Five, Four, Three, Two, Terraform!

The news that bacteria taken from an exposed beach in Devon have survived outside the orbiting space station for many days is interesting (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/jonathanamos/2010/08/bugs-and-humans-will-team-up-t.shtml).

The intention is to find organisms for space exploration that could accompany humans and eventually be used to transform alien worlds (in terms of generating oxygen, water etc). It is clear that such organisms do exist. The study also raises several other issues. The first is that it supports the view that simple life on Earth may have arrived from space rather than evolved here. A second is that it may not be very ethical to terraform other worlds (we already know that human introductions of organisms into island communities are often very detrimental to established ecologies). A third is that it would be very difficult to eliminate the bacteria if they prove to be problematical.