May 6, 2016 • 45 mins
Scientists are worried that we could contaminate other planets or bring back something to contaminate our own. How real is the risk and what can be done to prevent it?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, Little Green
Men taught me how to do the bop. I'm Jonvin
(00:21):
Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're gonna be
talking about life beyond the bounds of yeah, which we've
talked about in a couple of episodes before, but we're
specifically talking about how do we search for life and
and be sure that we found it and that it
definitely came from capital somewhere capital else. Yeah. We're not
(00:46):
just talking about alien life, but alien life that we
definitely didn't put there. Yeah. Yeah. So this is important
because of multiple things. One, we're very curious about whether
or not there is life outside of our planet. The
odds are pretty good, considering the vastness of the universe
that life also exists somewhere else. Whether it exists somewhere
(01:08):
within our detectable range of view is another question. And
then we also are hoping to maybe even learn more
about the origins of life on Earth, particularly from any
indications of life on our our nearby neighboring planetary and
moon bodies. Right, yeah, I mean one thing that would
(01:29):
be interesting would be if you go to other objects
in the Solar System and you find life forms there
that are based in DNA. You could say, ah, this
may be a piece of evidence for the theory that
DNA precedes the evolution of or the origin of all life. Right.
The DNA is a necessary component. You didn't have it
(01:50):
the other way around. You didn't have life that it
eventually got. DNA is a molecule. But there's another way
you could read finding life with DNA, which is that
what if it just came from some other DNA based life? Right?
What if? What if we also thought we had discovered
the smoking DNA gun on a surface such as Mars,
(02:12):
only to find out, much to our chagrin later on,
that whoops a daisy, it actually hits a ride on
the very probe we sent there, and in fact came
from you know, uh, dubuke, debuke, quite debuke, just random place. Well,
then let's say it came from Peoria, okay, our Kalamazoo, Michigan.
(02:33):
No matter where it comes from. That this is more
than just a problem of like corrupting our data samples
and our senses of childlike wonder. Uh. You know, if
we bring earth life along with us to a place,
how can we be sure that we won't be committing
unintentional genocide on whatever life forms might happen to be
(02:53):
native to that place to begin with? Right, So this
this is sort of the problem of something like kud
zoo here in the southeast. Right. Kud Zoo is not
native to the southeast United States, but anyone who has
spent any time, particularly north of Atlanta, is very familiar
with kud zoo. It's this creeping vine. It was brought
in specifically to try and help curtail erosion on hillsides.
(03:18):
I know this because the place where I grew up
absolutely covered and cut zoo over one place. I very
often see it, especially in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee,
and I go back there is in like former construction
sites and digging sites, places where there have been a
large large sections of earth carried away by earth movers
(03:39):
are flattened. Then there will, you know, years later, be
kud zoo all over it. I specifically remember a telephone
pole outside of Oakwood, Georgia, which is where I grew
up that because of the way the vines had grown
up the pole and along some of the wires, it
looked like Godzilla, and so we called it Cudzilla. And uh,
but the point that I'm making here is that cuts
(04:00):
do is is an invasive species that has killed a
lot of the native plants by covering them up. You know,
it's competing for the same resources, right, and it's a
really effective and growing exactly. So the fear is that
we could potentially bring something from Earth to another planet
where it would be uh capable of adapting to those
(04:22):
conditions and edging out any sort of indigenous life. Yeah,
and this is the subject that we're going to be
talking about today typically goes under the name interplanetary contamination
exactly for the process, and we're also going to be
talking about the process of trying to prevent this, which
is often known as planetary protection. Yeah. It's sort of
(04:42):
like a microbial version of the prime directive. The prime
directive of course being in star trek, the thing where
you say that you will do no harm, that you
will not interact with with other stuff there, with other
life forms out there, unless like it's really important or
there's like a chick you want to get up with,
or exactly unless the PLU calls for it, right, totally, totally,
(05:02):
but but at a microbial level, you know, that's basically
the same thing. Yeah, so we're not talking about bringing
life forms like multicellular complex organisms like rabbits, and the
probe isn't going to be having an infestation of badgers.
I mean, honey badgers are are a real problem, especially
(05:22):
in Far Cry four, but maybe water bears though, Yeah, okay,
there you go. But now we're we're specifically telling about
microbial life and or or things that aren't even life
yet but would be very interesting if we were to
find them in a place other than Earth, like what
they call organic molecules, right, the building blocks that indicate
(05:43):
perhaps the presence or uh the one, one time presence
of life, and maybe that the things we discover on
other planets aren't life but are rather remnants of what
used to be life sure, or or you know, write
all that DNA stuff that we were talking about, uh
earlier in this very episode and also for a couple
episodes before this. You know, either amino acids or nucleo bases,
(06:06):
nuclear tides, whatever you want to call them that sort
of thing. Yeah, and uh, or I mean something as
simple as methane, right, sure, yeah, something that that's considered
an organic moloch exactly. So interplanetary contamination, it actually works
both ways. We'll talk about that a little bit more
later on. But there is like forward contamination and backward contamination,
and that essentially means are we taking stuff to another
(06:28):
planet or are we bringing stuff back to our planet
from somewhere else. But interplanetary contamination is a big deal.
I mean, it's something that lots of smart people have
talked about, and in fact, there are agreements between nations
not to do that thing. Uh. The Outer Space Treaty,
which we have talked about multiple times on this show. Right,
(06:51):
we've talked about Outer Space Treaty for as far as
it goes with the idea of can you own property
in space, the idea that the Moon is no one
property you just because you put a flag there. The
answer is yes, you can if you buy it from me, right,
if you're, if you're not, if you're, if you're not
too upset about handing money over to a total scam artist,
(07:12):
you two can own landscape on the moon. Uh. So
for The Outer Space Treaty actually has a section that
covers the idea of interplanetary contamination, and its specifically reads
UH that states parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies
of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies,
and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their
(07:33):
harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of
the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter, and
where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose. Now
that's specifically backwards contamination. Well, it mentions both. It mentions
forward and backward contamination. So it says that we will
avoid quote they're harmful contamination. They're referring to the Moon
(07:55):
and other celestial bodies. And then it also says, don't
don't mess up Earth when you come back, which is
what happens, of course in Dawn of the Dead or
not neither the Living Dead. Yes, a space probe returning
from Venus comes into the atmosphere and then and then
hilarity ensues. Yeah, some sleepy people decided to have a party.
They're coming to get you, Barbara. In addition, the Committee
(08:18):
on Space Research, also known as Coast bar has created
the Coast bar Planetary Protection Policy, using the Outer Space
Treaty as sort of their starting point. And here in
the United States, NASA has a division that's dedicated to
this pursuit as well. It's called the Planetary Protection Office.
Its slogan is all of the planets, all of the time,
(08:41):
which you know is an ambitious at all. You know, like,
no no pressure there, NASA. You can fool all of
the planets some of the time, some of the planets
all the time, but you can't fool all the planets
all the time. Also, it just reminds me of that
of that hyperbole and a half quote to clean all
the things, like clean all the planets. Yes, but so
(09:02):
we mentioned there are two main types of planetary contamination.
It can be either going out or coming in. Yeah,
So the going out part we'll talk about more detail soon.
The coming back part, Uh, that's that's something that's already happened, right,
We brought samples back from the Moon. Sure. I mean,
if you believe NASA that we've been there, well, I
(09:22):
mean I want to put you in a very uh,
very frustrating scenario. Imagine you have just been to outer
space and you made it back to Earth safely, and
you're like, oh my god, I went to outer space. Yeah,
Like I want some mac and cheese. I want to
hug my dog. Like no, nope, you are going to
(09:43):
sit in a container and wait for a long time,
for like a month. Yeah. So in the Apollo missions, uh,
the returning equipment and astronauts had to undergo a thirty
day quarantine period after each time, after each mission, just
to make certain that nothing brought back would be harmful
to life here on Earth, because he can't be too careful.
(10:04):
You know, it's pretty people were pretty sure that there
wouldn't be anything incredibly dangerous, but you don't know. It
may be that the soils would have contained some sort
of highly dangerous carcinogen or something. Yeah, better safe than sorry.
This is funny. I mean I what I just said
was based on what the Apollo astronauts had to do.
(10:24):
What what is the process? Now? So let's say you
return from the I S. S. Do you have to
go through quarantine today? I'm sure there's I know there's
a period of observation, but it's like a couple of days.
I don't think it's as long as thirty days because
you're not typically bringing anything back with you that's extraterrestrial
in nature, right, you are aboard the I S S. Now,
there might be some some pretty far out people on
(10:47):
the I S S. But they aren't so far out
as to be not of this Earth. Yeah, well yeah,
uh and and as long as you're not demonstrating like
a clear case of space madness, it just takes me
back to ren and stimpy with the creamy new Guta Center.
So uh so the obviously creepy pasta obviously. Uh we'd
(11:13):
also love to get our hands on any kind of
life that originated from outside of the Earth. But if
we were to do so, our hands, grimy, grimy hands
are metaphorical hands, literal complex instrumentation hands, right, So we'd
love to be able to take possession of life that
(11:34):
originated from outside of our our own planetary home, right,
but that obviously could come with a substantial risk, lots
of different risks. We could in fact have the opposite
of what we were talking about earlier, where you know,
if we were to bring something from Earth to another
planet and it were to uh to to really multiply
(11:57):
in an uncontrollable fashion, the same thing could put ventually
happened bringing something from another planet back here on Earth,
and that could be bad. So uh, most people say
that the obvious solution for that is to use a
system of containment that you never allow whatever it was
you brought back from another planet to escape a controlled, contained,
(12:21):
you know, uh facility, So which makes perfect sense. You know,
you wouldn't be like, hey, we found martian daisies, let's
plant it on Earth and see what happens next to
all of our major food crops. There's a school right
down the road that would really use some some beautifications. Oh,
(12:42):
the Martian daisies are eating all the small animals. That's
probably not anything to worry about, you know. And then
you get some horrible science fiction film, and there are
a couple of different scenarios we sort of mentioned the
different ideas. One is that we send a probe out
to uh, another celestial body, and we end up getting
(13:03):
some sort of result that suggests that yes, we've found life,
or we found organic compounds that suggest the presence of life,
only to find out that whoops, we may have brought
that with us. So that's one of the really frustrating uncertainty. Yeah,
and it's something that's happened. It's not like this is
this is new this or or or just a theory orhypothetic. Yeah.
(13:25):
Then there's also the scenario that we've we mentioned before.
We send a probe there, it brings some sort of
organic material life forms to a distant body, and then
they flourish there and edge out any life or eradicate
any signs of life on that planet, and then we
never know if life was there or not. Yeah, maybe
(13:46):
our microbes are like the europa version of the alien xenomorphs.
Maybe like everything that they exhale it's just acid and
it's terrible. Yeah, but I mean, wouldn't it be fun
to find out? Uh? Then scenario three, of course, is
that we send some sort of probe or mission someplace,
it comes back and then we get space Mono and
(14:08):
there's a George Romero film that breaks out as a result, which,
while it sounds groovy, is probably not something you actually
want to live through. I mean, you want to live
through it, but you don't want to experience it. Right,
It's preferable overall if it's going to happen. If it's
going to happen, you want to live through through it.
I don't know. I mean it really depends. I mean,
season two of Walking Dead, you probably just wanted to
(14:29):
be like, just ended. I didn't want to live through that. Yeah. Okay,
So we've got this concern that we've articulated now that
there are multiple reasons we might want to be concerned
about microbial life being transported from one planetary body or
solar system object to another um and we can all
pretty much agree that that's something that could possibly happen
(14:49):
and that we should be concerned about. But how concerned
about it should we be? Well, I mean we've already
seeing people say we can allow something like the Curiosity
rover to make its way over to locations that are
theoretically at least within its its range of roving to
check out potential water because of these very concerns, right,
(15:14):
because we know that there's stuff on the Curiosity and
that we we don't want. Yeah, that the Curiosity wasn't
completely sterile. So because of that, we cannot allow the
Curiosity Rover to come in contact with the water supply
and potentially contaminate it. So it's very frustrating because you
can see where the water is and the rover is
(15:35):
within range of it, and if you could just get
over there and and do some measurements, legally speaking, you
might even be able to tell if there is life
or or evidence of past life within that area where
there's water. I mean, that seems like that's gonna be
our best, our best option of finding something close to
the surface of Mars, but we can't do it. So
(15:58):
that's one reason people concerned about it, because we've already
kind of seen the limitation of what we're able to
do with the tools that are on Mars right now.
There's also a pressing concern that the agreements we talked about,
that official Space treaty, that's an agreement between nations, between governments.
It's not an agreement between private industries, as many want
(16:19):
to be. Asteroid miners have frequently reminded us. Yeah, so
private industry isn't beholden to those same restrictions and could
potentially go and muck everything up for everybody. Yeah, the
private space industry, by the way, is poised to get
huge or huger like soon. Um. You know, we've talked
(16:41):
about that asteroid exploration thing before and about Mars one before,
and I'm pretty sure that Mars one is super defunct
at this point, um, But an announcement from SpaceX this
very week, the last week of April, indicates that private
Mars exploration in general is certainly not dead. Elad Musk
really wants to send an unpersoned Dragon to spacecraft, which
(17:03):
is the upcoming descendant of the Dragon one spacecraft two
Mars in eighteen eighteen. Y'all. That's like so soon, um,
And he's he's putting the pressure on because in teen
Mars will be just thirty five point eight million miles
away from Earth and that is the closest we will
be to the Red planet between now and so. So yeah,
(17:29):
so soeen might be when private spacecraft touches down on Mars.
Hat to it, by the way, to Robert Lamb and
How Stuff Works Now a new video and podcast series
from How Stuff Works for for for covering that particular topic.
Uh yeah, I've actually heard that. Uh. And I don't
know if this was a joke or not, but someone
on Twitter said, did you know Elon Musk wants to
retire on Mars? And I was thinking, is this real?
(17:52):
And I never bothered to actually check, but it totally
sounds like something he would say, even if it were
just in Jennifer kind of a joke. Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah.
So the the point here is that if we are
going to legislate private companies about this kind of stuff,
we should probably get on that like yesterday. Yeah, because
obviously these concerns we're talking about if you want to
(18:12):
answer some pretty big questions like was there ever life
on Mars? Is there still life on Mars? And other
celestial bodies. We're using Mars because that's probably the one
that we're going to be hitting first, but there are
other like there are there are certain other moons in
the Solar system that are also potential uh targets for
for where we think life is most likely to exist
(18:35):
if it exists elsewhere in our solar system. Um, but
can we get some legislation in there so that we
make sure we don't destroy that evidence before we have
a chance to actually look for it. Well, this sort
of leads us to the question of what we can
actually do to prevent it. I mean, just short of
not ever going to other objects if we're if we're
(18:57):
going to be right, yeah, if we're going to be
conjugating with other objects in our Solar system, exploring them
or even colonizing them. Is it just inevitable that we're
going to contaminate them with our microbes or are there
steps we can take to reasonably uh two, with reasonable
confidence say that we're not doing that right because because
(19:19):
legislation is lovely, but the practical scientific end has to
come up with a practical scientific way of making that go. Yeah,
and here's the thing, spoiler alert folks, because I'm just
gonna go ahead and tell you right now, there is
no way that we can be certain that we can
explore and certainly not colonize another planet or moon without
contaminating it to some degree. The other real question is
(19:42):
how bad would it be. We don't know. But if
you're gonna be bringing, like especially for colonization, if you're
gonna be bringing a whole bunch of stuff with you
that has organic material involved in it, like food, and
you know us, then not us in this room, I'm
not going but you know human beings, Well, that's colonization.
(20:02):
Maybe we should take a step back first and look
at exploration. Yeah, I mean, even even just a rover
as we are apt to send out to places we
have not been before. Um and and and you know,
so when when we want things to not have bacteria
on them, we usually sterilize them. And that seems like
a pretty good thing. Like every time I go in
to get another facial tattoo, like, you know, there's there's
(20:24):
some kind of sterilization system in place, right, we can
blows the cockroach parts off of the needle, Yeah, yeah,
and we can we can do we can blow the
cockroach parts off of rovers as well. Yeah yeah, and
remind me not to go to your tattoo artist. So
I was wondering how space agencies do this, and I
looked it up. Actually, NASA has a page that's pretty
(20:46):
interesting where it explains its own strategies before for sterilizing
equipment specifically bound for Mars through the Mars Exploration rover programs,
and that would include Spirit and opportunity. So objects we
put on Mars, we had to sterilize them before they went.
How did we do that? Uh? So this is funny.
They had a mandate to carry quote no more than
(21:08):
three hundred thousand bacterial spores on any surface from which
the spores could get into the Martian environment. I just
imagine that some poor schmooze job. Who's got a count? Man?
But come on, that's interesting. The mandate is not perfectly sterile.
It's no more than three hundred thousand spores. It's just like,
(21:29):
you know, no box of cereal is completely without rat hair. Yeah,
you gotta have a little you know, one part pavilion.
That's not so bad. So they've got that mandate, But
how do they actually accomplish it? Well? While the spacecraft
are being assembled, First of all, technicians are going to
be constantly wiping down surfaces with alcohol solution. Uh. This
(21:51):
is sort of stage one. You just you're constantly wiping
alcohol on them to sterilize the surfaces, kill whatever microbs
are there. Uh. And they also conduct microbiology samples to
make sure there aren't too many organisms present on the
surfaces at multiple stages along the construction of these spacecraft.
(22:12):
And then they take all of the heat tolerant components,
which aren't all of the components, but it's you know,
a lot of the outer ones. They heat tolerant components,
and they heat them to a hundred ten degrees celsius
or two and thirty degrees fahrenheit. And then they've also
got a central box containing the roverse computer and main
electronic components, and that's kept sealed and all the ventilated
(22:35):
air that goes through it is heavily filtered to make
sure that if you've got any microorganisms inside the electronics box,
they don't get out once they're on the other a
little little microbe jail, MicroB jail forever. And then they
also say that on this mission they went out of
the way to prevent any non sterilized part of the
(22:57):
launch vehicle from accidentally getting to Mars, which I thought
was interesting that this is something you do actually have
to worry about, but they did because so think about
it like this. As the rocket launches, it frequently it
at several stages has to separate from a stage of
its launch vehicle. You know, it discards part of the
rocket and throws it away, and the last part of
(23:18):
the rocket that it discards, the third stage of the
Delta launch vehicle, is going to be on the trajectory
with the spacecraft heading out of orbit right. And so
if you just left it like that, the part of
the the last part of the rocket that it separates with,
would basically be on a course to follow the spacecraft
to Mars. And so instead what they do is they
(23:41):
start their journey going the wrong way, not totally the
wrong way, but not quite on a direct on a
direct trajectory to hit Mars, so that the if they
separate and the object follows them, the launch vehicle part
will float off in that direction, and then after ten
days they make a course correct and to meet Mars
in its orbit. That's good because it reminds me of
(24:04):
that picture of the rocket taking off and the little
frog attached attached to the rocket, and and we could
have ended up with the frog on Mars, right, But
not with this program, nor that frog is lost in space. Now.
Apparently for some past probes, like the Viking Lander, they
had an even higher standard of sterility, which was pretty
(24:24):
much actual like full sterilization. They would blast the whole
thing in a high temperature oven for several days. Yeah,
the numbers that I read were a hundred and eleven
point seven degrees celsius for thirty hours. But the electronics
on the most recent probes probably could not stand up
to that. No, they're not not not quite the same
(24:45):
caliber as the ones from the Viking. So that we
we go through actually less rigorous sterilization on planetary rovers
and probes than we used to write. Now, here's the
thing is that not all, not all the stuff we've
sent out has been completely sterilized. Uh. And even when
you your sterilization method is effective and you're reasonably sure
(25:08):
that you're beneath below that three thousand bacterial spores metric
there's it doesn't It doesn't magically clean off all the
organic carbon molecules that may or may not be attached
that material. Those could still be on the probe, which
if there are enough of them, it could be enough
(25:29):
to throw off our our you know, instrumentation and give
you a false positive. So there's still the possibility that
stuff that isn't actually life but rather are the building
blocks for life here on Earth could hit your ride,
and even if you've done the sterilization approach, they could
throw things off because it's it's the same source stuff
(25:51):
is what you're looking for when you're doing these particular
types of experiments. Now, one of the ways we could
try to limit this possibile the is to go to
these places but not actually land on them, to do
essentially fly bys orbits that kind of stuff. Look at
the various bodies from a distance. Um. And the problem
(26:11):
with that method, of course, is that you can see
a lot of things from a distance that indicate the
building blocks for life. But unless you're catching space people
go into the space mall on your camera, you're probably
not close enough to actually get a real idea. The
problem with not landing on a planet is that you're
(26:32):
not landing on it. Yeah, you're not able to physically
interact with the environment and either verify or or discard
a hypothesis, right like, without actually landing and taking samples
and and testing those samples, you can just make a
kind of educated guess. And even that's kind of like saying,
I want you to meet my friend, but you can
only drive around the block around this house right now.
(26:53):
You might you might see that when you think about
you might see that lights are on in the house,
and you may draw the conclusion, well that you know,
Joe's friend is probably home, or you might see that
all the lights are off and you think Joe's friend
is either not home or is it sleep Essentially, right like,
there's certain things that there's certain conclusions you can draw,
but you're not certain of any of them. Same thing
(27:14):
as problems is problematic with this unless you honk your
horn really loud and Joe's friend comes out of the house. Right,
if you were to honk your hornet at at Mars
or one of the moon's out there that we suspect
could potentially house life and little microbes came out and
formed a giant like emoji like picture, and then that
(27:34):
would work. Yeah, that would be something somehow, I don't
think that's a highly likely scenario now, so one crush
all of my dreams. Another thing we could try to
do is reduce contamination to a level that's below the
precision of our instrumentation. So, in other words, be reasonably
sure that the amount of stuff from Earth that is
(27:57):
attached to a probe is so minute, there's so little
of it that it is unlikely the instrumentation aboard the
probe would even detect it. So if we were to
detect any organic compounds, it would likely be from wherever
we sent the probe rather than from Earth itself. The
problem is we're getting better and better and making sensitive instrumentation,
(28:20):
so it requires cleaner and cleaner probes to make absolutely
certain that it's not an earth bound or earth originated,
uh organic compound that we're picking up as opposed to
something from Mars or wherever. Another difficult thing to to
design a test for is whether the sterilization that we've
(28:40):
done on a spacecraft has gotten it truly clean. Um,
and this is especially true in the nineteen seventies. Like
we're learning a little bit better now, but but it's
it's real hard to to test the cleanliness of an
object because most lab procedures for for testing macro real
contamination revolve around culturing samples of the material to see
if anything grows in those lab cultures, And lots of
(29:02):
microbes really resist being cultured in labs. I mean, I
wouldn't want to reproduce in lab either, So I understand.
Uh So, so that method might not be a good
indication of what can contamination we might be sending out,
and especially what contamination we might have sent out in
the past. Now this tells me that, um, some microbes
are a lot like some at lanterns. They really really
(29:25):
resist getting cultured. Whole theater jokes. Okay, so, uh, if
we go back to the other half of that colonizing, Now,
clearly we've already said that just sending an unmanned probe
or rover or whatever is and making certain that we
do not contaminate the destination is already really hard. It's
(29:46):
an order of magnitude harder to do that as a
colonization mission, right right, Well, I mean anywhere we go,
where we're going to be pooping, yeah, we will probably
start to run into this problem. And wherever we go,
let's be honest, we're there, yeah, exactly right right, I
mean we're gonna be eating and pooping and all sorts
(30:08):
of doing all the human things at that because that's
what humans do at that location. And unless you've created
a habitat that is completely sealed off from the surrounding
environment to the point where you even begin to question
why did we come here, It's like it's like going
to an exotic location and staying inside your hotel room
the whole time. I mean, what's the point at that
(30:29):
at that stage? But wouldn't that be the most hilarious
conundrum if you So we do discover some kind of
microbial life on Mars and and we're like, sure it
didn't come from poop, but it might have come from Yeah,
this is why we have to be thankful that The
Martian is just a work of fiction, because otherwise Mark
(30:51):
Whatley ruined it for everybody. Um So it's interesting. Also,
this is not just the plot to The Martian. It's
also the plot to star Trek to the Wrath of
con Or at least part of the plot. So stick
with me here because this is actually it's instrumental to
things that happened. If it weren't for the fact that
the Federation also wanted to make absolutely certain that any
(31:13):
any experiments involving terraforming, in this case not not colonizing
or anything like that, but terraforming a planet did not
destroy any life forms at all. If it weren't for
that fact, there wouldn't have been a story to the movie.
Because what happens is um uh Commander pav Pavel Chekhov
goes along with the crew of the USS Reliant. He
(31:35):
is no longer part of the Enterprise crew. He's on
the Reliance crew, and they go to uh I think
SETI alpha five. They don't know that it's Set Alpha five,
but they go to SETI alf of five, which happens
to be where Khan has been uh chilling marooned for
the last several years um and strangely enough, Cohn recognizes
Chekhov despite the fact that Chekhov was not part of
(31:56):
the crew in in Space Seed, the episode that con
showed up and but never find that. And then so
they go They go there because they're looking for a
planet that is devoid of life in order to use
as a testing facility for the Genesis Project, which is
this terraforming project, right, And uh, if it weren't for
the idea that we have to find a lifeless planet,
the rest of the movie never would have happened. Now, granted,
(32:18):
they actually go down beam down to the surface of
the planet to check, which might not be the best
way to avoid bringing life to a lifeless planet. I
don't know. No, By the what is it the twenty
four century? Humans no longer shed skin cells or pop
or poop or breathe or you know, anything like that.
All the thing, all those organic functions that we used
(32:39):
to have. That's that's that's so twenty century. So but
you know what happens in the movie, of course, is
they test the Genesis Project and discover that it can
turn a dead planet into a lush, life supporting world
in a matter of hours, which is essentially the stuff
of magic. It's we have no technology even remotely close
(33:01):
to being able to do that. But it is interesting
that it was related to the topic we're talking about
right now. But that leads us to another question. Okay,
science fiction aside, is this something that we should actually
be concerned about in the first place? Is it as
big a deal as the Outer Space Treaty and these
(33:21):
various organizations would have us believe. And that depends upon
whom you ask. You know, um, there's a nature. Geoscience
ran a couple of different articles on this very subject,
and the first one was written by Alberto G. Firing
and I'm probably butchering the names. I apologize and dark
(33:42):
Shoals Macouch, who published a piece titled the Overt Protection
of Mars, and in that article they argued that we're
making way too big a deal about possibly contaminating the
Red planet, and their arguments were numerous. One of them
was that the way you said though with your own
you make it sound like they're like, ah, what the
heck I mean? I admit I get really cavalier in
(34:07):
the section because uh, I don't agree with their their perspective,
but I should say that their their paper uh is
not written in the snarky tone that my notes are
written in. I think they make some good points. Yea,
there's some there's some decent points. They say that the
restrictions are making it very difficult to explore Mars, and
(34:28):
we've said there there's a case for that. The Curiosity
Rover example is is that that's an actual, real historical
example we could point to. And they argue that we're
holding back scientific progress in an effort to protect something
that might not even be there. They also say it
adds to the expense of these missions to make certain
(34:48):
that the stuff we send up is sterilized. Um. And
they say, hey, you know what science has shown that's
pretty plausible that life could cling to a rock that's
been jettisoned into space through some event and then travel
to another planet and then survived the trip down to
that planet. And since that does seem to be possible, Uh,
it's probably true that tons of Earth microbes over the
(35:10):
millennia have already gone to Mars through natural means, and
that means that they're already there. The Earth microbes that
were so worried about bringing to Mars have been there
for millions of years. Yeah, we're I mean, we've definitely
found bits of what we're pretty sure our Mars stuff
here on Earth resulting from what we assume we're primordial impacts.
(35:32):
There's no reason to think that bits of Earth that
broke off after meteors or asteroids or comets or whatever
impacted us would not have similarly made their way over
to Mars and to other planets in the Solar System
and etcetera. Uh. And you know, maybe before the building
blocks of life and or early forms of life happened here,
but maybe after. Without a time machine that's way more
advanced than the way back machine, we may never know. Um. Also,
(35:57):
even if those rock samples that we found are not
bit of Mars, we're really pretty sure that like some
and or pounds of Martian micro meteorites land here on
Earth every year. So so this this kind of transfer
happens also, I mean, depending on even if we don't
see it very often, when you think about it over
(36:18):
geological time or the age of the Solar System, transfer
of matter between planetary bodies probably happens fairly frequently. Yeah, yeah,
on that scale certainly. And so if if we're imagining
there's a case where microbial life can be transported from
one body to the other and then survive for a
significant amount of time once it gets there. I mean,
(36:39):
not like dying eighteen hours after it arrives on Mars.
Um then that's probably already happened. Yeah, And speaking about
dying eighteen hours after it arrives on Mars, one of
the other arguments that said is, hey, Mars might really
suck if you're a living thing like that, that's almost
beyond a speculation. I mean, Mars would suck, but Mars
(37:04):
is crappy, yeah, for for for our our style of living.
I mean, I mean, I'm not a I'm not a
particularly lush, lux luxurious kind of guy, but even for me,
Mars is a little sparse for my taste. But then again,
we don't know. I mean, the life finds a way, yea.
So they said that if Mars is at a point
(37:27):
where it cannot sustain Earth life, then microbes probably wouldn't
survive very long in the Martians surface. Ancient Earth life,
assuming some had actually landed on the planet in the past,
probably died out once the conditions on Mars became too hostile.
It probably adapted for a while, and then once it
reached a certain point, could no longer survive, and any
(37:50):
life form from Earth today would die out pretty quickly
due to the same conditions. So bring all the Earth
life you like, it's not gonna have a chance to
contaminate anything. It'll die first. Or they argue it's possible
that Mars could support Earth like life on it. And
if in which case, all that stuff that's been going
that we just talked about, that's been going in there
over the geological time, yeah, it means that already contaminated.
(38:13):
It's already there, right, and that Martian and Earth life
maybe may have coexisted for millions of years at this point.
Or it could be that one had output had had
replaced the other. That's impossible to know. I mean, there's
even a hypothesis that's popular that says that, you know,
Earth life may have come from Mars. It's not like
we have strong evidence for this, but it's a possibility
(38:34):
that's taken seriously right now. If you look at that argument,
they're essentially saying, so either Mars can't support Earth life,
in which case there's no issue, or Mars can support
Earth life in which case it's already there, so contaminating
is a non problem. Stop making us worry about it.
We want to send stuff up there like crazy. Uh. Then,
(38:55):
in the subsequent edition of Nature Geoscience, Catherine A. Conley
and John D. Rummel wrote a rebuttal titled Appropriate Protection
of Mars. So you can probably tell from the title
that they disagreed with a previous argument. They also, by
the way, we're part of these organizations we were talking
(39:15):
about earlier, so you know they have a specific point
of view on this um. But I mean, good point
they might bring up here. What about science? Yeah, they
said that they are those protective measures, while certainly uh, comprehensive,
are vital if we are to understand the potential for
life on Mars, as well as gain insight to the
(39:36):
origins of life on Earth. If we do contaminate Mars
with Earth life, then we never are able to answer
definitively the question, does was their life on Mars? If so,
did it share a common ancestor with life on Earth?
Was it, in fact the ancestor to life on Earth?
Or perhaps was Earth the ancestor to life on Mars.
(39:58):
We wouldn't be able to answer any of those questions
because we have already fouled the test results right. In fact,
they said that if we don't have strong policies, then
scientists end up studying their own contamination rather than anything
pertaining to the actual planet or moon or whatever it
may be. Yeah, so this sounds like they're they're looking
out for the future. I mean, the goal here is
(40:19):
just saying like we want to uh, to be as
careful as possible to make things as friendly as possible
for future research, or or you might say like we
decided to send this team in to see how big
this forest is, and the way we're figuring it out
as we're cutting it all down as we go through, like, well,
what was the point of that? Yeah, And it highlights
(40:41):
how how we we don't have a second chance in
these kinds of experiments. It's not like if we muck
up the first Mars, there's a second Mars that we
can just be like, oh, just throw that one out
to the go to the next one. What I mean,
you know, and I guess the next one is like
Europa or something like that exactly. But but yes, that
would that would not be what I would like to
(41:02):
call scientifically great, Well, it sounds like you've bought into
that NASA shill line. You don't even accept the existence
of anti Mars Mars too. Uh yeah, I'm a I'm
a total anti Mars denier. No, that's why we we
we've wove in is very complex. No, I'll tell you
(41:23):
about anti Mars. Sometimes it's always on the exact opposite
side of the Sun from Earth. That's why you don't
see it. I think my nose just started bleeding. Is
it flat? Is it a flat planet? Flat Mars? They're
all flat planets. They all flow down here. So, uh,
this is a This was one of those fun topics
to kind of take a look at because it's it's
(41:43):
it's come up a lot before and it's never gone
into full depth. Yeah, it's something that we've mentioned a
few times, but we really wanted to kind of explore
the whole question further. And I do side more on
the caution part of the equation, because, yeah, I get
the frustration because we're at a stage now where we're
(42:06):
capable of doing a lot more more than we've ever
done in the history of mankind. That the private space
industry has has boosted our ability to reach destinations far
beyond what the official, governmental backed bodies were able to do.
But we can't allow that to just turn space into
(42:28):
a new wild West. If we want to answer these questions.
If we ultimately decide these questions aren't that important, then
that's another factor. I will be very sad if that
day comes, but or that it's just physically impossible for
us to answer them given the constraints, Given the constraints
you have, given that that microubs are really determined to
be places, and and it could even be that that
(42:52):
there could be microbes on Mars, but they might be
in a very localized region, and unless we just happened
to target region by sheer luck, we never find it. Right.
That's that's a possibility. It's not necessarily likely, but it
is possible that the the evidence we're looking for is
contained within a certain region on the planet. And and
(43:15):
that makes it even more tricky for us to get there.
Before finally people said, look, you had your chance. We're
building a condo there. We've we've got a lot of shallow,
frozen puddles to jump in if we're going to try
to find the one I think the microbes I think
I just came up with an idea for a movie,
and it's essentially the Martian meets Break into Electric Boogaloo,
(43:38):
where there's the development uh company that wants to come
in and build Martian condos, and then there's the scrappy
youth group that really want to protect the pristine environment
of Mars, and they do it through breakdancing, your stunt, silence, globus.
All I need you to do is promise you'll buy
(43:59):
a get to the Premier, all right, So that kind
of wraps up this discussion. If you guys have any
thoughts about this, maybe you're thinking you guys are making
way too big a deal about this, let me tell
you why we should not worry about it. Or maybe
you have a very passionate argument to protect the pristine
nature of these places. Until we have definitively or as
(44:22):
close to definitively as possible, answered the questions we have,
write us and let us know. I want to hear
your thoughts about it. Also, if you have any suggestions
for future episodes that kind of thing, get in touch
with us. The email address to use as f W
thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us
a line on social media like Twitter where we are
f W Thinking, or Facebook where you search out W
(44:43):
your thinking, we'll pop up. You can leave us a
message there and we will talk to you again really
soon for more on this topic in the future of technology.
This is forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota.
(45:10):
Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, Little Green
Men taught me how to do the bop. I'm Jonvin
(00:21):
Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're gonna be
talking about life beyond the bounds of yeah, which we've
talked about in a couple of episodes before, but we're
specifically talking about how do we search for life and
and be sure that we found it and that it
definitely came from capital somewhere capital else. Yeah. We're not
(00:46):
just talking about alien life, but alien life that we
definitely didn't put there. Yeah. Yeah. So this is important
because of multiple things. One, we're very curious about whether
or not there is life outside of our planet. The
odds are pretty good, considering the vastness of the universe
that life also exists somewhere else. Whether it exists somewhere
(01:08):
within our detectable range of view is another question. And
then we also are hoping to maybe even learn more
about the origins of life on Earth, particularly from any
indications of life on our our nearby neighboring planetary and
moon bodies. Right, yeah, I mean one thing that would
(01:29):
be interesting would be if you go to other objects
in the Solar System and you find life forms there
that are based in DNA. You could say, ah, this
may be a piece of evidence for the theory that
DNA precedes the evolution of or the origin of all life. Right.
The DNA is a necessary component. You didn't have it
(01:50):
the other way around. You didn't have life that it
eventually got. DNA is a molecule. But there's another way
you could read finding life with DNA, which is that
what if it just came from some other DNA based life? Right?
What if? What if we also thought we had discovered
the smoking DNA gun on a surface such as Mars,
(02:12):
only to find out, much to our chagrin later on,
that whoops a daisy, it actually hits a ride on
the very probe we sent there, and in fact came
from you know, uh, dubuke, debuke, quite debuke, just random place. Well,
then let's say it came from Peoria, okay, our Kalamazoo, Michigan.
(02:33):
No matter where it comes from. That this is more
than just a problem of like corrupting our data samples
and our senses of childlike wonder. Uh. You know, if
we bring earth life along with us to a place,
how can we be sure that we won't be committing
unintentional genocide on whatever life forms might happen to be
(02:53):
native to that place to begin with? Right, So this
this is sort of the problem of something like kud
zoo here in the southeast. Right. Kud Zoo is not
native to the southeast United States, but anyone who has
spent any time, particularly north of Atlanta, is very familiar
with kud zoo. It's this creeping vine. It was brought
in specifically to try and help curtail erosion on hillsides.
(03:18):
I know this because the place where I grew up
absolutely covered and cut zoo over one place. I very
often see it, especially in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee,
and I go back there is in like former construction
sites and digging sites, places where there have been a
large large sections of earth carried away by earth movers
(03:39):
are flattened. Then there will, you know, years later, be
kud zoo all over it. I specifically remember a telephone
pole outside of Oakwood, Georgia, which is where I grew
up that because of the way the vines had grown
up the pole and along some of the wires, it
looked like Godzilla, and so we called it Cudzilla. And uh,
but the point that I'm making here is that cuts
(04:00):
do is is an invasive species that has killed a
lot of the native plants by covering them up. You know,
it's competing for the same resources, right, and it's a
really effective and growing exactly. So the fear is that
we could potentially bring something from Earth to another planet
where it would be uh capable of adapting to those
(04:22):
conditions and edging out any sort of indigenous life. Yeah,
and this is the subject that we're going to be
talking about today typically goes under the name interplanetary contamination
exactly for the process, and we're also going to be
talking about the process of trying to prevent this, which
is often known as planetary protection. Yeah. It's sort of
(04:42):
like a microbial version of the prime directive. The prime
directive of course being in star trek, the thing where
you say that you will do no harm, that you
will not interact with with other stuff there, with other
life forms out there, unless like it's really important or
there's like a chick you want to get up with,
or exactly unless the PLU calls for it, right, totally, totally,
(05:02):
but but at a microbial level, you know, that's basically
the same thing. Yeah, so we're not talking about bringing
life forms like multicellular complex organisms like rabbits, and the
probe isn't going to be having an infestation of badgers.
I mean, honey badgers are are a real problem, especially
(05:22):
in Far Cry four, but maybe water bears though, Yeah, okay,
there you go. But now we're we're specifically telling about
microbial life and or or things that aren't even life
yet but would be very interesting if we were to
find them in a place other than Earth, like what
they call organic molecules, right, the building blocks that indicate
(05:43):
perhaps the presence or uh the one, one time presence
of life, and maybe that the things we discover on
other planets aren't life but are rather remnants of what
used to be life sure, or or you know, write
all that DNA stuff that we were talking about, uh
earlier in this very episode and also for a couple
episodes before this. You know, either amino acids or nucleo bases,
(06:06):
nuclear tides, whatever you want to call them that sort
of thing. Yeah, and uh, or I mean something as
simple as methane, right, sure, yeah, something that that's considered
an organic moloch exactly. So interplanetary contamination, it actually works
both ways. We'll talk about that a little bit more
later on. But there is like forward contamination and backward contamination,
and that essentially means are we taking stuff to another
(06:28):
planet or are we bringing stuff back to our planet
from somewhere else. But interplanetary contamination is a big deal.
I mean, it's something that lots of smart people have
talked about, and in fact, there are agreements between nations
not to do that thing. Uh. The Outer Space Treaty,
which we have talked about multiple times on this show. Right,
(06:51):
we've talked about Outer Space Treaty for as far as
it goes with the idea of can you own property
in space, the idea that the Moon is no one
property you just because you put a flag there. The
answer is yes, you can if you buy it from me, right,
if you're, if you're not, if you're, if you're not
too upset about handing money over to a total scam artist,
(07:12):
you two can own landscape on the moon. Uh. So
for The Outer Space Treaty actually has a section that
covers the idea of interplanetary contamination, and its specifically reads
UH that states parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies
of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies,
and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their
(07:33):
harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of
the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter, and
where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose. Now
that's specifically backwards contamination. Well, it mentions both. It mentions
forward and backward contamination. So it says that we will
avoid quote they're harmful contamination. They're referring to the Moon
(07:55):
and other celestial bodies. And then it also says, don't
don't mess up Earth when you come back, which is
what happens, of course in Dawn of the Dead or
not neither the Living Dead. Yes, a space probe returning
from Venus comes into the atmosphere and then and then
hilarity ensues. Yeah, some sleepy people decided to have a party.
They're coming to get you, Barbara. In addition, the Committee
(08:18):
on Space Research, also known as Coast bar has created
the Coast bar Planetary Protection Policy, using the Outer Space
Treaty as sort of their starting point. And here in
the United States, NASA has a division that's dedicated to
this pursuit as well. It's called the Planetary Protection Office.
Its slogan is all of the planets, all of the time,
(08:41):
which you know is an ambitious at all. You know, like,
no no pressure there, NASA. You can fool all of
the planets some of the time, some of the planets
all the time, but you can't fool all the planets
all the time. Also, it just reminds me of that
of that hyperbole and a half quote to clean all
the things, like clean all the planets. Yes, but so
(09:02):
we mentioned there are two main types of planetary contamination.
It can be either going out or coming in. Yeah,
So the going out part we'll talk about more detail soon.
The coming back part, Uh, that's that's something that's already happened, right,
We brought samples back from the Moon. Sure. I mean,
if you believe NASA that we've been there, well, I
(09:22):
mean I want to put you in a very uh,
very frustrating scenario. Imagine you have just been to outer
space and you made it back to Earth safely, and
you're like, oh my god, I went to outer space. Yeah,
Like I want some mac and cheese. I want to
hug my dog. Like no, nope, you are going to
(09:43):
sit in a container and wait for a long time,
for like a month. Yeah. So in the Apollo missions, uh,
the returning equipment and astronauts had to undergo a thirty
day quarantine period after each time, after each mission, just
to make certain that nothing brought back would be harmful
to life here on Earth, because he can't be too careful.
(10:04):
You know, it's pretty people were pretty sure that there
wouldn't be anything incredibly dangerous, but you don't know. It
may be that the soils would have contained some sort
of highly dangerous carcinogen or something. Yeah, better safe than sorry.
This is funny. I mean I what I just said
was based on what the Apollo astronauts had to do.
(10:24):
What what is the process? Now? So let's say you
return from the I S. S. Do you have to
go through quarantine today? I'm sure there's I know there's
a period of observation, but it's like a couple of days.
I don't think it's as long as thirty days because
you're not typically bringing anything back with you that's extraterrestrial
in nature, right, you are aboard the I S S. Now,
there might be some some pretty far out people on
(10:47):
the I S S. But they aren't so far out
as to be not of this Earth. Yeah, well yeah,
uh and and as long as you're not demonstrating like
a clear case of space madness, it just takes me
back to ren and stimpy with the creamy new Guta Center.
So uh so the obviously creepy pasta obviously. Uh we'd
(11:13):
also love to get our hands on any kind of
life that originated from outside of the Earth. But if
we were to do so, our hands, grimy, grimy hands
are metaphorical hands, literal complex instrumentation hands, right, So we'd
love to be able to take possession of life that
(11:34):
originated from outside of our our own planetary home, right,
but that obviously could come with a substantial risk, lots
of different risks. We could in fact have the opposite
of what we were talking about earlier, where you know,
if we were to bring something from Earth to another
planet and it were to uh to to really multiply
(11:57):
in an uncontrollable fashion, the same thing could put ventually
happened bringing something from another planet back here on Earth,
and that could be bad. So uh, most people say
that the obvious solution for that is to use a
system of containment that you never allow whatever it was
you brought back from another planet to escape a controlled, contained,
(12:21):
you know, uh facility, So which makes perfect sense. You know,
you wouldn't be like, hey, we found martian daisies, let's
plant it on Earth and see what happens next to
all of our major food crops. There's a school right
down the road that would really use some some beautifications. Oh,
(12:42):
the Martian daisies are eating all the small animals. That's
probably not anything to worry about, you know. And then
you get some horrible science fiction film, and there are
a couple of different scenarios we sort of mentioned the
different ideas. One is that we send a probe out
to uh, another celestial body, and we end up getting
(13:03):
some sort of result that suggests that yes, we've found life,
or we found organic compounds that suggest the presence of life,
only to find out that whoops, we may have brought
that with us. So that's one of the really frustrating uncertainty. Yeah,
and it's something that's happened. It's not like this is
this is new this or or or just a theory orhypothetic. Yeah.
(13:25):
Then there's also the scenario that we've we mentioned before.
We send a probe there, it brings some sort of
organic material life forms to a distant body, and then
they flourish there and edge out any life or eradicate
any signs of life on that planet, and then we
never know if life was there or not. Yeah, maybe
(13:46):
our microbes are like the europa version of the alien xenomorphs.
Maybe like everything that they exhale it's just acid and
it's terrible. Yeah, but I mean, wouldn't it be fun
to find out? Uh? Then scenario three, of course, is
that we send some sort of probe or mission someplace,
it comes back and then we get space Mono and
(14:08):
there's a George Romero film that breaks out as a result, which,
while it sounds groovy, is probably not something you actually
want to live through. I mean, you want to live
through it, but you don't want to experience it. Right,
It's preferable overall if it's going to happen. If it's
going to happen, you want to live through through it.
I don't know. I mean it really depends. I mean,
season two of Walking Dead, you probably just wanted to
(14:29):
be like, just ended. I didn't want to live through that. Yeah. Okay,
So we've got this concern that we've articulated now that
there are multiple reasons we might want to be concerned
about microbial life being transported from one planetary body or
solar system object to another um and we can all
pretty much agree that that's something that could possibly happen
(14:49):
and that we should be concerned about. But how concerned
about it should we be? Well, I mean we've already
seeing people say we can allow something like the Curiosity
rover to make its way over to locations that are
theoretically at least within its its range of roving to
check out potential water because of these very concerns, right,
(15:14):
because we know that there's stuff on the Curiosity and
that we we don't want. Yeah, that the Curiosity wasn't
completely sterile. So because of that, we cannot allow the
Curiosity Rover to come in contact with the water supply
and potentially contaminate it. So it's very frustrating because you
can see where the water is and the rover is
(15:35):
within range of it, and if you could just get
over there and and do some measurements, legally speaking, you
might even be able to tell if there is life
or or evidence of past life within that area where
there's water. I mean, that seems like that's gonna be
our best, our best option of finding something close to
the surface of Mars, but we can't do it. So
(15:58):
that's one reason people concerned about it, because we've already
kind of seen the limitation of what we're able to
do with the tools that are on Mars right now.
There's also a pressing concern that the agreements we talked about,
that official Space treaty, that's an agreement between nations, between governments.
It's not an agreement between private industries, as many want
(16:19):
to be. Asteroid miners have frequently reminded us. Yeah, so
private industry isn't beholden to those same restrictions and could
potentially go and muck everything up for everybody. Yeah, the
private space industry, by the way, is poised to get
huge or huger like soon. Um. You know, we've talked
(16:41):
about that asteroid exploration thing before and about Mars one before,
and I'm pretty sure that Mars one is super defunct
at this point, um, But an announcement from SpaceX this
very week, the last week of April, indicates that private
Mars exploration in general is certainly not dead. Elad Musk
really wants to send an unpersoned Dragon to spacecraft, which
(17:03):
is the upcoming descendant of the Dragon one spacecraft two
Mars in eighteen eighteen. Y'all. That's like so soon, um,
And he's he's putting the pressure on because in teen
Mars will be just thirty five point eight million miles
away from Earth and that is the closest we will
be to the Red planet between now and so. So yeah,
(17:29):
so soeen might be when private spacecraft touches down on Mars.
Hat to it, by the way, to Robert Lamb and
How Stuff Works Now a new video and podcast series
from How Stuff Works for for for covering that particular topic.
Uh yeah, I've actually heard that. Uh. And I don't
know if this was a joke or not, but someone
on Twitter said, did you know Elon Musk wants to
retire on Mars? And I was thinking, is this real?
(17:52):
And I never bothered to actually check, but it totally
sounds like something he would say, even if it were
just in Jennifer kind of a joke. Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah.
So the the point here is that if we are
going to legislate private companies about this kind of stuff,
we should probably get on that like yesterday. Yeah, because
obviously these concerns we're talking about if you want to
(18:12):
answer some pretty big questions like was there ever life
on Mars? Is there still life on Mars? And other
celestial bodies. We're using Mars because that's probably the one
that we're going to be hitting first, but there are
other like there are there are certain other moons in
the Solar system that are also potential uh targets for
for where we think life is most likely to exist
(18:35):
if it exists elsewhere in our solar system. Um, but
can we get some legislation in there so that we
make sure we don't destroy that evidence before we have
a chance to actually look for it. Well, this sort
of leads us to the question of what we can
actually do to prevent it. I mean, just short of
not ever going to other objects if we're if we're
(18:57):
going to be right, yeah, if we're going to be
conjugating with other objects in our Solar system, exploring them
or even colonizing them. Is it just inevitable that we're
going to contaminate them with our microbes or are there
steps we can take to reasonably uh two, with reasonable
confidence say that we're not doing that right because because
(19:19):
legislation is lovely, but the practical scientific end has to
come up with a practical scientific way of making that go. Yeah,
and here's the thing, spoiler alert folks, because I'm just
gonna go ahead and tell you right now, there is
no way that we can be certain that we can
explore and certainly not colonize another planet or moon without
contaminating it to some degree. The other real question is
(19:42):
how bad would it be. We don't know. But if
you're gonna be bringing, like especially for colonization, if you're
gonna be bringing a whole bunch of stuff with you
that has organic material involved in it, like food, and
you know us, then not us in this room, I'm
not going but you know human beings, Well, that's colonization.
(20:02):
Maybe we should take a step back first and look
at exploration. Yeah, I mean, even even just a rover
as we are apt to send out to places we
have not been before. Um and and and you know,
so when when we want things to not have bacteria
on them, we usually sterilize them. And that seems like
a pretty good thing. Like every time I go in
to get another facial tattoo, like, you know, there's there's
(20:24):
some kind of sterilization system in place, right, we can
blows the cockroach parts off of the needle, Yeah, yeah,
and we can we can do we can blow the
cockroach parts off of rovers as well. Yeah yeah, and
remind me not to go to your tattoo artist. So
I was wondering how space agencies do this, and I
looked it up. Actually, NASA has a page that's pretty
(20:46):
interesting where it explains its own strategies before for sterilizing
equipment specifically bound for Mars through the Mars Exploration rover programs,
and that would include Spirit and opportunity. So objects we
put on Mars, we had to sterilize them before they went.
How did we do that? Uh? So this is funny.
They had a mandate to carry quote no more than
(21:08):
three hundred thousand bacterial spores on any surface from which
the spores could get into the Martian environment. I just
imagine that some poor schmooze job. Who's got a count? Man?
But come on, that's interesting. The mandate is not perfectly sterile.
It's no more than three hundred thousand spores. It's just like,
(21:29):
you know, no box of cereal is completely without rat hair. Yeah,
you gotta have a little you know, one part pavilion.
That's not so bad. So they've got that mandate, But
how do they actually accomplish it? Well? While the spacecraft
are being assembled, First of all, technicians are going to
be constantly wiping down surfaces with alcohol solution. Uh. This
(21:51):
is sort of stage one. You just you're constantly wiping
alcohol on them to sterilize the surfaces, kill whatever microbs
are there. Uh. And they also conduct microbiology samples to
make sure there aren't too many organisms present on the
surfaces at multiple stages along the construction of these spacecraft.
(22:12):
And then they take all of the heat tolerant components,
which aren't all of the components, but it's you know,
a lot of the outer ones. They heat tolerant components,
and they heat them to a hundred ten degrees celsius
or two and thirty degrees fahrenheit. And then they've also
got a central box containing the roverse computer and main
electronic components, and that's kept sealed and all the ventilated
(22:35):
air that goes through it is heavily filtered to make
sure that if you've got any microorganisms inside the electronics box,
they don't get out once they're on the other a
little little microbe jail, MicroB jail forever. And then they
also say that on this mission they went out of
the way to prevent any non sterilized part of the
(22:57):
launch vehicle from accidentally getting to Mars, which I thought
was interesting that this is something you do actually have
to worry about, but they did because so think about
it like this. As the rocket launches, it frequently it
at several stages has to separate from a stage of
its launch vehicle. You know, it discards part of the
rocket and throws it away, and the last part of
(23:18):
the rocket that it discards, the third stage of the
Delta launch vehicle, is going to be on the trajectory
with the spacecraft heading out of orbit right. And so
if you just left it like that, the part of
the the last part of the rocket that it separates with,
would basically be on a course to follow the spacecraft
to Mars. And so instead what they do is they
(23:41):
start their journey going the wrong way, not totally the
wrong way, but not quite on a direct on a
direct trajectory to hit Mars, so that the if they
separate and the object follows them, the launch vehicle part
will float off in that direction, and then after ten
days they make a course correct and to meet Mars
in its orbit. That's good because it reminds me of
(24:04):
that picture of the rocket taking off and the little
frog attached attached to the rocket, and and we could
have ended up with the frog on Mars, right, But
not with this program, nor that frog is lost in space. Now.
Apparently for some past probes, like the Viking Lander, they
had an even higher standard of sterility, which was pretty
(24:24):
much actual like full sterilization. They would blast the whole
thing in a high temperature oven for several days. Yeah,
the numbers that I read were a hundred and eleven
point seven degrees celsius for thirty hours. But the electronics
on the most recent probes probably could not stand up
to that. No, they're not not not quite the same
(24:45):
caliber as the ones from the Viking. So that we
we go through actually less rigorous sterilization on planetary rovers
and probes than we used to write. Now, here's the
thing is that not all, not all the stuff we've
sent out has been completely sterilized. Uh. And even when
you your sterilization method is effective and you're reasonably sure
(25:08):
that you're beneath below that three thousand bacterial spores metric
there's it doesn't It doesn't magically clean off all the
organic carbon molecules that may or may not be attached
that material. Those could still be on the probe, which
if there are enough of them, it could be enough
(25:29):
to throw off our our you know, instrumentation and give
you a false positive. So there's still the possibility that
stuff that isn't actually life but rather are the building
blocks for life here on Earth could hit your ride,
and even if you've done the sterilization approach, they could
throw things off because it's it's the same source stuff
(25:51):
is what you're looking for when you're doing these particular
types of experiments. Now, one of the ways we could
try to limit this possibile the is to go to
these places but not actually land on them, to do
essentially fly bys orbits that kind of stuff. Look at
the various bodies from a distance. Um. And the problem
(26:11):
with that method, of course, is that you can see
a lot of things from a distance that indicate the
building blocks for life. But unless you're catching space people
go into the space mall on your camera, you're probably
not close enough to actually get a real idea. The
problem with not landing on a planet is that you're
(26:32):
not landing on it. Yeah, you're not able to physically
interact with the environment and either verify or or discard
a hypothesis, right like, without actually landing and taking samples
and and testing those samples, you can just make a
kind of educated guess. And even that's kind of like saying,
I want you to meet my friend, but you can
only drive around the block around this house right now.
(26:53):
You might you might see that when you think about
you might see that lights are on in the house,
and you may draw the conclusion, well that you know,
Joe's friend is probably home, or you might see that
all the lights are off and you think Joe's friend
is either not home or is it sleep Essentially, right like,
there's certain things that there's certain conclusions you can draw,
but you're not certain of any of them. Same thing
(27:14):
as problems is problematic with this unless you honk your
horn really loud and Joe's friend comes out of the house. Right,
if you were to honk your hornet at at Mars
or one of the moon's out there that we suspect
could potentially house life and little microbes came out and
formed a giant like emoji like picture, and then that
(27:34):
would work. Yeah, that would be something somehow, I don't
think that's a highly likely scenario now, so one crush
all of my dreams. Another thing we could try to
do is reduce contamination to a level that's below the
precision of our instrumentation. So, in other words, be reasonably
sure that the amount of stuff from Earth that is
(27:57):
attached to a probe is so minute, there's so little
of it that it is unlikely the instrumentation aboard the
probe would even detect it. So if we were to
detect any organic compounds, it would likely be from wherever
we sent the probe rather than from Earth itself. The
problem is we're getting better and better and making sensitive instrumentation,
(28:20):
so it requires cleaner and cleaner probes to make absolutely
certain that it's not an earth bound or earth originated,
uh organic compound that we're picking up as opposed to
something from Mars or wherever. Another difficult thing to to
design a test for is whether the sterilization that we've
(28:40):
done on a spacecraft has gotten it truly clean. Um,
and this is especially true in the nineteen seventies. Like
we're learning a little bit better now, but but it's
it's real hard to to test the cleanliness of an
object because most lab procedures for for testing macro real
contamination revolve around culturing samples of the material to see
if anything grows in those lab cultures, And lots of
(29:02):
microbes really resist being cultured in labs. I mean, I
wouldn't want to reproduce in lab either, So I understand.
Uh So, so that method might not be a good
indication of what can contamination we might be sending out,
and especially what contamination we might have sent out in
the past. Now this tells me that, um, some microbes
are a lot like some at lanterns. They really really
(29:25):
resist getting cultured. Whole theater jokes. Okay, so, uh, if
we go back to the other half of that colonizing, Now,
clearly we've already said that just sending an unmanned probe
or rover or whatever is and making certain that we
do not contaminate the destination is already really hard. It's
(29:46):
an order of magnitude harder to do that as a
colonization mission, right right, Well, I mean anywhere we go,
where we're going to be pooping, yeah, we will probably
start to run into this problem. And wherever we go,
let's be honest, we're there, yeah, exactly right right, I
mean we're gonna be eating and pooping and all sorts
(30:08):
of doing all the human things at that because that's
what humans do at that location. And unless you've created
a habitat that is completely sealed off from the surrounding
environment to the point where you even begin to question
why did we come here, It's like it's like going
to an exotic location and staying inside your hotel room
the whole time. I mean, what's the point at that
(30:29):
at that stage? But wouldn't that be the most hilarious
conundrum if you So we do discover some kind of
microbial life on Mars and and we're like, sure it
didn't come from poop, but it might have come from Yeah,
this is why we have to be thankful that The
Martian is just a work of fiction, because otherwise Mark
(30:51):
Whatley ruined it for everybody. Um So it's interesting. Also,
this is not just the plot to The Martian. It's
also the plot to star Trek to the Wrath of
con Or at least part of the plot. So stick
with me here because this is actually it's instrumental to
things that happened. If it weren't for the fact that
the Federation also wanted to make absolutely certain that any
(31:13):
any experiments involving terraforming, in this case not not colonizing
or anything like that, but terraforming a planet did not
destroy any life forms at all. If it weren't for
that fact, there wouldn't have been a story to the movie.
Because what happens is um uh Commander pav Pavel Chekhov
goes along with the crew of the USS Reliant. He
(31:35):
is no longer part of the Enterprise crew. He's on
the Reliance crew, and they go to uh I think
SETI alpha five. They don't know that it's Set Alpha five,
but they go to SETI alf of five, which happens
to be where Khan has been uh chilling marooned for
the last several years um and strangely enough, Cohn recognizes
Chekhov despite the fact that Chekhov was not part of
(31:56):
the crew in in Space Seed, the episode that con
showed up and but never find that. And then so
they go They go there because they're looking for a
planet that is devoid of life in order to use
as a testing facility for the Genesis Project, which is
this terraforming project, right, And uh, if it weren't for
the idea that we have to find a lifeless planet,
the rest of the movie never would have happened. Now, granted,
(32:18):
they actually go down beam down to the surface of
the planet to check, which might not be the best
way to avoid bringing life to a lifeless planet. I
don't know. No, By the what is it the twenty
four century? Humans no longer shed skin cells or pop
or poop or breathe or you know, anything like that.
All the thing, all those organic functions that we used
(32:39):
to have. That's that's that's so twenty century. So but
you know what happens in the movie, of course, is
they test the Genesis Project and discover that it can
turn a dead planet into a lush, life supporting world
in a matter of hours, which is essentially the stuff
of magic. It's we have no technology even remotely close
(33:01):
to being able to do that. But it is interesting
that it was related to the topic we're talking about
right now. But that leads us to another question. Okay,
science fiction aside, is this something that we should actually
be concerned about in the first place? Is it as
big a deal as the Outer Space Treaty and these
(33:21):
various organizations would have us believe. And that depends upon
whom you ask. You know, um, there's a nature. Geoscience
ran a couple of different articles on this very subject,
and the first one was written by Alberto G. Firing
and I'm probably butchering the names. I apologize and dark
(33:42):
Shoals Macouch, who published a piece titled the Overt Protection
of Mars, and in that article they argued that we're
making way too big a deal about possibly contaminating the
Red planet, and their arguments were numerous. One of them
was that the way you said though with your own
you make it sound like they're like, ah, what the
heck I mean? I admit I get really cavalier in
(34:07):
the section because uh, I don't agree with their their perspective,
but I should say that their their paper uh is
not written in the snarky tone that my notes are
written in. I think they make some good points. Yea,
there's some there's some decent points. They say that the
restrictions are making it very difficult to explore Mars, and
(34:28):
we've said there there's a case for that. The Curiosity
Rover example is is that that's an actual, real historical
example we could point to. And they argue that we're
holding back scientific progress in an effort to protect something
that might not even be there. They also say it
adds to the expense of these missions to make certain
(34:48):
that the stuff we send up is sterilized. Um. And
they say, hey, you know what science has shown that's
pretty plausible that life could cling to a rock that's
been jettisoned into space through some event and then travel
to another planet and then survived the trip down to
that planet. And since that does seem to be possible, Uh,
it's probably true that tons of Earth microbes over the
(35:10):
millennia have already gone to Mars through natural means, and
that means that they're already there. The Earth microbes that
were so worried about bringing to Mars have been there
for millions of years. Yeah, we're I mean, we've definitely
found bits of what we're pretty sure our Mars stuff
here on Earth resulting from what we assume we're primordial impacts.
(35:32):
There's no reason to think that bits of Earth that
broke off after meteors or asteroids or comets or whatever
impacted us would not have similarly made their way over
to Mars and to other planets in the Solar System
and etcetera. Uh. And you know, maybe before the building
blocks of life and or early forms of life happened here,
but maybe after. Without a time machine that's way more
advanced than the way back machine, we may never know. Um. Also,
(35:57):
even if those rock samples that we found are not
bit of Mars, we're really pretty sure that like some
and or pounds of Martian micro meteorites land here on
Earth every year. So so this this kind of transfer
happens also, I mean, depending on even if we don't
see it very often, when you think about it over
(36:18):
geological time or the age of the Solar System, transfer
of matter between planetary bodies probably happens fairly frequently. Yeah, yeah,
on that scale certainly. And so if if we're imagining
there's a case where microbial life can be transported from
one body to the other and then survive for a
significant amount of time once it gets there. I mean,
(36:39):
not like dying eighteen hours after it arrives on Mars.
Um then that's probably already happened. Yeah, And speaking about
dying eighteen hours after it arrives on Mars, one of
the other arguments that said is, hey, Mars might really
suck if you're a living thing like that, that's almost
beyond a speculation. I mean, Mars would suck, but Mars
(37:04):
is crappy, yeah, for for for our our style of living.
I mean, I mean, I'm not a I'm not a
particularly lush, lux luxurious kind of guy, but even for me,
Mars is a little sparse for my taste. But then again,
we don't know. I mean, the life finds a way, yea.
So they said that if Mars is at a point
(37:27):
where it cannot sustain Earth life, then microbes probably wouldn't
survive very long in the Martians surface. Ancient Earth life,
assuming some had actually landed on the planet in the past,
probably died out once the conditions on Mars became too hostile.
It probably adapted for a while, and then once it
reached a certain point, could no longer survive, and any
(37:50):
life form from Earth today would die out pretty quickly
due to the same conditions. So bring all the Earth
life you like, it's not gonna have a chance to
contaminate anything. It'll die first. Or they argue it's possible
that Mars could support Earth like life on it. And
if in which case, all that stuff that's been going
that we just talked about, that's been going in there
over the geological time, yeah, it means that already contaminated.
(38:13):
It's already there, right, and that Martian and Earth life
maybe may have coexisted for millions of years at this point.
Or it could be that one had output had had
replaced the other. That's impossible to know. I mean, there's
even a hypothesis that's popular that says that, you know,
Earth life may have come from Mars. It's not like
we have strong evidence for this, but it's a possibility
(38:34):
that's taken seriously right now. If you look at that argument,
they're essentially saying, so either Mars can't support Earth life,
in which case there's no issue, or Mars can support
Earth life in which case it's already there, so contaminating
is a non problem. Stop making us worry about it.
We want to send stuff up there like crazy. Uh. Then,
(38:55):
in the subsequent edition of Nature Geoscience, Catherine A. Conley
and John D. Rummel wrote a rebuttal titled Appropriate Protection
of Mars. So you can probably tell from the title
that they disagreed with a previous argument. They also, by
the way, we're part of these organizations we were talking
(39:15):
about earlier, so you know they have a specific point
of view on this um. But I mean, good point
they might bring up here. What about science? Yeah, they
said that they are those protective measures, while certainly uh, comprehensive,
are vital if we are to understand the potential for
life on Mars, as well as gain insight to the
(39:36):
origins of life on Earth. If we do contaminate Mars
with Earth life, then we never are able to answer
definitively the question, does was their life on Mars? If so,
did it share a common ancestor with life on Earth?
Was it, in fact the ancestor to life on Earth?
Or perhaps was Earth the ancestor to life on Mars.
(39:58):
We wouldn't be able to answer any of those questions
because we have already fouled the test results right. In fact,
they said that if we don't have strong policies, then
scientists end up studying their own contamination rather than anything
pertaining to the actual planet or moon or whatever it
may be. Yeah, so this sounds like they're they're looking
out for the future. I mean, the goal here is
(40:19):
just saying like we want to uh, to be as
careful as possible to make things as friendly as possible
for future research, or or you might say like we
decided to send this team in to see how big
this forest is, and the way we're figuring it out
as we're cutting it all down as we go through, like, well,
what was the point of that? Yeah, And it highlights
(40:41):
how how we we don't have a second chance in
these kinds of experiments. It's not like if we muck
up the first Mars, there's a second Mars that we
can just be like, oh, just throw that one out
to the go to the next one. What I mean,
you know, and I guess the next one is like
Europa or something like that exactly. But but yes, that
would that would not be what I would like to
(41:02):
call scientifically great, Well, it sounds like you've bought into
that NASA shill line. You don't even accept the existence
of anti Mars Mars too. Uh yeah, I'm a I'm
a total anti Mars denier. No, that's why we we
we've wove in is very complex. No, I'll tell you
(41:23):
about anti Mars. Sometimes it's always on the exact opposite
side of the Sun from Earth. That's why you don't
see it. I think my nose just started bleeding. Is
it flat? Is it a flat planet? Flat Mars? They're
all flat planets. They all flow down here. So, uh,
this is a This was one of those fun topics
to kind of take a look at because it's it's
(41:43):
it's come up a lot before and it's never gone
into full depth. Yeah, it's something that we've mentioned a
few times, but we really wanted to kind of explore
the whole question further. And I do side more on
the caution part of the equation, because, yeah, I get
the frustration because we're at a stage now where we're
(42:06):
capable of doing a lot more more than we've ever
done in the history of mankind. That the private space
industry has has boosted our ability to reach destinations far
beyond what the official, governmental backed bodies were able to do.
But we can't allow that to just turn space into
(42:28):
a new wild West. If we want to answer these questions.
If we ultimately decide these questions aren't that important, then
that's another factor. I will be very sad if that
day comes, but or that it's just physically impossible for
us to answer them given the constraints, Given the constraints
you have, given that that microubs are really determined to
be places, and and it could even be that that
(42:52):
there could be microbes on Mars, but they might be
in a very localized region, and unless we just happened
to target region by sheer luck, we never find it. Right.
That's that's a possibility. It's not necessarily likely, but it
is possible that the the evidence we're looking for is
contained within a certain region on the planet. And and
(43:15):
that makes it even more tricky for us to get there.
Before finally people said, look, you had your chance. We're
building a condo there. We've we've got a lot of shallow,
frozen puddles to jump in if we're going to try
to find the one I think the microbes I think
I just came up with an idea for a movie,
and it's essentially the Martian meets Break into Electric Boogaloo,
(43:38):
where there's the development uh company that wants to come
in and build Martian condos, and then there's the scrappy
youth group that really want to protect the pristine environment
of Mars, and they do it through breakdancing, your stunt, silence, globus.
All I need you to do is promise you'll buy
(43:59):
a get to the Premier, all right, So that kind
of wraps up this discussion. If you guys have any
thoughts about this, maybe you're thinking you guys are making
way too big a deal about this, let me tell
you why we should not worry about it. Or maybe
you have a very passionate argument to protect the pristine
nature of these places. Until we have definitively or as
(44:22):
close to definitively as possible, answered the questions we have,
write us and let us know. I want to hear
your thoughts about it. Also, if you have any suggestions
for future episodes that kind of thing, get in touch
with us. The email address to use as f W
thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us
a line on social media like Twitter where we are
f W Thinking, or Facebook where you search out W
(44:43):
your thinking, we'll pop up. You can leave us a
message there and we will talk to you again really
soon for more on this topic in the future of technology.
This is forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota.
(45:10):
Let's Go Places,
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Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com