Lessons Learned
Not much comfort for humans in part of the experiment surviving when the experimenters die, but the crash itself seems to have inadvertantly served as an experiment of greater import.
For one thing, the survival of nematodes proves that invertibrates, let alone bacteria can survive a flaming wreck that scatters a space vehicle over 17 counties.
This strengthens the argument that we have to be extra-careful to quarantine space vehicles, stations, satellites, etc. If the nematodes which survived had been a mutated virus, bacterium or parasite, THEY could be introduced into Earth environments, possibly even scattered over a wide area like the wreckage.
This is a BIG problem for anybody who wants to send probes to Mars and other potential life-supporting environments and is even a problem for things like the International Space Station and MIR--which was massively infected with mold and other organisms brought from Earth.
Even more fundamental, the survival of nemotodes in the wreck of a crash space vehicle strengthens the Panspermia theory--scientists have been firing blocks of simulated meteorites with bacteria in them to see if anything could travel from planet to planet in a meteorite and then survive the crash.
It looks like they can survive the crash.
The late Sir Fred Hoyle is today looking less like a maverick on the cutting edge of science and more like a visionary because of these little worms.
Because these worms survived, the victims of the Columbia accident are now victims of an experiment far more important than any they could have intentionally taken part in: they have proven that Life could have come from outer space.
The cultists and science fiction speculators who believe Earth was seeded by space aliens, either intentionally or accidentally can point to this unintended lesson of the Columbia disaster as supporting evidence.
While those scientists who worry that we might bring back Martians from Mars have a cautionary tale to tell: we have, at least, managed to re-introduce Terran organisms to Earth. I hope the nematodes in question were, at least, American natives.
There are already over 50,000 alien (but terrestrial) species in the United States, ranging from the innocuous to the disastrous. I read that there is a new species introduced into San Francisco Bay every two weeks because of ships dumping their ballast water. We don't need to expose ourselves to even greater ecological disasters imported or re-imported from space.
