

 

[Xanatic*]

Unless panspermia is correct. There is a chance.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Space microbes have been falling onto the planet for billions of years. Relax, everybody.

 

[kamalktk]

Space microbes have been falling onto the planet for billions of years. Relax, everybody.

Only after having been kaboomed off their home rock by a meteorite impact and then having to survive spending thousands or million of years in the vacuum of space, we're offering them a 5 star hotel room onboard the Concorde with concierge staff, full kitchen, and on call doctor.

 

[Salmonellus]

Space microbes have been falling onto the planet for billions of years. Relax, everybody.

I tend to agree. If space bugs were a major threat to life on Earth we'd all be dead already.

Chandra Wickramasinghe was a big proponent of the idea that extraterrestrial bugs caused epidemics on Earth. He blamed the 1918 flu pandemic, polio, SARS, mad cow disease, and Covid on pathogens dropping in from space.

It was him or one of his supporters who suggested that humans had evolved with nostrils pointing downwards as a defence against alien viruses drifting in from space - the bugs would be more likely to fall into our noses if the nostrils were pointing up !

I find the idea of space based infections a little hard to accept, because all of these bugs have clear genetic links to microbes already here. You would have to suggest that ALL earthly microbes got here by panspermia if you wanted to suggest that the new species were aliens.

And besides, what would you conclude if you thought that alien pathogens kept causing plagues down here? Okay, plagues have come and gone - but we're still going, so the threat from space can't be that much of a threat.

 

[kamalktk]

If space bugs were a major threat to life on Earth we'd all be dead already.

<stares suspiciously at username>

 

[eburacum]

I find the idea of space based infections a little hard to accept, because all of these bugs have clear genetic links to microbes already here

That's right. The DNA of all the microbes recovered from high-altitude sampling, and from the Moon landers, is all related to Earth DNA and originated here. We all share a Last Common Ancestor on this planet. So we can probably rule out panspermia bringing microbes in from other solar systems.

My daughter had one of Wickramasinge's acolytes as a lecturer; Milton Wainwright, who thinks life comes from comets too. Note that no life has yet been found in sample-and-return missions yet, although they did find amino acids. Wickramasinge and Wainwright favour the Steady State theory of cosmology, a theory that would at least allow infinite time for microbes to permeate throughout the universe; this theory looks increasingly unlikely to be true.