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Scientists warn, without good biosecurity measures 'alien organisms' on Earth may become a reality stranger than fiction.
Published in international journal BioSciences, a team of scientists, including Dr. Phill Cassey, Head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Adelaide, are calling for greater recognition of the biosecurity risks ahead of the space industry.
"In addition to government-led space missions, the arrival of private companies such as SpaceX has meant there are now more players in space exploration than ever before," said Associate Professor Cassey.
"We need to take action now to mitigate those risks."
Space biosecurity concerns itself with both the transfer of organisms from Earth to space (forward contamination) and vice-versa (backward contamination). While the research points out that at present the risk of alien organisms surviving the journey is low, it's not impossible.
Dr. Cassey said: "Risks that have low probability of occurrence, but have the potential for extreme consequences, are at the heart of biosecurity management. Because when things go wrong, they go really wrong."
Journal Reference:
Anthony Ricciardi, Phillip Cassey, Stefan Leuko, et al. Planetary Biosecurity: Applying Invasion Science to Prevent Biological Contamination from Space Travel, BioScience (DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biab115)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 24 2021, @05:36PM (2 children)
It's paranoid foolishness. The "forwards contamination" argument is a bit reasonable, if we want to be certain that the life we encountered wasn't something we imported, but anything evolved to live on, say Europa or Mars would be at a MASSIVE disadvantage for even surviving under earth conditions. And that's if nothing ate it. (Microbes will even eat some plastics, which were specifically designed so that they wouldn't do that. I think Teflon is safe against that, but not much else except in the short run.)
(FWIW, some plastics are nearly impervious, because their surfaces repell water. A few repell both water and oil. But only flourine bonds are so strong that they can't be broken by chemical attack. This doesn't mean that it won't take awhile for a microbe to eat something to evolve...and it's got to gain some advantage by doing so. But it will happen.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Common Joe on Wednesday November 24 2021, @07:25PM (1 child)
We literally do not know how easy it is for life to exist outside of our atmosphere. But we are learning. Bacteria, algae, and moss [futurism.com] can survive the hellish rigors of space. And if single celled organisms aren't enough, there are the tardigrades [acs.org]. The panspermia theory [wikipedia.org] became a hypothesis the same year the Wright Brothers flew a plane for the first time.
We know life can exists in space. We simply don't know how easy it is for life to adapt one way or another -- or how dangerous it is. I mean, less than a century ago, we were giving out jewerly made out of radioactive materials [epa.gov] and making people sick. A mistake of this kind might not kill all life on Earth, but it could kill most trees. Or all the bees. Of course, it would really suck if an invasive species [noaa.gov] wiped out the plankton in our oceans [noaa.gov]. (I don't think humans would survive that one.)
So, no, not paranoid foolishness.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday November 24 2021, @09:07PM
If they can survive, they're probably already here. We've got fragments known to be from Mars and the Moon. Dust from outer space rains down all the time. But everything we've checked uses the same protein selection and pretty much the same genetic code. Anything larger than a virus and we can say it uses a close modification of the same ribosome protein pattern. So they've all got common ancestry.
Worrying about this is paranoid foolishness. It's not literally impossible, but the probability is so low that it's not worth worrying about. Now if we find a working ecosystem somewhere else, then I'd revise my priors and say we ought to check this carefully. But I still wouldn't be very worried.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.