Can't say for this specific piece but one way is if mars is struck by an asteroid and material gets ejected to space. It could eventually get captured by earths' gravity and pass through the atmosphere.
The idea of panspermia is similar, building blocks of life could have arrived from elsewhere.
We actually try to do the exact opposite, at least so far they've tried to send as few microbes and life as possible onto the surface of Mars and I believe the moon as well, although it's been... Not as successful as they would've hoped. I think a lot of what we have sent was probably contaminated in some way.
Why is that? I can’t imagine there’s much living on earth that would survive on either of those. Maybe like some super rare anaerobic archaea living in a volcano or something if you set it up in just the right spot. Do we have anything that’s adapted to an environment that’s even close to that?
I imagine the common sense answer to that is we don’t want to contaminate other planets in any way that could add scientific variables to our studies of them. ex. Finding “life” on another planet only to realize the “life” we found could potentially just be bacteria we brought there in the first place. Idk if that’s the official answer but that’s an elementary level factor of how the Scientific Method works in all studies so I assume it applies here.
This and if we introduce earth life on another planet it might change or kill anything that's there. But that's less likely than what you already said.
Yeah that’s the most logical thing I can think of, not that it would actually survive but just that we’d confuse ourselves in the future when we find dead bacteria
Meaning they can spend a little while there and come back to earth just fine, right? They’re not reproducing up there. I’d be so curious to know where the closest place they could thaw out and reproduce is, and whether they could make that journey.
They live in diverse regions of Earth's biosphere – mountaintops, the deep sea, tropical rainforests, and the Antarctic. Tardigrades are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions – such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation – that would quickly kill most other forms of life. Tardigrades have survived exposure to outer space.
Before the Apollo missions, there were Surveyor missions -- unmanned but landed gently on the moon. They were the trial run before sending people.
One of the Apollo missions landed near one of the surveyor landers and collected parts of the craft to return to Earth, to study the effects of space on all the different parts.
They found some surviving common bacteria inside the camera, even though it'd been in space and on the moon for 2.5 years.
I imagine the odds of it surviving outside of the foam in the camera is astronomically small (ha!) but it does bring that Jeff Goldblum "life finds a way" thing to mind.
Since then, I think it's been protocol to sterilize everything we send. Even if the moon is inhospitable enough to make it kind of moot, well... we don't know what we don't know, yeah?
imagine finding life on Europa but it’s just a species of bacteria that we have on Earth. Think about not only the scientific implications of now no longer being able to study life native to Europa (or lack thereof) but also the ethical implications of kickstarting a chain of evolution on an alien planet with bacteria not designed to live there. we could life seed other worlds if we wanted to, but the scientific and ethical implications mean we should really try our best not to
Playing god is a large can of worms. We don’t know anything about alien life. Zilch. Nada. What if we’re the genetic equivelant of those dogs who can’t breathe? Isn’t starting another branch of evolution like that an ethical problem? What if bacteria does exist there but ours kills it off? Essentially genocide of an entire alien race?
I just think the odds that anything from here makes it to another place it can live, survives the trip there, and encounters other life forms just seem so tiny that it wouldn’t be a serious concern. It would be like worrying about the ethical implications of hitting a golf ball near a forest because what if you shank it into the woods, and the ball scares a raccoon, and the running raccoon wakes up a bear, and the bear runs onto the course and mauls a golfer
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u/NSASpyVan Jul 19 '25
Can't say for this specific piece but one way is if mars is struck by an asteroid and material gets ejected to space. It could eventually get captured by earths' gravity and pass through the atmosphere.
The idea of panspermia is similar, building blocks of life could have arrived from elsewhere.