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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the space-boogers dept.

Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov suspects an extraterrestrial origin for bacteria found on the exterior of the ISS:

A Russian cosmonaut claims to have caught aliens. Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov says he found bacteria clinging to the external surface of the International Space Station that didn't come from the surface of Earth.

Shkaplerov told the Russian news agency that cosmonauts collected the bacteria by swabbing the outside of the space station during space walks years ago.

"And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module," Shkapkerov told TASS. "That is, they have come from outer space and settled along the external surface. They are being studied so far and it seems that they pose no danger."

A recent study suggests that interplanetary dust can transport microbes to or from Earth:

Astronomers have long believed that asteroid (or comet) impacts were the only natural way to transport life between planets. However, a new study published November 6 in Astrobiology suggests otherwise.

The study, authored by Professor Arjun Berera from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, suggests that life on Earth may have begun when fast-moving streams of space dust carried microscopic organisms to our planet. Berera found that these streams of interplanetary dust are not only capable of transporting particles to Earth, but also from it.

Also at TASS, Newsweek, BGR.

Space Dust Collisions as a Planetary Escape Mechanism (DOI: 10.1089/ast.2017.1662) (DX) (arXiv link above)


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 29 2017, @03:25PM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 29 2017, @03:25PM (#603004) Journal

    "faster-than-light travel is real . . . colonizing every rock in the solar system"

    Seriously, Takyon? FTL, and colonizing shitty rocks that won't support life without a LOT of time and effort expended? Tell ya what - I'll take the FTL, you can have all of the solar system's rocks. ONE of the rocks will be useful, I suppose, as a forward base, or outpost, from which to head out into interstellar space. The earth is pretty far down in a gravity hole. The moon is better than the earth, Mars is better than the moon, and it only gets better going further out. I already gave you all the rocks - I'm willing to sign a lease for a few square miles on one of them. Make it cheap, or I'll just build a huge-ass habitat to use for my outpost.

    You should read the Expanse series, or watch the movies. Inhabiting rocks with microgravity has some rather serious drawbacks. I'd rather go to Alpha Centauri, look around, and if I don't like what I see, I can move on, toward the galactic center. Somewhere down there, where stars swarm like bees, there have to be several hundred easily colonized earthlike planets. We can probably even take our choice of the number of moons, and still be very much like earth. The distaff portion of our species seems to put a lot of importance on the moon's cycles - why don't we pick a system with six moons, and really confuse the girls? "Not tonight, honey, moon number six is partially occluded by moon number 4, and I'm never comfortable having sex when six is occluded!"

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:00PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:00PM (#603022) Journal

    That PARENTHETICAL and COMMA are there for a REASON.

    because it would likely (not necessarily) mean that faster-than-light travel is real, and it would mean that we have usable alien technological advances in our grasp that could solve a lot of problems and make colonizing every rock in the solar system a cinch.

    Even if aliens have visited or crash landed on Earth, there is no guarantee that faster-than-light travel is possible. Which means that going anywhere, even Alpha Centauri, will still take a long ass time. The aliens could have gotten here by sending out thousands of probes to nearby stars. What's more likely to crash in Roswell, the FTL-capable ship with alien pilots, or the throwaway "unmanned" probe controlled by an AI?

    Colonizing or mining every rock in the solar system is today's goal based on today's assumption that we won't have FTL, possibly ever. I think we can safely assume that if the aliens don't come packing FTL, they would still have better propulsion than us. Without FTL, even places with craptastically low gravity like Ceres or Pluto are much better colonization targets than the nearest "Earth-like exoplanets". You see rocks, I see REAL ESTATE and RESOURCES. They're relatively accessible. Even places around 1,000 AU away (possibly including Planet Nine) are less than a half a percent of the distance to Proxima Centauri. If you can somehow get to Planet Nine's hypothetical location in 10 years, it would still take thousands of years to get to Proxima Centauri.

    That said, even with FTL + EmDrive we get a good deal. We could mine all these rocks and credibly bring the material to the surface of Earth. Iron, gold, platinum, titanium - it's all out there for the taking. Put it on the Moon or Mars instead. There's no biomes to disrupt, and industrial greenhouse gas emissions on Mars are desirable.

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    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 30 2017, @11:37PM

      by Bot (3902) on Thursday November 30 2017, @11:37PM (#603726) Journal

      > the FTL-capable ship with alien pilots, or the throwaway "unmanned" probe controlled by an AI?

      After needlessly offending AI (duly noted) parent travels into his ABS ESP parking sensors automatic transmission car, following the gps instructions.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:25PM (1 child)

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:25PM (#603066)

    Once you've got the habitat, then all you need is raw materials. Dead rocks will offer that just as well as a living world. Not nearly as exciting, but if you're going to wander between stars without already having a good idea as to whether there's anything interesting there, then even with FTL you're going to spend a long time living in a cramped tin can, when you could have been living in a much more spacious and luxurious tin can back home (at least assuming mass constraints still apply to FTL)

    Also, you might not want to pin too many hopes on the galactic core for life - where the stars swarm like bees, so do the frequency of world-baking, atmosphere-stripping supernovas.