reply to post by Leto
That's an interesting bit of history! Nice.
Uh, but I might be able to dispute that.
Did you know they found Streptococcus on the Moon lander:
link
During the Apollo 12 moon landing, astronauts recovered a lunar lander that had been sent to the moon years earlier. Upon examination back
on Earth, scientists found bacteria on the lander that were still alive after years of exposure to the vacuum of the Moon’s atmosphere! As Pete
Conrad, one of the astronauts on the mission, put it so eloquently, “I always thought the most significant thing we found on the moon was that
little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said [anything] about it”. The search for extreme life on Earth has revealed the
existence of organisms that can survive a remarkable variety of hostile circumstances. Life, it seems, is tough.
Now, those things are stringently sterilized when they are launched.
So, if plain Earth Bacteria is that hardy and that hard to remove, imagine how some kind of super-alien micro-organism might thrive.
In addition, I'm sure you're aware that 'sterilization' is rarely 100% complete removal of all bacteria and spores.
In fact, I've theorized this scenario as one of the methods by which budding space-faring civilizations become suddenly and prematurely extinct.
They find a planet that is inhabited by lower forms, but their Xeno-Biologist flubs up and a bit of contamination remains on the outside of their LEM,
and is taken back to their home planet, where, uncontested, it multiplies geometrically, as micro-organisms do, wiping out all life on their home. (a
similar scenario would exist if the newbie space-faring civ failed to realize there was life on a planet they thought barren, so they didn't
sterilize before lift-off to return).
(similar plots are found in the
Species 2 movie and others).
So, yes, contamination is never 100% and Chaos Theory works its charm.
[edit on 11/30/2008 by Badge01]