an hour ago
We should be dropping bags of extremophile organisms into the Martian atmosphere to get a start on terraforming it.
an hour ago
The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago. The second best time is now.
an hour ago
What if we are the bag of organisms?
29 minutes ago
All the study says is that their lab yeast survived shock waves and perchlorate levels similar to those on Mars.
That's all.
3 hours ago
I think by "survive" they mean that yeast spores can briefly be put in a "mars jar" and then be revived, not that they can become metobolicaly active, or even last for an extended time on mars
38 minutes ago
Is there any food for them on mars?
4 hours ago
Yeah, we can make beers on mars!
10 minutes ago
I came here to write this.
We could call it "The beer at the end of the universe"
an hour ago
And yet the stuff in my freezer went bad.
8 days ago
So send the yeast.
an hour ago
More seriously, they send only sterilized landers to Mars, to avoid killing all life there (if there is any), and to avoid the problem of finding in a few years the contamination we sended there. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection
3 hours ago
My first thought on reading the title of the OP was 'I wonder if we've already ruined Mars with unhelpful yeast?'.
Surely there's nothing for it to eat there yet though.
3 hours ago
When jupiterians come to explore mars they'll face a horror movie scenario with long dormant alien pathogen eating through their carbohydrate shells.
4 hours ago
Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%, Panspermia is starting to feel more and more likely.
3 hours ago
Something to blow your mind with. The early days in the universe there were millions of years were the average temperature in the universe supported liquid water.
2 hours ago
Okay, but this is the average temperature of a big cloud of hydrogen with oxygen yet to be invented right?
3 hours ago
I don't think millions of years is long enough for anything interesting to happen life-wise, is it?
2 hours ago
On the one hand, (primitive) life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions allowed it.
On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
3 hours ago
hard to know with so few data points
an hour ago
>hard to know with so few data points
i've yelled at the interns several times but none have been able to set up a haldane soup focus group yet
2 hours ago
all of those theories depend on one assumption, that life and our existence are products of a purely random collision of events.
IMHO, "We don't know" is the only answer to the question of how many planets have life on them or the probability of some forms of live existing somewhere. 0 is as valid as 10^128 until more than one other life supporting planet or moon is found to establish some baseline for speculation. otherwise, we're talking sci-fi here, in which case I think stargate's version seems decent.