"Tardigrades on the moon is not good"



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OApril 11, 2019, the Israeli company SpaceIL has Beresheet (In Hebrew for "In the beginning") a lunar lander crashed on the Moon. BeresheetThe payload provided by the Arch Mission Foundation, a non-profit association, was supposed to be a safeguard of information for the Earth. It included a DVD containing 30 million pages of human knowledge, as well as 60,000 engraved pages requiring no computer, keys of 5,000 languages ​​and DNA samples of 25 people. According to the president of the Arch Mission Foundation, Nova Spivack, in the event of a disaster, this library of information, parked on the moon, could be enough to "regenerate the human race".

Many might consider Arch's mission as whimsical, others deeper. But few objected. After all, it was their money. The creators have certainly done more ridiculous things. Damage to the crash, though.

But then he came out on August 7 that Beresheet Carried an additional cargo, some 10,000 microscopic animals called tardigrades, on a piece of tape the size of a postage stamp. Amateur microscopists call them "aquatic bears" or "foam pigs". They have the ability to survive dehydrated for years, dehydrated, and are also very resistant to radiation. Now they were on the moon.

At first, the reporters recounted the story with a light touch. "Thousands of tardigrades have stranded on the moon after the accident of a lander," wrote Mindy Weisberger in a playful way in LiveScience. "The water bears were stuck on the moon after a crash," the BBC reported. "There is certainly an excellent source material for a sci-fi horror film. The attack of piglets foam of the moon? We would look at that. "

But alas, the pleasure did not last. "The tardigrades on the moon are not good," said astrobiologist Monica Vidaurri of NASA Goddard in a series of tweets on Aug. 10. She continued (pauses between tweets were omitted):

That 's not cute This is the result of a major gap in the responsibility of planetary protection and ethics between public and private science, and we do not have a single. have no idea what can result. This means that the private sector can continue to do what it wants. This means that they do not respond to any protection / ethics office. And the fact that nothing is happening in terms of policy and that decontamination standards ALWAYS have not been updated, is dangerous beyond imagination. And if you think anything like "sweet, we've created lunar beings!" So stop. Think carefully. We have created something on ANOTHER world that we do not understand well. He has an environment, even though we have deemed him "barren" for all life on earth. . .

What you are doing is showing your enthusiasm for the long history of forcing OUR values, our systems and, in this case, living beings in another world. This is not our right and it is not our job. If we maintain this mentality, even if we remove the word "colonization", the premise is the same. It's colonialism. It is imperialism.

I accuse!

Other alleged planetary protectors have shown more sobriety, but have nevertheless joined the Inquisition, claiming that the offenses committed in the Tardigrade Affair threatened not only lunar science, astrobiology and paleontology, but also the whole structure of international law.

These statements are of significant clinical interest, so let's take a moment to review them.

The record of the global protectionist charge is based on the assertion that sending a milligram of tardigrades to sleep on the moon constituted a "harmful contamination" of another world, which is forbidden by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. But that does not make sense, because it is conceivable that the tardigrades may have survived the crash and even remain reanimated for several years. years on the Moon in a dormant dehydrated form, they can not be metabolized there, because there is no liquid water on the surface of the Moon. So, until someone comes to pick them up and take them to a laboratory for scientific studies, there is so much dust.

In addition, the Beresheet mission was not the first time people were delivering microorganisms to the moon. In fact, Apollo missions have not left milligrams, but kilograms of live microbes on the moon in pockets of human stool. It was a clever thing to do, because by leaving the trash behind them, the astronauts were able to come back with more rocks from the moon, which are worth much more than manure. But it did not matter if they did not, because as soon as the astronauts opened the door of the lunar module, millions of microbes were released on the lunar surface, millions more were transported in space suits and billions were sent. go back down after the lunar modules left in orbit finally crashed on the moon. In addition, even if technical solutions could have prevented these discharges at great expense, it would still have been impossible to carry out Apollo missions in compliance with the guidelines for the protection of the planet, since it would never have been guaranteed that the Lunar module would not crash, an event that would have released microbes throughout the landscape.

Monica Grady, a leading astrobiologist at the British Open University in Milton Keynes, acknowledged this story, but commented, [planetary protection] It was 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were present, which is true, but since then we are much more aware of how we should preserve these planetary bodies.

"I do not think anyone would have been allowed to distribute dehydrated tardigrades on the surface of the moon. So it's not a good thing. "

More conscious or less conscious? The Apollo waste was dehydrated and effectively sterilized by the lunar environment a few hours after their departure, and the missions would have been impossible without the acceptance of such transient discharges. So Something "It's not a good thing," but it's not that tardigrades were sent to the moon. This is because no one "would have had permission" to do so.

If you can not send tardigrades to the moon, you can not send people to the moon.

In addition, there are deeper problems here. In the first place, who gave the moon to astrobiologists? Giving the moon to astrobiologists is like giving the stratosphere to ichthyologists.

But what about Mars? Unlike the Moon, the red planet has indeed a considerable and justifiable interest for astrobiology. While the surface-lunar combination of daytime temperatures of 127 degrees Celsius (260 Fahrenheit) and high vacuum would qualify it as an excellent laboratory autoclave, totally excluding any viable microbial life, there are no such conditions on Mars . In addition, unlike the cold, dry and very aerated conditions that prevailed in the region, the beginning of March was hot and humid, with a thick atmosphere of CO2, which made it a close twin of the Earth at the time when life there appeared. Life could have developed on Mars, and even if it could no longer survive on the surface, it might have left fossils and even persisted in hydrothermally heated underground reservoirs. So, science would not be served by banning the humans of Mars?

No. To hunt fossils on Earth, one must travel long distances over undeveloped land, do difficult work with picks and do a delicate job of peeling layers of sedimentary rocks to reveal the remains of life trapped in the ground. ; inside. To find and characterize existing life on Mars, drilling rigs will be required to probe hundreds of meters into the ground and collect water samples and submit them for biological investigations and biochemical tests in the laboratory. . All these operations are light years beyond the capabilities of robotic robots. As for the objection that if we send humans to Mars, we will not know if the life we ​​find there is indigenous or something we have brought ourselves, it is nonsense. If that is indigenous life, it will have left fossils or other biomarkers proving its existence on Mars before our arrival. This is how we know there was life on Earth before the appearance of man here. Believe the opposite, it is to agree with creationists who argue that fossils do not prove the existence of life on Earth before humans, because God could have created the planet with fossils included. This is not science.

We do not need to wait for human missions to become feasible for global protectionism to undermine the exploration of Mars, it is already the case. In 2015 the Curiosity rover, sent to Mars at the cost of more than $ 2 billion for US taxpayers, was prevented by reasons of protection of the planet from conducting an investigation on nearby places where it had appeared that groundwater was flowing to the surface. These could possibly contain microbes or remnants of microbes. NASA's planned Mars return mission to Mars has been enormously complex, with many stand-alone rendez-vous and dock operations in space being inserted into the mission plan to meet the demands of protecting the planet. . These include not only the "protection" of the surface of Mars against contamination (impossible) by microbes transported from the Earth, but also the protection of the Earth against (impossible) microbes living on the Martian surface (which, if they already existed, would have arrived long ago on their territory). many of the 500 kg of naturally ejected Mars rocks arriving here each year.) As a result, the return of the sample has shifted from one mission to one vision. In fact, because of the constraints imposed by planetary protection on the design of the mission, NASA has not sent a life-detection experiment to Mars since 1976.

So we spend billions for a robotic planetary exploration program and tens of billions for an inhabited space flight program, while subjecting these programs to global protection constraints that prevent them from achieving their goals – constraints whose absurd foundations are laid bare by the will of their advocates to fanatically demand their application even for a self-sterilizing environment such as the Moon of the Earth.

But there is a bigger question. It is not only the question of who gave the moon to the astrobiologists, but who gave the universe to the professional scientists. Humans do not exist to serve scientific research. Scientific research exists to serve humanity. We learned a lot of science by setting up America, but that's not why we did it. We will gain new knowledge by becoming an invasive species, but that is not why we should do it. We should do this to establish new branches of human civilization, which will enrich the history of man in the future, just as the human colonization of the Earth will enrich it enormously compared to what it would have been if we stayed in our native homeland, Kenya. The Rift Valley. We will create new nations, with new languages, literatures, inventions, traditions and heroes, on new worlds filled with wonders to discover, certainly, but also history to discover.

Our presence will not "contaminate" these worlds, but will enrich them in a fabulous way. To settle them is not "imperialism", it is the construction. Humans are not vermin. We are creators, not destroyers. A living world is better than a dead world. A world of thinking beings is better than a world without them. We are not the enemies of life and thought, we are the vanguard. he is our place to continue the creative work. If we can, we should not just bring life to Mars, but make it live.

I think we will do it. And when we are done, no one will be able to look at our work and not feel more proud of being human.

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