My initial post was related to more of bacteria or organisms on space suits or moon walks and then flown back to earth in the comfort of a shuttle.
In: Biology
Your question now makes *me* question: if a water bear got in ones bloodstream, could it survive *in* us????
There are clean rooms where you have to wear protective suits when spacecraft are being built, but it’s really diligence in keeping everything sanitized especially when they are looking for signs of life. But, honestly it’s hard to do, and we can only do the best we can when trying to keep things clean.
If they are as hardly as the water bears then they most likely already survived other means of arriving and living on Earth.
You watch the horror movie “life” it tackles this problem. And set up a room to seal up and try to bring life from some mars rocks. But of course, it escapes quarantine and wrecks havoc. Really good (big name actors) and gore
You can’t. The first moon missions ended in a quarantine on Earth. Today we are reasonably sure there is no life on the moon. Mars and Venus mission planning will have to deal with this potential problem. Alien life is probably ill equipped for surviving on Earth but you cannot be absolutely sure it won’t find a niche and then change ecosystems
They can’t. However the planetary protection treaty doesn’t require you to do this.
The reason we haven’t been the the frozen moons of Jupiter or the glaciers of Mars is due to our lack of decontamination. We visit other places where we think life doesn’t exist.
I may be wrong with this, but i recall watching a documentary and the way it was explained made it seem like the concern of a dangerous pathogen is pretty low because it likely wouldnt be able to “infect” life on earth. Most bacteria and viruses evolved over long periods of time and are highly specialized and anything from space would lack the ability to find a host.
I read a book about precision and it discussed this a bit. It said that basically we know there is bacteria in space on other planets like Mars because we put it there. The rigorous sterilizing efforts done to spacecraft preflight ensured that only the hardiest of bacteria survived, bacteria that could survive space. (If I am out to lunch please correct me if I am wrong, I am referencing a paragraph in a book I read like five years ago).
They can *survive* there but they cannot thrive. They don’t have any food, they cannot replicate, grow, or do anything else that’s necessary for long-term living. They just survive in a hibernation-like state.
So far nothing returned to Earth from a place that might have life. If a tardigrade from Earth catches a ride to space and somehow survives re-entry then it had a really hard time just to go from e.g. Florida to the Atlantic Ocean near Florida, or from somewhere in Kazakhstan to somewhere in Russia, or whatever. No harm done here.
If we return samples from Mars then things will get much more difficult. The samples need to be put into a capsule that then enters Earth’s atmosphere. The outer surface will be sterilized by the intense heat of the re-entry, but inside you still have the protected samples. You want to make *really* sure that the capsule doesn’t break open by accident.
Let’s say a bunch of space bacteria *does* make it down to Earth and lands in a nice fertile bog or something.
It’s going to have absolutely no resistance to the natural antibiotics of the first fungus that shows up. Failing that, it’s going to have no defense against the first virus that decides to move in. And god help this bacteria if it somehow gets into something with an immune system, having no way to hide and no survival strategy.
Simple life used to barely hanging on in some lifeless world is going to have no chance here.
Generally, the more prevalent life is somewhere, the meaner it is. We’re actually way more worried about the reverse happening, some Earth bacteria getting into Martian water on a probe and devastating whatever shred of biodiversity is there.
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