by Alec Muffett
The Viking landing craft were sterilised in case of polluting the Martian biosphere, and lest contamination skew test results.
Given that bacteria can survive way over a year in space, and given the implausibility of manned space flight for the next 100 years or so, perhaps we should start launching microbes to the stars in the hope of populating a few other planets, in the hope that something of Earth might survive interstellar travel and our own foibles?
This rings of “interplanetary biological warfare”, depending on how much store you put in the idea of life having developed independently elsewhere.
We wouldn’t want our microbes doing elsewhere, what they and our viruses did to H G Wells’ Martians, on Earth (even if it’s only to different microbes, rather than anything more advanced)…
Someone once thought it would be a good idea to introduce rabbits to Australia, too.
BTW you misspelt polluting as populating in the above.
🙂
Of course, who’s to know if this hasn’t happened already (at least within the Solar system) due to naturally occurring impact ejector transport?
Still, you could see this as akin to the Earth’s ecosystem sending spores out into the cosmos in the same way as a fungus sends its spores into the atmosphere on Earth.
Our missionary microbes may land on a very small planet and dwarf it’s native inhabitants causing unimaginable havoc.
Perhaps we could be the missionary microbes from a far larger planet and we owe our lives to a similar speculative space mission.
We didn’t need to be very large to wreak our own brand of havoc though.
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