You Contaminated My Planet!

definitely came from capital somewhere capital else. Yeah. We're not 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

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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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

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 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

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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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? 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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. Let's Go Places,