Hi everyone,
We have probably seeded life on Mars....?!
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210510-could-the-perseverance-rover-have-carried-life-to-mars***********
Humanity has sent around 30 spacecraft and landers to the Red Planet since the space age began. Now, we know which microbes might have survived the trip, says geneticist Christopher Mason.
But did anything else come along for a ride with all this hardware? Could a trace bacterium or spore from Earth have accidentally been carried into space and survived the trip to make its new home on Mars?
Although Nasa and its engineers in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have precise and thorough protocols to ensure their spacecraft are free from any organisms that might inadvertently hitchhike on a space mission, two recent studies highlight how some organisms might have survived the cleaning process and also the trip to Mars, and also how fast microbial species can evolve while in space.
Given all the planned Martian missions, we are at the shore's edge of new era of inter-planetary biology, where we will learn about adaptations of an organism on one planet and apply them to another. The lessons of evolution and genetic adaptations are inscribed in the DNA of every organism, and the Martian environment will be no different. Mars will write its new selection pressures on organisms that we will see when we sequence them, opening an entirely new catalogue of evolutionary literature.
This is not just for idle curiosity, but rather a duty for our species to protect and preserve all other species. Only humans understand extinction, and thus only humans can prevent it, which applies today as well as it does in billions of years, when the Earth's oceans begin to boil and the planet becomes too hot for life. Our inevitable violation of planetary protection will occur when we start to head off towards other stars, but in that case, we will have no choice. Eventually, careful and responsible forward contamination is the only way to preserve life, and it is a leap we must begin to make over the next 500 years.
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Interesting...
Cheers.
Sriram
