Could these strange new microbes survive on Mars?
http://www.tgdaily.com/space-features/63941-could-these-strange-new-microbes-survive-on-mars
As our ability to better detect the presence of life increases in sensitivity, the locations where we find life increasingly making it easy to wonder if there are any locations on this planet that do NOT support some sort of life. While I am not a general fan of panspermia (all it does is push the question of the origin off someplace else), life has proven to be so robust on this planet that it is increasingly plausible to me that space itself is ‘infected’ with life. Indeed, while I still hold that life can originate quickly and easily, given the appropriate conditions (where appropriate is a pretty low threshold: liquid water, temperature gradients, and a variety of minerals and carbon), any newly evolved life could quite plausibly have to immediately compete with extraterrestrial ‘invaders’ that have had the benefit of several billion year’s worth of evolution. As such, it might be a rare planet that produces totally unique life of its own, the typical case might be a hybrid of some space invaders and whatever local ‘talent’ produced.
It sure would be nice to explore space enough to learn at this level of detail, but given NASA’s budget woes I suspect we are on the verge of a great pullback on space. It might be that India or China will pick up the slack (China certainly exhibits willingness), but we are in the midst of a massive brain drain in NASA and getting that knowledge reproduced somewhere else (in another language and/or culture) might be such a lengthy process that no one makes the effort.
I am not a person who thinks we need to have humans mucking around in order to get great science, I think robots can do an adequate enough job and tend to be so much cheaper that the cost/benefit seems clear. What we need is not only a commitment to regularly send out probes, but also a commitment to update the technology as well. NASA developed ion drives decades ago but they are only just finally making it into space. While risk aversion is often beneficial (though that didn’t help the Columbia or the Challenger, did it?) there should be some facility to rapidly test new technology, particularly when it has the potential to so radically reduce cost or duration of investigations.
Oh well, I guess we will just have to be happy with the odd picture from the Hubble before it de-orbits and burns to slag.
