What if Mars is barren of life?

[jnc]

gimmicky wastes of time that confuse people and trivialise what robots can and cannot do.  They are not surrogate people, no matter how many facebook pages and twitter accounts they have, they are just tools, with specific abilities and limits.

This reminds me of an old Dilbert cartoon:

"You're immune to both romance and mirth. You must be a.. a.."
"That's right, I'm an engineer."

I hear you, but much as I wish everyone thought that way, they don't. If the plucky liitle Mars robot explorer boosts public interest in, and thus support for, extra-planetary exploration, I will grin and bear it.

Noel

[robertinventor]

Okay did a bit of a search, obviously don't expect the level of detail of a manned mission when there has been so much funding etc for research into manned missions.

But did turn up this paper

http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars121.html

which goes into practical issues of a Mars telepresence mission in some detail, and with lots of references.

Unfortunately it's published in the "Journal of Cosmology" which is a bit of a crank site sometimes, a mix of perfectly valid scientific papers with more wayout fringe stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology

But this one certainly reads like a sober scientific paper.

This is their summary

"Telesupervision of multi-robot systems has great potential to increase science return, and human safety and productivity when we send humans to explore Mars. Appropriate sharing of risks and workload among humans and robots will allow human attention to stay focused on critical tasks. Our experience in developing a telesupervision architecture for Lunar and Martian exploration using a homogeneous fleet of mineral prospecting robots (Podnar et al. 2006; Halberstam et al. 2006; Elfes et al. 2006; Dolan et al. 2005) demonstrated some of these benefits. The experiences gained from this initial NASA-supported work, as well as a project on telesupervision of multiple surface craft for Harmful Algal Bloom detection (Podnar et al. 2008), have allowed development and testing of some of the enabling technologies, including high-level mission planning, hazard and assistance detection, and high-fidelity telepresence including geometrically-correct stereoscopic remote vision systems.

Augmenting human abilities with robotic systems is crucial to achieving the long-term goals of human space exploration. Employing the described telesupervision architecture provides formal integration of multi-robot coordination and multi-level robot-human autonomy. Initially deploying humans on orbit rather than on the Martian surface will increase safety while allowing round-trip communications times compatible with effective telesupervision. Testing the technology in low Earth orbit and on the Moon prior to Mars will contain risk and costs."

Obviously a lot more research into the topic is needed. Maybe it has been done and I just haven't managed to turn it up?

[robertinventor]

Okay here is a better reference, a Nasa paper on a proposed telepresence mission to Mars called HERRO

http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa.gov/papers/Oleson2012.pdf

"This paper presents a concept for a human mission to Mars orbit that features direct robotic exploration of the planet’s surface via teleoperation from orbit. This mission is a good example of Human Exploration using Real-time Robotic Operations (HERRO), an exploration strategy that refrains from sending humans to the surfaces of planets with large gravity wells.

HERRO avoids the need for complex and expensive man-rated lander/ascent vehicles and surface systems. Additionally, the humans are close enough to the surface to effectively eliminate the two-way communication latency that constrains typical robotic space missions, thus allowing real-time command and control of surface operations and experiments by the crew. Through use of state-of-the-art telecommunications and robotics, HERRO provides the cognitive and decision-making advantages of having humans at the site of study for only a fraction of the cost of conventional human surface missions.

It is very similar to how oceanographers and oil companies use telerobotic submersibles to work in inaccessible areas of the ocean, and represents a more expedient, near-term step prior to landing humans on Mars and other large planetary bodies.

Results suggest that a single HERRO mission with six crew members could achieve the same exploratory and scientific return as three conventional crewed missions to the Mars surface."

[JohnFornaro]

First, a bit of stationkeeping:

Well just a quick reply.

Try using the "reply with quote" feature.  It makes it easier to back track answers and so forth.  You don't need to use it all the time, I certainly don't, but it is a very useful feature.

[quote Bob, later on]That's just quick typing, and you can't go back an edit your posts after you post them.[/quote]

Yes you can.  There's a "Modify message" feature as well, available if you're logged in.

***********

I don't understand the extreme fear of pathogens.

Because you could die, since you'd have no natural pre-existing resistance to an infectious pathogen?  Carl Woese is absolutely correct:

Unless you can rule out the chance that it might do harm, you should not embark on such a course.

So a human occupied spacecraft will have many trillions of micro-organisms...

No doubt, but you're still overlooking the mechanism by which these mircrorganisms, specialized to the human body, are placed in martian sweet spots, and thrive to such an extent as you are concerned with.  On the surface, every last one of them is likely to be killed.  The only mechanism you allow so far is the possibility that "just one of them falls right down into a crevice in a pebble just by chance".  Which isn't sufficient for too much concern, I'd say, which you partially acknowledge:

It is the toughest step surely for it to find a habitat. But - the endospores are also amazingly long lived ...

But the human ones are less likely to have such amazing lives of dormancy.  We should certainly be very careful about backward contamination; somewhat less so for forward contamination.  Even so, we should study Mars from orbit for a good while before attempting to land.

In return you get a ten fold increase in performance over remote control from earth and but the crew are still 100 times less effective that they would be on the surface.

Unfortunately, these are made up numbers.

Spin gravity is undemonstrated with unknown long term effects.  Proving it up would require an extensive program.

As always, I insist that a 900m, 1rpm, 1gee ring station, would solve all gravity related problems, and would have no severe coriolis effect problems.  I do realize that there could be a mass effect for biological creatures.  Living bodies may need a nearby massive planet, and the mass of a ring station just wouldn't cut it.  But I don't know that anybody is even proposing this possibility.

As to extensive programs:  I think that objection applies to any program not already demonstrated.

Robert the Inventor:  BigDog Rox!  Thanks for sharing.  When the guy kicked him, he was able to maintain his footing!  Same on the ice!

True, as you point out in a later post, "Human location locomotion is quite efficient".  However, it is the robot which mimics human locomotion which is not.

I trot out again, heh heh, my idea of horses on the Moon, and Mars by extension. Yes, they'd need spacesuits, already demonstrated for humans, readily conceived scalable for horses.  All of the software, thanks to evolution, is included in the horse itself.  Several paces, low energy consumption, self balancing, intelligent and easily trained, strong.  What's not to like?  Possibly even cheaper to keep in operating than a robot of similar capability.  Not only that, why not dogs?  They could carry samples and tools, and be quite useful.

We are talking about very complex systems hear, not toys.  Which is why I keep asking for numbers.

Well, I hear you loud and clear.  Robert the Inventor is thinking, by my thinking, outside the box, and generating ideas, some of which have merit.  He is not yet able to provide numbers for these ideas yet, and that is a problem with some of his suggestions.  But he is not suggesting the use of toys; he is giving examples of toys which have already solved some important problems of calculation.

Literalitudinity.  You tend to be obstreperous, to the point of confusing the issue deliberately:

Cliffs are not the only thing that are vertical, so are ladders.  The LEM had a ladder.

When operating on more than one floor humans tend to incorporate stairs and ladders into their buildings.

Why would you want a ladder and floors on an unmanned mission? ...

I want to see numbers, power, mass, volume, needed to achieve the same as a human mission.

You fail to realize that if there were a human tended base with more than one floor, stairs and ladders would probably be incorporated.  You get that Andrew's not talking about an unmanned station?

Your call for numbers, etc. is valid, but not easy to answer.

Why would you want to climb a vertical cliff?

People who don't want to explore don't climb vertical cliffs.

Whether you need a head ... is a different but related question.

I keep my brain in mine, but hey.

[robertinventor]

It is the toughest step surely for it to find a habitat. But - the endospores are also amazingly long lived ...

But the human ones are less likely to have such amazing lives of dormancy.  We should certainly be very careful about backward contamination; somewhat less so for forward contamination.  Even so, we should study Mars from orbit for a good while before attempting to land.

Ah - but how likely is your "less likely"? Out of 1000 species in 19 phyla on the human skin.

Also many Archaea some so hard to study we don't even know how many phyla there are. Though not endospore forming, some extremophile may be able to survive without metabolising for a long time on the surface of Mars protected from UV. If all you have of some of the extremophiles on the spaceship are some RNA sequences you were able to duplicate, you can't say anything really about what they might do on Mars.

"less likely" just isn't good enough. You need to prove it can't happen.

I agree we need to care about backward contamination. But the risks are so high both ways, with backward contamination you risk at worst the human race or more, so that's of course a higher risk in a sense, but the other way you risk messing up a whole planet and losing much of incalculable value.

I don't really myself want to call that a "lesser risk" as if it doesn't matter so much.

As for the grain of dust, you haven't convinced me that it can't happen, so many endospores, so many grains, gigantic on the scale of an endospore, not only does it seem possible, just seems a matter of time before it actually happens.

There are so many other ways it could happen too, it's like the many headed hydra. If you finally manage to show that one vector can't happen another will just pop up in its place. So - in the air, on a pebble, lands in a drop of water, falls into a shadow, is trodden into the ground by an astronaut or the wheel of a rover, gets stuck to the wheel of a rover, gets stuck to a fleck of material from the parachute and blown away in the wind, gets buried deeper into the ground during an excavation, down to level of permanent briny water possibly.... That's just a selection there are probably many other ways it could happen during a human mission to Mars.

Just one oversight, one vector missed, and one endospore that gets through all the problems unscathed all the way to a habitat where it is able to survive, and that's the end of your planetary protection policy. Like with one of the early Moon missions when they opened the space capsule door by mistake when it was in the ocean, so any micro-organisms inside would have immediately found a nice warm vast wet habitat to reproduce in.

It's really not up to me to prove it can happen, not with something with as long term consequences as this. Just to suggest ways that it might happen, so long as it is at least semi-plausible it can happen, it's up to those who still propose that humans do visit Mars to prove rigorously that it can't happen. A hunch even a well informed one is just not good enough as they can be like the anaerobic halophiles that that expert said couldn't exist when he recommended dropping planetary protection protocols for Mars before Sagan's paper.

Also no-one has answered the issues with a human occupied spacecraft crashing during the landing on Mars. Until that can be solved, I think Mars has to be a no-go area for humans, even if you do somehow solve the issues to do with what happens when you get there.

Why run those risks at all.

Seems to be lots to like about telepresence, and really nothing much to prefer about humans on the surface except that natural feeling that humans like to be there, and wanting to see other humans walking about on the surface of Mars.

I feel that natural feeling too, imagination fired by the idea of humans walking on Mars. It would be great to colonise Mars, would be so interesting and exciting, I'd be following every step like with the Moon landings when I was young.

But you and I won't feel so good about it any more if a decade later we discover that the climate of Mars has started to change, and that the surface is covered in organisms of Earth origin, that some of the organisms there are become pathogens, and that humans can no longer hope to safely live on the surface of Mars.

Then perhaps you find out that there was some amazing life form living on Mars in some particular secluded spot, and organic deposits 4.5 billion years old - and now they are all just a slowly decomposing mass of Earth bacteria plus a few intriguing fossils of the hard parts of the organisms that no-one is quite sure how to intepret.

Someone should make all this into a blockbuster movie, it might create quite an impact. Or a good sci fi story at least. I wish I could write one, but though okay at expressing myself in writing, I've tried and just don't have the knack to write a good story like that, not yet anyway.

It might not happen. The worst outcomes there might even be low probability. But right now we simply don't have any way to be sure, and that's not good enough in my book.

Sorry to keep saying the same thing, seems a bit that I am. I should probably stop soon, especially as I feel I'm beginning to repeat myself .

This is the sort of conversation where sometimes its good to take a break from it and try again later when everyone has had a chance to reflect on it more.

The main thing in my book is there should be extreme caution for the first human mission to Mars, also for the first mars sample return.

If the first mission to Mars with humans is done from orbit and with telepresence, and the first MSR is done to high orbit or the Moon, that will satisfy the likes of me for the time being.

Then we will learn so much about Mars from that.

Hopefully also there will be more research into the contamination issues. Maybe also ways will be found to study the Archaea. Also with large quantities of Mars samples returned, e.g. to the Moon, similar quantities to the return of the Moon rocks to Earth, can actually study, with real Mars samples and with simulated Mars atmosphere, in detail, what is likely to happen to it when Earth life is introduced to it.

So in various ways we can study Mars, and study what the contamination issues really are in more detail and maybe we can have this conversation again when we all know more about it.

I can imagine the live feed from Mars explored by telepresence would be pretty interesting too. Agree that a cute anthropomorphic robot or dog with big camera lens eyes operated by telepresence would probably increase the audience ratings . But - if they just move more quickly than the current rovers, and can travel long distances like hundreds of Km even, that would make it more interesting too, if when you see an interesting rock on the horizon and drive there the same day instead of weeks later.

Robert the Inventor:  BigDog Rox!  Thanks for sharing.  When the guy kicked him, he was able to maintain his footing!  Same on the ice!

True, as you point out in a later post, "Human location locomotion is quite efficient".  However, it is the robot which mimics human locomotion which is not.

Yes it does doesn't it, I was impressed by that too.

With the human locomotion, - the ones like Asimo obviously could be more efficient than they are, but probably limited in how much better then can get yes, if just based on simple engineering.

My thought there is based on that chap who is imitating the human skeleton, and including even the way the muscles are able to absorb energy and re-release it just like ours do. A robot that incorporates that could be much more efficient at walking, if it incorporates those same tricks our body uses to reduce the amount of energy needed, perhaps it could be nearly as efficient as we are.

Sorry I didn't explain that well but hopefully it is clear now.

I trot out again, heh heh, my idea of horses on the Moon, and Mars by extension. Yes, they'd need spacesuits, already demonstrated for humans, readily conceived scalable for horses.  All of the software, thanks to evolution, is included in the horse itself.  Several paces, low energy consumption, self balancing, intelligent and easily trained, strong.  What's not to like?  Possibly even cheaper to keep in operating than a robot of similar capability.  Not only that, why not dogs?  They could carry samples and tools, and be quite useful.

For mars at a later stage in terraforming, if the decision is made that it's okay to go ahead, I like the idea of using mammoths, which we might well be able to clone by then.

They have special adaptations of the blood to really cold conditions

http://news.discovery.com/animals/woolly-mammoth-blood-bacteria-cold.html

As for suits for animals, or better suits for humans, this one using "lines of non extension" would be much easier to use than modern spacesuits which are basically "miniature spaceships"

http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/

Just that I wouldn't use it for Mars astronauts quite yet, obviously.

I've got the same adventurous and imaginative spirit when it comes to space as I expect the rest of you have, read the sci fi stories and imagination fired up by them. Go back say twenty years and I thought there were no problems at all with colonising Mars, hadn't heard of these issues and if I was posting on a board like this then I'd say just what you are saying. I'd be all for an immediate manned mission to Mars.

But nowadays, after what I've found out about the issues, there is no way I'd advocate colonising Mars at present, not until all these concerns and issues are laid to rest.

So anyway for a quick summary of what the issue is.

The one about a spacecraft rupturing on landing I think is the most convincing, as it's the one that you can never argue out of.

You can argue this way and that about the endospores, and it really needs more reseach to understand it clearly and we may never get a concensus opinion about what exactly is likely to happen.

But it is easy see that there is nothing at all you can do to protect the planet in the event of a crash landing of a human occupied spaceship.

And - of course backward contamination is the highest risk of all if it could mean extinction of the human race. But forward contamination is risking so much as well in my book.

BTW did you know as a result of this thread, literalitudinity has become briefly a Googlewhackblatt and coincidentally also has the same number of letters as Googlewhackblatt

Won't last for long as there are three posts here now using the word.

[JohnFornaro]

Ah - but how likely is your "less likely"?

As it turns out the counter is: "How likely is your likely?"  So we're at an impasse pending verification.

You need to prove it can't happen...

Further impasse.  You also need to prove that it will happen, in spite of efforts to control it.

The impasse is where the political extremophiles make their money, but also where progress is not made.

Just one oversight, one vector missed, and one endospore that gets through ...

True, but where does the fear mongering begin?  More importantly, where does it end? I agree with the principle of conservation, but you have not yet provided a mechanism whereby safety can be proven or not.  I quite understand if that specific proof is beyond your payscale at the moment.  But so far, the planet looks more barren than teeming.

If the decision that the planet is barren is made, and that soon, there is still the possibility of error some decades later, when a new life form is discovered.  If there is a permanent human outpost on Mars, I fully expect there to be a one way planetary quarantine put into effect, until the finally discovered lifeform, or its mutation, can be adequately understood.

If we farouk up (pardon the Arabic) the intial planetary protection, even then we would have discovered a new life form, and would have determined second genesis.  Not ideal, but for me, acceptable.  I'm not being cavalier (even tho I'm a wahoo), I'm trying to be pragmatic and perhaps even apologetic in advance.

But it is easy see that there is nothing at all you can do to protect the planet in the event of a crash landing of a human occupied spaceship.

Here is where the perfect becomes the enemy of the good enough.  That risk cannot be eliminated, it can only be better understood and then estimated.  By my take, Mars is too far into the future for too much planning, pending actual experience in the cis-lunar space.  While gaining that experience, we can learn more about the martian systems.

BTW did you know as a result of this thread, literalitudinity....

I am taking over, and have calculated all.  Resistance is futile.

Literalitudinity is.

[robertinventor]

Actually I have just found a study of exactly what we want to know, endospores survival on the Mars surface, it's here

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2011.0737

In the Expose E experiment on the space lab, says there was a second experiment which studied survival of endospores on the surface in a simulated Mars environment. The results were remarkable - the experiment ran for 3000 hours (125 days).

In that time period, 5% of the endospores survived on the surface in multi-layers. Less than one in 10^-6 survived in monolayers, but still some survived even like that exposed to the full sunlight on Mars (which was simulated by filtering the light from the sun to Mars intensity). In shadows on the simulated Mars surface, 75% of the spores survived for 125 days.

[robertinventor]

I can sort of understand where you are at, but for me, a one-way quarantine protection of Mars is just not good enough.

It's not just a risk for the astronauts who are landing on Mars you see - if that was all they could make their own decision about whether to take the risk or not.

But it's also risking the whole planet for all the scientists who want to study it, all the discoveries that might be made as a result of those discoveries, and all the inventions that would arise from those discoveries.

Indeed, also all the future generations of people who might live there if it is successfully terraformed once we know how to do it properly and if it is found out that it is okay to do it. (That's because if we just let life do its thing without much knowledge of how to set up the right populations of organisms and feedback loops , it could change the climate and the micro-organisms population in a way that prevents easy terraforming or evolves pathogens making terraforming for humans to live there just impossible).

So - all these other people who would be impacted need to have their say as well, and need to be taken account of.

So anyway that's what I think, put in a nutshell. Probably shouldn't say any more, if I've got nothing new to add.

I agree it is too far in the future for much planning at this stage. Except for the first Mars mission, that is reasonably imminent maybe in the next decade someone will do it, or next couple of decades.

So, it is good to do more planning of tele-presence for that, and proper complete mission planning continuing that paper I quoted above.

http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa.gov/papers/Oleson2012.pdf

Also, if there is any way to make sure people can see the advantages of tele-presence, for the first few missions at least, and the possible disadvantages of human landings at our current stage of knowledge.

If any of the groups planning a human direct landing on Mars in the nearish future do go ahead with their plans, I will be even a bit scared at what might possibly happen to the Earth when they come back, and feel really sad for what might well be lost on Mars as a result of their exploration. So - that's the one milestone in the future, I very much hope the first human mission to Mars is by telepresence. Then after that then we can make new decisions and see what happens based on what we know then.

It might be that by then when we see in practise how much can be achieved by telepresence, and given that by the time the first human expedition returns from such a mission that telepresence capabilities and technology will have moved forward enormously from the way it is now, that it might just be established as the norm to continue with telepresence, and people might even wonder why anyone wanted to land on the surface in the first place.

Anyway will see what happens then

Before then then of course the first Mars Sample return, I think we are both agreed that shouldn't be returned to the Earth's surface.

If anyone does go ahead with plans for a Mars Sample Return direct to the Earth's surface, I'll be speaking out as loud as I can to try and stop them doing it, the risk however small it is, if not proved safe is just something you can't even contemplate. In something like that, the burden of proof is to prove it safe, not to prove it unsafe.

I read somewhere that Carl Sagan suggested (I think a bit tongue in cheek) that the scientists planning that type of Mars sample return test it first with a container filled with Anthrax spores - with the idea that on the basis of our current knowledge what you bring back from Mars could be far worse than Anthrax spores. Not surprisingly no-one took him up on the challenge.

BTW answering something you said earlier, yes I found the reply with quote button, only after quite a few posts. It's funny how you can miss something like that just because it's in a different place from the place you are used to, I came here after posting in the newmars forum and it was in a different place, that's how I missed it, if I'd gone in the other direction I'd have missed the one there most likely too, so there's probably nothing you can do about it.

But anyway found it, and I've been using it. Works well. As you say, though, don't need to use it all the time, and I find sometimes though it's just easier to answer with a new post, as after a while it can get a bit hard to read if you quote every sentence you respond to.

[JohnFornaro]

Actually I have just found a study of exactly what we want to know, endospores survival on the Mars surface ...In that time period, 5% of the endospores survived on the surface in multi-layers. Less than one in 10^-6 survived in monolayers, but still some survived even like that exposed to the full sunlight on Mars...

Interesting.  Again, this is about survival, not "thrival", which is to minimize to some extent, your concerns about rapid widespread forward contamination of Mars with a carefully selected subset of our endospores.

Still needed in your conjectural proof is the mechanism by which these endospores, a subset of all endospores, are inadvertently carried to Mars, in spite of precautions; and the mechanism by which the subset of those surviving endospores, contaminates the entire planet in relatively short order.  The discussion rapidly turns to a listing of those particular endospores, which I turn out to know nothing at all about.  They may very well exist, as you surmise, but their actual existence and survival rates, is something you, or somebody else, must provide.  In short, there's a lot of research yet to do.

I can sort of understand where you are at, but for me, a one-way quarantine protection of Mars is just not good enough.

Moi?

It's also risking the whole planet for all the scientists who want to study it, all the discoveries that might be made as a result of those discoveries, and all the inventions that would arise from those discoveries.

The risk is that subset of a subset of organisms, and the particular mechanisms by which they would be known to spread versus the containment procedures to be implemented to prevent that spread.  I'm talking myself into believing that it's a small number, but I don't know.

As to the discoveries, you can only be talking about the discoveries of new life forms and the determination of second genesis, which has a lot of value, I agree.  As to inventions, I can only envision the possibility of say, new vaccines, which would take advantage of the similarities and/or differences between terrestrial and possible martian life, which also could have potential value.

Also, if there is any way to make sure people can see the advantages of tele-presence, for the first few missions at least, and the possible disadvantages of human landings at our current stage of knowledge.

If any of the groups planning a human direct landing on Mars in the nearish future do go ahead with their plans, I will be even a bit scared at what might possibly happen to the Earth when they come back, and feel really sad for what might well be lost on Mars as a result of their exploration. So - that's the one milestone in the future, I very much hope the first human mission to Mars is by telepresence. Then after that then we can make new decisions and see what happens based on what we know then.

Pretty much totally agree.  I plug again the 900m, 1rpm, 1gee manned ring station orbiting Mars, with a Mars-gee intermediate ring, and a fleet of lab and tool equipped rovers performing a comprehensive survey looking for life.

There is no rush to get to Mars, unless there is found to be signs of intelligent life.

[robertinventor]

Actually I have just found a study of exactly what we want to know, endospores survival on the Mars surface ...In that time period, 5% of the endospores survived on the surface in multi-layers. Less than one in 10^-6 survived in monolayers, but still some survived even like that exposed to the full sunlight on Mars...

Interesting.  Again, this is about survival, not "thrival", which is to minimize to some extent, your concerns about rapid widespread forward contamination of Mars with a carefully selected subset of our endospores.

Still needed in your conjectural proof is the mechanism by which these endospores, a subset of all endospores, are inadvertently carried to Mars, in spite of precautions; and the mechanism by which the subset of those surviving endospores, contaminates the entire planet in relatively short order.  The discussion rapidly turns to a listing of those particular endospores, which I turn out to know nothing at all about.  They may very well exist, as you surmise, but their actual existence and survival rates, is something you, or somebody else, must provide.  In short, there's a lot of research yet to do.

Yes of course lots of research to do yet. I'm not a researcher in this field, I can prove mathematical theorems, but it's not for me to prove this sort of a result, and as I said, already, if you can show a possibility of contamination, show that the probability of contamination is non zero, then the proof should be the other way, that it is safe.

But the vector of the endospores caught in a dust grain and carried in the Mars dust storm - that seems like a pretty easy way for it to happen now based on these figures. The dust grain gives UV protection to endospores in its cracks, and there is more from the dust storm itself.

There may well be liquid just briefly on the surface as a water drop did seem to form on a lander leg during one of the missions. They weren't able to analyse it just images it but it looked like a water drop.

If not then a bit under the surface - or in a cave.

Once it finds a habitat anywhere on Mars, and been able to thrive there, then by same method, won't take that long to spread to all similar habitats throughout Mars. Because once it starts living on Mars itself it produces millions of Endospores probably every day.

It's also risking the whole planet for all the scientists who want to study it, all the discoveries that might be made as a result of those discoveries, and all the inventions that would arise from those discoveries.

The risk is that subset of a subset of organisms, and the particular mechanisms by which they would be known to spread versus the containment procedures to be implemented to prevent that spread.  I'm talking myself into believing that it's a small number, but I don't know.

Good that you say you don't know . I don't know either. But it is plain that no-one actually knows, and that despite all the massive advances of the last century, still research into micro-organisms has huge gaps into it with even whole Phyla (in the case of the Archaea) completely unknown to science.

My plausibility reason is that though many micro-organisms are specialised to particular habitats, others are generalists like the polyextremophiles, and so organisms that thrive on human skin, some will only be able to survive there, but there will be others that can survive almost anywhere.

It's like in your garden, some flowers need special soil conditions and special care. But others can grow anywhere in the garden, usually the "weeds", and they are often more vigorous if anything.

So some of those 1000 micro-organisms in those 19 phyla could easily turn out to have extremophile capabilities. I wonder if anyone has studied the extremophile capabilities of organisms in the human microbiomes..

Then there are always those clean room extremophile Archaea including the ones that nobody yet knows anything about except that they exist.

As to the discoveries, you can only be talking about the discoveries of new life forms and the determination of second genesis, which has a lot of value, I agree.  As to inventions, I can only envision the possibility of say, new vaccines, which would take advantage of the similarities and/or differences between terrestrial and possible martian life, which also could have potential value.

Ah I had much more in mind than that.

The thing is, that micro-organisms are like miniature factories or nano-technological marvels. They are immensely complex and way beyond anything we can make ourselves at that scale.

So they can make things. Not just vaccines. Look at all the ways they are used in our modern society, micro-organisms are used everywhere, for food, biochemicals, crops, fertilizer.

Or - could be useful for turning light into energy, or might be able to digest materials no Earth organism can handle, or could be able to clean up radioactivity or various kinds of toxic chemicals.

Or make new materials, with new properties. New types of structures.

I think that in the future micro-organsims will be used more and more for this sort of thing.

The more different it is from Earth life the wider the range there.

So if it is really early life or it has evolved along a completely different path from Earth life, then there's almost no limit to what we could learn, seems to me. Because then it's like all our biochemistry and life science on Earth rich and amazing as it is, is all just different ways of combining the same bases C G T A and based on DNA and RNA.

If you found life that worked in a different way, different bases, or the same bases but different structure of DNA, it's like you have added a whole new extra dimension to everything, if you have two completely different forms of life to look at.

That might be some direction that life took in the very early years of the solar system before DNA and RNA took over, with the surface of Mars so ancient, it's seas so localised with no continental drift, and the whole planet was probably never covered with water, just parts of it only were covered by large shallow seas. So, there might be actual undisturbed deposits of those remains as the actual organics, not decomposed at least, maybe damaged by radiation or whatever, but if covered from the sunlight, and in the deep freeze of Mars and if no decay bacteria, it could be more or less unchanged from 4.5 billion years ago. Even might be able to bring it back to life again, like cloning mammoths.

Or it might even still be alive in some relic population at the bottom of maybe one tiny dried up sea bed with maybe some geothermal heat or whatever.

Or - could be none of those. But if it was there, and it's gone already when you first explore Mars, you might never even know what you lost.

Hope that's a bit clearer, that's what I had in mind, not just vaccines or the like.

Also, if there is any way to make sure people can see the advantages of tele-presence, for the first few missions at least, and the possible disadvantages of human landings at our current stage of knowledge.

If any of the groups planning a human direct landing on Mars in the nearish future do go ahead with their plans, I will be even a bit scared at what might possibly happen to the Earth when they come back, and feel really sad for what might well be lost on Mars as a result of their exploration. So - that's the one milestone in the future, I very much hope the first human mission to Mars is by telepresence. Then after that then we can make new decisions and see what happens based on what we know then.

Pretty much totally agree.  I plug again the 900m, 1rpm, 1gee manned ring station orbiting Mars, with a Mars-gee intermediate ring, and a fleet of lab and tool equipped rovers performing a comprehensive survey looking for life.

There is no rush to get to Mars, unless there is found to be signs of intelligent life.

Great so glad you agree there. It's the most pressing point after all, the rest we can find out more and decide later as you say. Yes, sounds like just the way to do it. Maybe eventually a Stanford Torus in orbit around Mars constructed from the materials of Deimos.

[JohnFornaro]

So if it is really early life or it has evolved along a completely different path from Earth life, then there's almost no limit to what we could learn, seems to me.

There's a very influential group of people here, who insist that should we stay home, contemplate our navels and meditate, that there would be "almost no limit to what we could learn".  I'm less inclined to accept either hand wavy raison as justification for how we should proceed.

Well, at this point, you and I are starting to repeat ourselves, and I'm not sure what newness or resolution there could be should the discussion continue.

[JohnFornaro]

Yes I agree when you start to repeat yourself, that's a clear sign that the discussion has reached the point where you probably aren't going to learn much more, but it's been a really good discussion and I thank you all for taking part.

Maybe we can take it up again once we learn more, either if Curiosity comes up with interesting results or later on.

Also hope I have given you all some interesting things to think about, as you have too in your responses.

I have certainly learned in observing your stream of consciousness reporting along the way of your researching this subject.

Oh.  And speaking of literalitudinity and other useful terms.  Try snarkasm.  I think I invented that one too...

[robertinventor]

Removed both the original message and my reply, don't want to be hurtful.

Try a shorter one. Also to say sorry for the sarcasm which was due to clumsiness in expressing myself and not intended as sarcasm. Reading it back afterwards and after reading your reply, I can see easily how it would be understood that way.

So, just to say, about the "influential group of people", okay I understand these things can happen.

I'm not influenced by any of the other people here, or indeed anyone else at all, not originally, so this is a completely independent point of view.

It just came out of concern after reading recent news stories about possible human Mars missions, raising a concern I had already from quite a few years ago, through independent thought about the matter.

I can say that with confidence because two weeks ago didn't even know there was anyone else as concerned in the way that I am about Mars contamination by humans both ways.

I'm all for adventure in space myself, keen on space exploration and human exploration of space too, so am not a "stay at home". Just someone who is concerned particularly about the issues involved with exploring planets that either might have life on them or might be habitable for life. It is a concern that has developed gradually over my life.

For other forms of space exploration such as space habitats, or the asteroids, moon, ice on Mercury at its poles etc. where humans might go then I'm all for it (so long as it's reasonably certain there's no life there).

Where there's life or might be or possibility of life or terraforming then I'm all for telepresence as a way of exploring the surface, at least for now until we know a lot more.

Since you also like the idea of exploring Mars from orbit at least to start with then we aren't so far apart, and it's rare you totally agree with anyone and the differences of opinion are what makes discussion interesting and worthwhile.

Then, here are the two links I mentioned in the deleted posts, still of interest,

====================

BTW I found a couple of other links the other day, this study from 2001 about the possibility of thin films of water on the surface of Mars. Basically - in some parts of Mars the pressure is high enough to raise the boiling point of water to 10C. It's still hard for water to form on the surface because the air is so dry that it would evaporate, just as water on Earth always evaporates unless the air is 100% humidity. Also the places where it is easiest for water to form are the driest places on Mars (i.e. with least amounts of ice to melt to form the water). But he points out that salt reduces the melting point of the ice and makes it easier for water to form.

http://ebookbrowse.com/haberle-water-on-mars-2001plw-pdf-d276815460

That suggests the idea that a short way below the surface, so protected from evaporation to some extent then the water could form more easily (maybe heated by the rocks warming in the sun).

Then I found this recent paper which was published just two months ago (Mar 15):

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08120099.2011.591430

I'll put the whole abstract, better than just quoting a short sentence.

"The correlation between liquid water and life may be our most reliable tool in the search for extraterrestrial life. To help develop this tool, we explore the complex relationship between liquid water, partial pressure, and solute freezing point depression on Earth and Mars and discuss the conditions under which liquid water is metastable on Mars. We establish the physical conditions for the existence of saline aqueous solutions in the pores of the martian near surface substratum. We find that thin films of near subsurface liquid water on Mars at –20°C could provide a viable niche for terrestrial psychrophilic halophiles. Since some martian salts can suppress the freezing point of aqueous solutions with minimal suppression of the water activity, some martian liquid water environments with a water activity above 0.6 may also be able to support terrestrial life at temperatures as low as −30°C, 10°C lower than the limit of terrestrial life."

This is a slightly different situation from the previous one, subsurface films of water so easier to form, also well below 0C. So seems such habitats could be widespread on Mars.

If those films do exist, that would give your habitat that you asked for earlier when you asked for a method by which the life could thrive and spread once it reaches the surface of Mars.

Still needed in your conjectural proof is the mechanism by which these endospores, a subset of all endospores, are inadvertently carried to Mars, in spite of precautions; and the mechanism by which the subset of those surviving endospores, contaminates the entire planet in relatively short order.

As for how they get there, could just be the endospore falls to the surface. Then it has those 125 days + it can survive there even exposed to sunlight if part of a monolayer - and probably survive for years in shadow.

Some time in the mission then an astronaut steps on the soil the endospore fell into and it gets trodden a bit into the subsurface layer and so encounters that film of cold salty water. If it happens to have the capability to live as an anaerobic psychrophilic halophilic autotroph (doesn't need to be it's only habitat) then it will thrive on Mars.

As for how it gets onto the spacecraft, there are all those different extremophiles in the clean room analysis.  There are all the organisms that live on humans, and there are the endospores that just get carried in the air and the air in a human occupied ship can't remove those completely (even in an operating theatre, then they just aim to reduce them to say a hundred or so colony forming units per cubic meter). Also organisms in the food for the astronauts too for that matter - sterilisation to make sure it doesn't go off won't be good enough for this sort of thing.

Then the final thing that is really hard to do anything about at current stages of knowledge, there are all the non cultivable archaea even complete phyla we don't even know anything about except they exist and some of those could easily be of the desired type (or rather undesired type ), if we don't know anything about them and know that many of them are extremophile enough to survive in spacecraft clean rooms and indeed the Archaea are particularly noted for the number of extremophile species you get. As I understand, they don't form endospores but some can have very robust dormant states that could do the trick just as well, just survive without growing or reproducing until they encounter a suitable medium to grow.

This isn't a proof because it's not maths, so I can't provide what I would call a proof which is a mathematical certainty. I don't know how you set about proving results in this field. But it's enough for me to be concerned that it could very well happen, for me even a small probability would be enough to be really concerned about the possible outcome.

Don't expect you to agree with me completely but do you understand how I might feel the way I do about it?

And I suppose the thing that makes me most concerned is that people who have clearly thought about manned missions a lot don't seem to have given these matters a tremendous amount of thought. Not just you. All the people involved in manned missions to Mars including the ones that have become media celebrities, talking on TV about it including also famous astronomers. Here in the UK for instance heard Brian Cox (very famous as a media celebrity scientist here in the UK) and Patrick Moore talking about manned missions to Mars and they have never raised the subject in any of their programs about it. The inventor of that mars suit. All the articles about manned missions to Mars in the astronomy magazines. The people from Mars One in this video that got me concerned about it this time around:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/6QoEEGySGm4&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/6QoEEGySGm4&rel=1</a>

Lots of people just never seem to address it. Intelligent clever people, with nobel prizes and the like, just don't understand why they don't talk about it.

Just a few well known people have worried about it as I now know such as Carl Sagan and Carl Woese, and as you read those articles you find other researchers here and there who are also clearly concerned about it. Also e.g. Carl Sagan clearly found that many of the scientists he talked to didn't really see why he was so concerned about it.

Yet when you go and ask for details in a place like this forum, it is clear that no-one else has even researched into it. Here I've turned up lots of research that none of you here had the slightest idea existed as you asked for evidence for things I said, which then turned up in these various papers.

So it seems the reason for this silence on the matter in the media isn't because they have a superior knowledge and understanding of the matter and know things that weren't clear to an outsider like myself. It seems to be just that they don't think about it much. That's the most worrying thing of all for me, I shouldn't have to raise these issues, you should all be well aware of it already. It's not for me to do the research, well out of my field. But someone should be doing it certainly, and though some are, they should also be listened to more.

Sorry if this is a bit of a rant, I'm rather passionate about it, and the more the rest of you seem to treat it as not much of an issue the more concerned I get about it.

I don't see it as your fault, not blaming anyone, it is natural like the crowd instinct in humans, if everyone else around you says it is okay we have a great tendency to assume it must be okay.  You are certainly in very good company, plenty of other extremely clever, thoughtful, and well respected people you can follow, and say "I think just like them".

(Not being in the least bit sarcastic here, and understand it, if it is that.)

If it is that, then it changes gradually, as more people around you become concerned about it, and as celebrities or people you respect start to talk about such issues more, as there is a "sea change" in how people think about things, you begin to realise there is something in it after all. I have seen several such changes happen in my own lifetime, and remember how it happened. (In most of them I took as long to adjust and see what was happening as everyone else)

I suppose with my job then there is a premium on inventiveness and thinking "out of the box" as you mentioned, so maybe I have to be just a little immune to that herd instinct to be able to do what I do. In one or two areas anyway.

[robertinventor]

Sometimes a few pictures are worth many words.

Here is something I uploaded to facebook. As you can see, I'm no artist, but it seems to work .

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4119192579818

[Patchouli]

If no life is found on Mars bad news for the hunt for extraterrestrial life but it would mean good news for those who wish to colonize it.
No staying clear of what might be the best locations for a base and no worries about contamination with Earth life.
Personally I think the fears of cross contamination are unfounded as Mars and Earth have exchanged materials in the past.