Yeah, and you want to explain to future generations why we could have had a happy relationship with Mars but no, we gave it a really bad yeast infection and now it never wants us anywhere near it? Hmmm? :-)
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.
Potentially a much greater filter is going from unicellular to multicellular life, no? If it likely took billions of years to get from unicellular to multicellular life on Earth, and only (hundreds of) millions of years to get to life that can conduct spaceflight, then perhaps microbes wouldn’t be the best way to attack this problem (I’m assuming you’re talking primarily about unicellular microbes, of course).
Well in the talk the presenter was talking things like tardigrades which are multicellular. The challenge with tardigrades (and any multicellular life) is that you want it to be reproducing (and hence evolving) so it has to be able to do so under conditions on the body you drop it on too. Again, since the talk was speculative there were various speculative ideas such as ice penetrators to put them into the liquid under the ice of moons like Enceladus.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
> Why would you prefer to believe a random outsider's view (scientists are holding us back)
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?
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...
Spreading into new territory is a fundamental human instinct. It’s how we ended up being spread out across the entire planet. Tut tutting ain’t gonna change that, people are still going to follow the instinct. See: religion’s attempts to control sexual instincts in humans. We would at least need to respect the instinct and give it a robust outlet, not just expect people to suppress it for the good of… some rocks?
Minimizing our bad influence on our planet and wanting everything for oneself caused the problem we're currently in. Most humans know no moderation, and putting it out as "this is our instinct, innit? We can't do anything about it but to follow it, eh?" is the biggest continuous mistake we're doing as a species.
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.
Ah well, I want to share a part of Red Mars by Robinson about this topic, where the protagonist have that debate. (starting with Ann, a "red" who stronglopposes
"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.""
I recommend you to read Hyperion Cantos then. All four volumes. Takes a couple of months, but it's worth it.
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.
I feel that I need to clarify my stance on space exploration.
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.
> 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.
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?
> The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago.
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.
To your point, one of the most remarkable things I've read about both Mars and Venus, is that there was a time billions of years ago when they had more moderate temperatures and liquid water.
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.
The best time to start terraforming a planet is never. The idea is as absurd as a Dyson sphere/swarm. People should really grow beyond sci-fi ideas that were last fresh in the 1930's.
I’m really curious about fungi that can survive in these conditions, because fungi many times break down inorganic matter into organic. It sounds natural to just drop some all over and check what’s up a couple of centuries later.
Mars is super short of hydrogen (and lacks the magnetic field to guard it). We'd need to crash a bunch of ice asteroids into it to get in the water and heat it up, then there could be a stab at terraforming it. So far we seem to be more likely to marsaform Earth.
We still find evidence of life on earth from billions of years ago that was not erased by billions of years of their successors. I doubt you have anything to worry about.
But imagine the value of finding _any_ living RNA based life which is clearly not from earth before we travel to other stars.
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.
I worked with these organisms from the space station. Their resistance to things like hydrogen peroxide (what we wash space probes with) is incredible.
At the end of the day, there are tons of organisms, many of which can survive epic conditions. My personal favourite is still Deinococcus radiodurans but there are many other contenders.
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:
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?
The point is not to put yeast on Mars. The research isn't part of some terraforming or settlement program.
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.
I think by "survive" they mean that yeast spores can briefly be put in a "mars jar" and then be revived, not that they can become metobolicaly active, or even last for an extended time on mars
More seriously, they send only sterilized landers to Mars, to avoid killing all life there (if there is any), and to avoid the problem of finding in a few years the contamination we sended there. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection
Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%, Panspermia is starting to feel more and more likely.
Something to blow your mind with. The early days in the universe there were millions of years were the average temperature in the universe supported liquid water.
We don't really know. Decades ago we would have said yes, the universe was metal poor (metal being any element heavily than hydrogen). But these days the composition of early stars that we can detect have too much metal too early.
On the one hand, (primitive) life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions allowed it.
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.
>Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%
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.
I kinda like the optimistic perspective that humanity emerged preposterously early. Like the age of the universe is a mere ~14 billion years. It's basically nothing imo. Star formation is predicted to keep going for about 100 trillion years. So from that perspective we are only about 0.1% of the way through the current cosmic era.
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?!
all of those theories depend on one assumption, that life and our existence are products of a purely random collision of events.
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.
There is the old theory about how life is entropy accelerating, and therefore in a grand sense the emergence of life is thermodynamically favored. Though, that says nothing about the absolute chance of it occurring.[1] Our observable universe is far from infinite.
[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.
All the study says is that their lab yeast survived shock waves and perchlorate levels similar to those on Mars.
That's all.
We should be dropping bags of extremophile organisms into the Martian atmosphere to get a start on terraforming it.
Yeah, and you want to explain to future generations why we could have had a happy relationship with Mars but no, we gave it a really bad yeast infection and now it never wants us anywhere near it? Hmmm? :-)
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.
Potentially a much greater filter is going from unicellular to multicellular life, no? If it likely took billions of years to get from unicellular to multicellular life on Earth, and only (hundreds of) millions of years to get to life that can conduct spaceflight, then perhaps microbes wouldn’t be the best way to attack this problem (I’m assuming you’re talking primarily about unicellular microbes, of course).
Well in the talk the presenter was talking things like tardigrades which are multicellular. The challenge with tardigrades (and any multicellular life) is that you want it to be reproducing (and hence evolving) so it has to be able to do so under conditions on the body you drop it on too. Again, since the talk was speculative there were various speculative ideas such as ice penetrators to put them into the liquid under the ice of moons like Enceladus.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
> Why would you prefer to believe a random outsider's view (scientists are holding us back)
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.
> colonization opportunity.
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.
Spreading into new territory is a fundamental human instinct. It’s how we ended up being spread out across the entire planet. Tut tutting ain’t gonna change that, people are still going to follow the instinct. See: religion’s attempts to control sexual instincts in humans. We would at least need to respect the instinct and give it a robust outlet, not just expect people to suppress it for the good of… some rocks?
> for the good of… some rocks?
This is a perfect portrayal of what I'm talking about:
Minimizing our bad influence on our planet and wanting everything for oneself caused the problem we're currently in. Most humans know no moderation, and putting it out as "this is our instinct, innit? We can't do anything about it but to follow it, eh?" is the biggest continuous mistake we're doing as a species.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.
Space is big. Colonize colonize colonize!
You can start practicing it with 4X games like Master of Orion (I/II/III/IV).
Then we can follow your footsteps by utilizing the experience you got from these endeavors.
Ah well, I want to share a part of Red Mars by Robinson about this topic, where the protagonist have that debate. (starting with Ann, a "red" who stronglopposes
"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.""
I recommend you to read Hyperion Cantos then. All four volumes. Takes a couple of months, but it's worth it.
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.
> 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."
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.
I feel that I need to clarify my stance on space exploration.
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.
"Oh, if we can be absolutely sure that Mars has no life on it"
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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 best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago. The second best time is now.
> The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago.
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)
To your point, one of the most remarkable things I've read about both Mars and Venus, is that there was a time billions of years ago when they had more moderate temperatures and liquid water.
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.
Or we cycle through them and forget every time.
The best time to start terraforming a planet is never. The idea is as absurd as a Dyson sphere/swarm. People should really grow beyond sci-fi ideas that were last fresh in the 1930's.
No. Sci-fi ideas from the 1930s beat the myopic doomerism of 2020s, and it's not even a contest.
What's better, and on what metric(s)?
What if we are the bag of organisms?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
I’m really curious about fungi that can survive in these conditions, because fungi many times break down inorganic matter into organic. It sounds natural to just drop some all over and check what’s up a couple of centuries later.
If we did that then we may never be able to know if life previously existed on Mars or not.
Mars is super short of hydrogen (and lacks the magnetic field to guard it). We'd need to crash a bunch of ice asteroids into it to get in the water and heat it up, then there could be a stab at terraforming it. So far we seem to be more likely to marsaform Earth.
Then we will never know if mars once had life that's different from earth life
We still find evidence of life on earth from billions of years ago that was not erased by billions of years of their successors. I doubt you have anything to worry about.
But imagine the value of finding _any_ living RNA based life which is clearly not from earth before we travel to other stars.
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.
We won't have a place among the stars if we refuse to leave the Earth due to fear of "contaminating" the universe.
How likely is it that we have already accidentally "contaminated" other planets or moons, despite procedures to prevent this?
It seems unlikely to be possible to completely prevent all lifeforms from hitching a ride
Tardigrades (crash) landed on the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beresheet
It’s pretty likely or at least plausible.
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.
At the end of the day, there are tons of organisms, many of which can survive epic conditions. My personal favourite is still Deinococcus radiodurans but there are many other contenders.
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?
The point is not to put yeast on Mars. The research isn't part of some terraforming or settlement program.
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.
I imagine it is related to the first step of colonizing mars, which is figuring out the most efficient way to terraform mars.
If your hab blows out it would be ideal if not everything died immediately.
Yeah, we can make beers on mars!
Be careful, everyone on Mars will be a lightweight!
And the Martian beers can drunk in Mars' bars
I came here to write this.
We could call it "The beer at the end of the universe"
I think by "survive" they mean that yeast spores can briefly be put in a "mars jar" and then be revived, not that they can become metobolicaly active, or even last for an extended time on mars
Is there any food for them on mars?
What about uncommon yeast?
They can't surive Mars Condition.
So send the yeast.
More seriously, they send only sterilized landers to Mars, to avoid killing all life there (if there is any), and to avoid the problem of finding in a few years the contamination we sended there. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection
My first thought on reading the title of the OP was 'I wonder if we've already ruined Mars with unhelpful yeast?'.
Surely there's nothing for it to eat there yet though.
When jupiterians come to explore mars they'll face a horror movie scenario with long dormant alien pathogen eating through their carbohydrate shells.
I think they prefer "Jovians".
That's just our word for them, just like Protestants is a Catholic umbrella term for most other denominations.
And yet the stuff in my freezer went bad.
Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%, Panspermia is starting to feel more and more likely.
Something to blow your mind with. The early days in the universe there were millions of years were the average temperature in the universe supported liquid water.
Okay, but this is the average temperature of a big cloud of hydrogen with oxygen yet to be invented right?
We don't really know. Decades ago we would have said yes, the universe was metal poor (metal being any element heavily than hydrogen). But these days the composition of early stars that we can detect have too much metal too early.
I don't think millions of years is long enough for anything interesting to happen life-wise, is it?
On the one hand, (primitive) life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions allowed it.
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.
hard to know with so few data points
"insufficient data for meaningful answer", one might say.
>hard to know with so few data points
i've yelled at the interns several times but none have been able to set up a haldane soup focus group yet
>Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%
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.
I kinda like the optimistic perspective that humanity emerged preposterously early. Like the age of the universe is a mere ~14 billion years. It's basically nothing imo. Star formation is predicted to keep going for about 100 trillion years. So from that perspective we are only about 0.1% of the way through the current cosmic era.
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?!
all of those theories depend on one assumption, that life and our existence are products of a purely random collision of events.
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.
There is the old theory about how life is entropy accelerating, and therefore in a grand sense the emergence of life is thermodynamically favored. Though, that says nothing about the absolute chance of it occurring.[1] Our observable universe is far from infinite.
[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.