Bacteria can thrive in some amazing places: Deserts, Antarctica, volcanoes, underwater volcanic vents. Basically everywhere on earth, even the most extreme places.
So for any one property of the Mars enviroment, there will be a bacteria that can survive it. I’m going to go out on a limb and say there is probably a bacteria that can survive somewhere on the surface of mars. If there isn’t, then it probably won’t take long to mutate, and evolve into something that can survive there.
But the chances of that bacteria being in your potato are pretty slim. Earth top soil is completely different to wherever that potato will land on Mars.
If you want to send potatoes to mars without accidentally introducing bacteria, then yes, there is a risk.
On the other hand, if you want to seed mars with viable bacteria, you would do better by being selective about which bacteria you send there, and sending a food source more appropriate than a single potato.
This is a balanced take. If anyone doubts, you should read up on the scrubbing/cleaning NASA has to do on their rovers before sending them to Mars.
You know how that bottle of alcohol-based sanitizer says it kills ‘99.9%’ of all bacteria? Well 99.9% still leaves billions of the bastards behind. It’s the same for the UV treatment they do. And the ionic plasma jet. And the 8 or 9 other steps they take. And they’re really still not convinced every time they detect an organic on the surface of Mars we didn’t bring it with us by accident, have them make it through the vacuum of space and the hard radiation for the 18 month trip, and just release a handful of still living super resistant bacteria onto the surface.
i remember reading an article that said, in 1 g of agricultural soil, we find 10⁹ bacteria, while in 500 m depth below the surface (!) that reduces to a mere number of 10⁶ bacteria xD
Life is so resilient I’m more surprised when it doesn’t survive somewhere. There’s a geologically active sulfur deposit in Ethiopia with extremely harsh conditions. It was a sensation when scientists found bacteria in the water, but it later turned out the tests were contaminated and the place is actually, truly dead
Sort of. Anaerobes with co2 fixing pathways could very conceivably live and grow on Mars. They would grow slowly, but still orders of magnitude faster than human timescales. There’s also significantly more radiation on mars, so you’ll accumulate more mutations quicker. Time was ill defined here, but you could easily pick up adaptive mutations in as little as hours for fast growing earth based bacteria (because they have a new generation literally every 20 minutes). This would obviously be slower on mars with anaerobes (probably) but the speed at which microbes accumulate adaptive mutations could reasonably be described as “not long” and not at all be in the realm of marvel.
No… we know mars regolith (not soil) is high in perchlorates, that’s hostile to anaerobes, radiation and zero moisture make the regolith a non starter. Is there’s ice? That’s great, but it isn’t liquid, and it’s not saturating the regolith.
*I’m just a nutter who did a bunch of stuffing after reading Andy wier’s , the martian, mars is horrifically hostile to life as we know it.
There are anaerobes that reduce perchlorates (dissimilatory perchlorate reduction). Lack of moisture is a problem, but there will be some supplied by this sweet potato or whatever we’ve deposited on the planet. If we deposited it somewhere where ice was, there probably exists a region of habitability for a long enough period to induce the potential for microbial adaptation in a certain time frame.
It is hostile to life, but microbes would absolutely have a much better chance of growing there than humans, especially spore formers that could endure cyclic periods of high radiation and lack of water, followed by a very brief almost sublimating thaw, followed by freezing temperatures. That’s just if we didn’t provide more seeding material or more hospitable subterranean environs.
There is a significant (not meaning magnitude, meaning statistically reasonably) non zero chance that microbes are actively already living on the planet, not necessarily introduced by us but very possibly. Microbes have extremophiles in their ranks. Life finds a way.
Bacteria can thrive in some amazing places: Deserts, Antarctica, volcanoes, underwater volcanic vents. Basically everywhere on earth, even the most extreme places. So for any one property of the Mars enviroment, there will be a bacteria that can survive it. I’m going to go out on a limb and say there is probably a bacteria that can survive somewhere on the surface of mars. If there isn’t, then it probably won’t take long to mutate, and evolve into something that can survive there. But the chances of that bacteria being in your potato are pretty slim. Earth top soil is completely different to wherever that potato will land on Mars.
If you want to send potatoes to mars without accidentally introducing bacteria, then yes, there is a risk. On the other hand, if you want to seed mars with viable bacteria, you would do better by being selective about which bacteria you send there, and sending a food source more appropriate than a single potato.
This is a balanced take. If anyone doubts, you should read up on the scrubbing/cleaning NASA has to do on their rovers before sending them to Mars.
You know how that bottle of alcohol-based sanitizer says it kills ‘99.9%’ of all bacteria? Well 99.9% still leaves billions of the bastards behind. It’s the same for the UV treatment they do. And the ionic plasma jet. And the 8 or 9 other steps they take. And they’re really still not convinced every time they detect an organic on the surface of Mars we didn’t bring it with us by accident, have them make it through the vacuum of space and the hard radiation for the 18 month trip, and just release a handful of still living super resistant bacteria onto the surface.
EDIT: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-microscopic-fungus-survived-nasas-sterilization-protocols-and-is-hardy-enough-to-potentially-contaminate-mars-180988728/
Love it.
i remember reading an article that said, in 1 g of agricultural soil, we find 10⁹ bacteria, while in 500 m depth below the surface (!) that reduces to a mere number of 10⁶ bacteria xD
deep biosphere
Life is so resilient I’m more surprised when it doesn’t survive somewhere. There’s a geologically active sulfur deposit in Ethiopia with extremely harsh conditions. It was a sensation when scientists found bacteria in the water, but it later turned out the tests were contaminated and the place is actually, truly dead
this isn’t marvel, mutations require iterations. Theres no ecosystem to support mutations of earth based biologicals
Sort of. Anaerobes with co2 fixing pathways could very conceivably live and grow on Mars. They would grow slowly, but still orders of magnitude faster than human timescales. There’s also significantly more radiation on mars, so you’ll accumulate more mutations quicker. Time was ill defined here, but you could easily pick up adaptive mutations in as little as hours for fast growing earth based bacteria (because they have a new generation literally every 20 minutes). This would obviously be slower on mars with anaerobes (probably) but the speed at which microbes accumulate adaptive mutations could reasonably be described as “not long” and not at all be in the realm of marvel.
No… we know mars regolith (not soil) is high in perchlorates, that’s hostile to anaerobes, radiation and zero moisture make the regolith a non starter. Is there’s ice? That’s great, but it isn’t liquid, and it’s not saturating the regolith.
*I’m just a nutter who did a bunch of stuffing after reading Andy wier’s , the martian, mars is horrifically hostile to life as we know it.
There are anaerobes that reduce perchlorates (dissimilatory perchlorate reduction). Lack of moisture is a problem, but there will be some supplied by this sweet potato or whatever we’ve deposited on the planet. If we deposited it somewhere where ice was, there probably exists a region of habitability for a long enough period to induce the potential for microbial adaptation in a certain time frame.
It is hostile to life, but microbes would absolutely have a much better chance of growing there than humans, especially spore formers that could endure cyclic periods of high radiation and lack of water, followed by a very brief almost sublimating thaw, followed by freezing temperatures. That’s just if we didn’t provide more seeding material or more hospitable subterranean environs.
There is a significant (not meaning magnitude, meaning statistically reasonably) non zero chance that microbes are actively already living on the planet, not necessarily introduced by us but very possibly. Microbes have extremophiles in their ranks. Life finds a way.