We know there are a lot of, er, distractions right now but NASA's got some sweet video of its asteroid rubble raiser NASA on Wednesday released images and video footage of the moment this week when its OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft scooped some dirt from the asteroid Bennu, some 200 million miles away. The plan is to send the sample back to Earth for boffins to study. “This amazing first for NASA demonstrates how an incredible team from across the …
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We might have grown in our very own Petri dish, but the sample was most certainly introduced from outside. And seeing as all life has this common ancestry, it isn't a difficult leap to imagine a microscopic invader with the ability to focus on that commonality might find some leverage over time and eventually write itself into our final chapter.
Then again, enough cosmic flotsam has crashed into us, that we have already been exposed to most things out there already.
Might want to be a bit more cautious with the rocks that originated from outside our solar system, and perhaps use some extremely long barge poles on anything dropping in from Andromeda.
I have read that claim before, which is just that a claim. A claim fundamentally flawed and quite frankly ridiculous. <disclaimer>Well...my claim is that the claim is fundamentally flawed and ridiculous. It might of course be that it is my claim that is so. And I am probably less qualified that Drew Smith.</disclaimer>
It is ridiculous because it is empirically wrong. There are loads of examples here on earth that bacteria that reach new shores can thrive quite well and create havoc. Okay, there is co-evolution still because if you go far enough back all life on earth has evolved together.
It is ridiculous because it doesn't define what an extraterrestrial bacteria is. Bacteria is a form of life on earth, extraterrestrial bacteria is therefore not a thing by definition. So to apply the constraints on how they operate in a body (and those constraints are both wrong and applied wrong btw) makes no sense. Does he mean extraterrestrial life that resemble bacteria? Would that exclude life that resembles single celled parasites more? What about fungi? Or viruses? Or something that fails to fall into our six types of life completely?
It is ridiculous because it turns the argument of co-evolution on its head. It is because we have co-evolved that it is so hard for the bacteria to attack us. All the creatures that hasn't encountered something they couldn't cope with has died and also then the attacking bacteria. He is using the main driving mechanism of evolution as a proof that the mechanism in itself can't happen. The goal of parasitic life isn't to kill its host, or at least the population of hosts. If it did, it would itself die out. Co-evolution is a driver to make it less deadly and benign, where the most successful end up being symbiotic. It can't be used as an argument that it has to be co-evolution to be deadly.
It is ridiculous because the claim isn't that probability is low. The claim is zero. It is a hard number to grasp in probability it is somewhat like proving a negative. He is claiming that there are no conceivable way for an alien type of life to have any form of mechanism that can prove to be deadly for any human. Life we know nothing about except it is constrained by the laws of physics. Or again, am I butting my head against some weird constraints of extraterrestrial bacteria which is a non-thing. Do they have to attack the cells for nutrients? Is it enough that they feed of something else and produce a toxin? No? What about if they are in themselves toxic? What if we are allergic, does that count? etc
I take issue with this! This assumes a pathogen would be viral or bacterial, but a strong fungus or algae could just as easily cause problems - Like in the Expanse book series, later on. Many lifeforms like to live anywhere that is very moist (inside us) and very dark (inside us) and they can cause us problems despite us never having pruned them into immunoresistant things, since they're not sculpted to /not/ instantly overwhelm the body and kill the host, like most pathogens are, because they need the host alive to transmit further.
That quote is false. It is trivial to see that the chance is greater than zero: at minimum consider that the chance of finding a planet with identical biology to ours is greater than zero. The chance of finding such a planet is obviously minute, but it is not zero. The chance of extraterrestrial organisms being bad for us is far greater than that: what's the chance of finding something that's been living in an environment very poor in some chemical and which has developed aggressive methods of harvesting that chemical from places it is found, say? The chance of anything being dangerous is likely to be extremely small, but it is not zero.
If there was some organism dormant in the regolith (which by definition then would actually be soil I suppose, since it contained micro organisms, regardless of how alien), it would not need to have DNA or proteins, just be opportunistic and find something in our makeup 'tasty'. This could be any of the molecules that make up our physiology. And as such, might be very hard to eradicate, as none of our current tools for dealing with such things would likely work. It would be more of a fungus of some kind in that respect.
Of course the odds are so vanishingly small of such a thing occurring that you'd probably be more likely to win the lottery 10x over, possibly without even buying a ticket, but life and the universe does surprise us at times. And the universe has a sense of humor, which is usually not kind.
There's a film from 1971 by Robert Wise called "The Andromeda strain" and another one from 2017 by Daniel Espinosa called "Life".
Both well made although the latter is bit far fetched in some aspects.
But downright scary in others.
Since they were announced, these missions (OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2) have kept me wondering about just how much thought, peer review and control is actually going into the handling of whatever will be brought back to Earth from the surface of a rock that has been hurtling through space for eons.
Both of them are absolutely incredible feats for mankind but the fact is that we really do not know what else is coming along (if anything) with what has been scooped up.
And that is a fact, not a conspiracy theory or a sci-fi flick script.
Just a thought.
O.
You raise a good point. I wonder what that meeting went like, because NASA probably included that in the risk assessment - does any impact within the scope of the probe's thrust and mass knock the asteroid into a threatening orbit.
Oh, who am I kidding? Aside from the cool as hell maths involved, it was a boring meeting.
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Predicting the orbits that far in advance is almost impossible for such small objects as Bennu. It may well collide with other asteroids, or even spin itself apart in the next millennium. But to to worry, we'll all be living in Dyson spheres by then, the Earth having been rendered uninhabitable by humankind's influences and the Great Eruptions of 2976 and 3148 (at least that's what it says in an interesting book which just appeared on my desk with the big, friendly words "Don't Panic" on the cover ...).
"The passenger-bus-sized spacecraft will spin with its robotic arm extended, and NASA will measure the moment of inertia to measure the mass inside the sample head on Saturday."
Brilliant: We could put some kind of instrument to measure what we captured, but instead we'll just use the entire spacecraft and physics as an instrument!
This.
I was wondering (not having read up on the project), if it might be tasked with docking at the ISS to offload it's cargo so it can be pre-analysed before entering the atmosphere. Would have saved carrying the necessary stronger shielding and chassis all the way there and back.
I would guess that the part that reenters will be some relatively small bit containing the sample which has detached itself from the rest of it, so the shielding you need will be relatively light. It would be interesting to know if that's right, and also if the rest of the spacecraft will reenter (and burn) or not.
I was wondering (not having read up on the project), if it might be tasked with docking at the ISS
So instead of coming straight back it has to reduce its radial speed (vis-a-vis Earth) to zero, while speeding up to an orbital velocity of 7.6 m/s (54.2 linguine per second) and ending up in the ISS orbit.
to offload it's cargo so it can be pre-analysed before entering the atmosphere
Which the ISS is a bit less than perfectly equipped for, with respect to the tests one wants to perform while simultaneously not contaminating the samples in any way.
So in short: you haven't thought this through. At all.
:-) It's actually quite fun to think how you could vacuum in space. Maybe initiate a really really tiny black hole that would gravitationally attract the material in the nanosecond before it evaporates. I appreciate there are a few techy challenges, but that's why the boffins get paid the big bucks.
It's actually quite fun to think how you could vacuum in space.
Simples. Just wrap the asteroid in a dust bag, and call it good. Vacuum makers can then charge $loads for new dust bags. Sadly, probably couldn't market them as Dyson Spheres as that name's taken by a line of bagless vacuums.
But I digress. And will shortly be off for a wander in cyberspace to see how NASA did it. Kinda curious if the blast of nitrogen would be enough pressure to allow vacuuming to work, or if it just trapped the ejecta. Also neat to just think about the composition being a ball of dirt, and a short video demonstrating perhaps why asteroids like this would be less of a threat to the Earth, and how comet tails form.
Pity Christo has died earlier this year; that would be something right up his street
In a strange coincidence, I've been re-reading Niven & Pournelle's Footfall. And last night it mentioned an old proposal to bag asteroids. So using solar mirrors to melt asteroids, catch the slag in a bag, build a mass driver and then use the slag as reaction mass to move asteroids closer to Earth where they can be mined & processed further. Even though it was only last night, I can't remember the name they cited for that idea.
But it's fun stuff. Downside to asteroid mining proposals is the cost, and although there are potentially huge amounts of nickel, iron, cobalt, they're not that scarce here, yet. And presumably as they've been bombarded by SEPs and cosmic rays, would be radioactive to some degree. But maybe that's useful if it means useful isotopes to extract. I still think that stuff is more useful for space-based manufacturing though, especially if zero-g allows for interesting products or alloys.
Trans-linear accelerator perhaps? (TLA)
Heh, I meant the name of the person who proposed asteroid bagging. Got me thinking about potential snags.. Like mass. Like the mass of the asteroid and the mass being launched being kinda important in moving and positioning any mass-driven rock into a more accessible location. Like not lithobraking it on top of your newly built steelworks waiting to process it. In-flight refining and mass driving just seems to make that a tad more complex, if it means the mass of the rock is changing as it goes.
" In order to measure how much cosmic rubble it has acquired, the passenger-bus-sized spacecraft will spin with its robotic arm extended, and NASA will measure the moment of inertia to measure the mass inside the sample head on Saturday."
That's pretty impressive to be able to measure 60 grams or less of material.. The craft itself weighs somewhere around 1-2 tons depending upon how much fuel is left!
"That's pretty impressive to be able to measure 60 grams or less of material.. The craft itself weighs somewhere around 1-2 tons depending upon how much fuel is left!"
Actually, with this method they can measure to tenths of grams accuracy! It's mindboggling the hacks they've pulled off to get this far, including pushing their camera and navigation systems far beyond the original design specs to even be able to sample from a site that small. Original target spec was an area 50m diameter, the largest potential site they had available was 16m diameter. The LIDAR system that was supposed to be the primary navigation method turned out to be unsuitable, and the backup Natural Feature Tracking system was pushed far beyond initial design specs to be able to pull this off. It's an impressive case of "make do".
Yes - it's the paint shortage. They run out of anything other than white and black (so shades of grey) on the secret Area 51 sound stage where this was mocked up. This is because Samsung have cornered the market for colour paint in the whole world to give us more lifestyle gaming.
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