Why don't we "seed" various bodies in the Solar System like Mars and Europa with extremophiles like tardigrades to...

Why don't we "seed" various bodies in the Solar System like Mars and Europa with extremophiles like tardigrades to ensure in the case that life is extremely rare to the point Earth is the only planet with life in the universe, that life can live on even if Earth gets smashed into pieces by a large impact?

We don't know for sure they don't already have life on them. If we seed them with Earth life we'll never know the answer to that really important question. Landers are very thoroughly sterilized to prevent doing this accidentally.

Isn't ensuring the survival of life, a phenomenon we only know exists on one planet in the entire universe, incredibly more important than sating our intellectual curiosity? For all we know if Earth is destroyed that's it, life will be gone forever. It seems like an incredibly short sighted viewpoint. We should be doing everything in our power to ensure that life (And hopefully human life) exists for as long as possible.

>We should be doing everything in our power to ensure that life (And hopefully human life) exists for as long as possible.

Life in general is a fucking mistake, we should be working on ways to prevent life from spreading. Why do you objectively want to spread more misery? Spreading life outside earth is in my opinion the most heinous of crimes assuming we are not already extraterrestrials ourselves.

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Agreed.

I bet plenty of people have a fairy tale view of life and nature where bambies bounce around in flower fields with their rabbit and bird friends feeling all happy and joyful. In reality, life for most sentient animals is mostly pain and agony. Stressful shit you wouldn't believe, filled with parasites, hunger, cold and there's no one offering you pain killers for your head ache or surgery for your broken leg.

When you get a bad disease you will simply have to lie down in agony while the crows pick your eyeballs out.

And that's the average life you're going to get as a wild animal, not some exaggerated version of it.

Multiply that by hundreds billions of individual animals alive at any one time. Then multiply that with a billion years of multicellular life. Life is a fucked up thing that should have never existed.

Said from the comfort of a computer in a heated and/or cooled building in a country with healthcare infrastructure and a commodity supply chain that will literally deliver any object to your front door.

But right, life is pain, please continue.

The science equivalent of SJWs want to keep other planets dead and sterile.

That said, I do think down the line we could seed Mars with some controlled life in caves of some sort, or just a greenhouse. It'd be dope

It's not quite an absolute nightmare, since it would be irrational for most life to be in an agitated state all its life since that would consume useful energy

Plus, animals don't comprehend the relative uselesness of their existence since all they do is act on instinct most of the time. Humanity is arguably the cursed animal that knows about its own death and, so far, relative lack of purpose int he universe.

who cares if some bacteria survive on some cold space rock after we are all dead? it's not like they will turn into anything special in that environment

>who cares if some single celled life occurs on a volcanic rock with a terrible atmosphere? It's not like they will turn into anything special in that environment nor change the composition of the atmosphere to make it more hospitable to life

Then we'd never be able to tell if there is life that evolved on it's own on those bodies. It is also illegal to do this by international space law.

neither europa nor mars will ever be habitable

>that's literally being braindead
>not realizing humanity slowly extincts Inseln

We're animals you dumbshit and we literally still operate from the lower brain. Everything you do, even your faggy ass joy solving equations is not above somebody enjoying laying on the grass.

>implying
>implying
>implying

>Then we'd never be able to tell if there is life that evolved on it's own on those bodies
How is that knowledge more important than ensuring life continues to exist in the universe?

>Fuck all life on Earth was extinguished by a gamma ray burst
>Oh well at least we didn't contaminate Mars and prevent our intellectual curiosity being answered! Worth it!

Why should we give one care about sending mere bacteria to live on cold and baren worlds where the bacteria will never evolve to be as complex as earth fauna? Many scientists would gladly exterminate some of the micro organisms on earth that threaten us, if they could. Likewise if you were to go back in time 1000 years and tell someone that lions are threatened by extinction, they would probably ask you what the problem was.

There is one life form on earth worth saving and that's humanity. There's over a trillion species on earth and only one has higher intelligence. That's what's truly special.

>There is one life form on earth worth saving and that's humanity.
And dogs

Any astronomer back then would be able to tell that earth had perfect conditions for life and would maintain them for a long period. There's no other planet in the solar system that's going to be like that in the future. Mars will have a brief boon in the future when the sun gets hot enough to melt its ice caps, but Mars does not have enough gravity to hold on to that water, which will mostly evaporate into space. It's time in the habitable zone will be too brief for any complex life to evolve, either. Earth needed 2 billion years to get multicellular life. Then another billion or so before the party started. We are very, very late to that party. Mars will have probably less than a few hundred thousand years of liquid water. Not really oceans, just a few shallow seas that constantly boil away.

How likely is it that a gamma ray burst will kill all life on earth, but not the rest of the solar system? Knowledge is worth a lot user
>> oh wow we found life on mars this has huge implications for understanding our place in the universe
>> but it could have just come from someone's shit that was smeared all over mars!

Why is life itself important? Every species ultimately only cares about itself, if humanity is dead then what happens to life in general isn't important. Also, simple life will continue existing on Earth even if you threw ten giant asteroids at it, there is no way to kill those fuckers

Finding bacteria on some other planet isn't going to have "huge implications". It's meaningless information. Who gives a shit.

that would literally be the most important thing humanity has ever discovered but ok kid

Zero chance of a GRB only hitting earth. A GRB cone would widen to become larger than the solar system long before it reached us. If the solar system was only grazed, the intensity of the gamma rays on the edge of the cone would be diminished enough for it to be less of a problem.

That said, I am curious if it would be possible for the sun to shield earth, assuming it just happened to be right in front of where the GRB comes from. Probably not. It would just go straight through the sun.

The irony is that what you are suggesting is short sighted, we have been doing a dandy job of obliterating our native eco system. Nevermind an alien one.

>Every species ultimately only cares about itself

senpai, that isn't even the case. There is no natural, non-arbitrary distinction of species- it's a behavioral trait which holds genetic basis that is almost definitively selected for in communal species like humans to protect that which you can have kids with.

People can say that's an inherent thing, or whatever, but it's only because it's something we all have in common. We seem to take for granted that traits we might all normatively hold in common must be something innate and common to nature, when the simpler (and true) explanation is simply a matter of what traits grant higher fitness- ability to reproduce.

Take away this almost instinctual care for other humans, and there's no real distinction between one form of life and another. It'd be kind of cool if life survived- it has a lot of interesting pathways and implications for relative rates of entropy, especially if it became something common throughout the universe.

I highly doubt it is sterilized enough. We have already accidentally seeded Mars.

Nah, humans aren't worth saving.

maybe by seeding other planets you destroy existing life that would've been more successful in the long run

user, I'm sorry I know this doesn't really relate to the crux of your argument, but the current estimate for the amount of species on the planet is 10 million, nowhere near trillions. There's a lot of wiggle room if you're looking into the nitty gritty of microbiotia, but it's always a good idea to keep in mind the scale of things when talking about biology.

Finding native bacteria from Mars, Europa, Titan etc. Would imply that the universe has an enormous abundance of life.
And its understandable that people like you would ignore those implications. Because they mean that earth, humanity our species achievements aren't special in the least (oh boo-hoo, your feelings).

Veeky Forums is 18+ user

Biofag here. Not to ruin the stew or anything, but I think it would depend on the kind of extraterrestrial life formed. If there are novel adaptations that allow for a much wider array of environments for life than we can predict given what we know about terrestrial life and its most basic requirements, then I believe that is the case. But I don't think the probabilistic argument works out too well, considering the possibility of things as close as mars, europa, etc. being within a range that it's not 100% impossible that, say, a huge asteroid striking the earth and life-carrying debris (I'm talking over 3 billion years ago) shuttling prokaryotic life forms elsewhere in the solar system.

That's not to say it can't be tested in various ways- and it'd be pretty obvious if the life didn't have any genetic basis in the life earth knows; aka non-RNA or DNA based, as an example.

Settle down Adam Lanza

That's funny, I think about how future biologists are so fucked sometimes. Right now we can pretty easily categorize and catalog life, and perform genetic analysis. In fact with the free fall cost of genome sequencing, now is probably going to be the golden age of phylogenetic analysis.The problem for future biologists is that they have to play an entirely different game- with human led genetic engineering that is entering a boom, there's now not only just vertical gene transfer along different "branches" of a phylogenetic tree, but now there are horizontal connections since we adapt genes that evolved in say, fish, and put them in plants. Because of this, if all knowledge were to be lost, but we had something like a commercial crop which has high fitness and still survives, anyone analyzing it in the future would be confused as fuck.

The only thing that helps is proper cataloging, but that isn't exactly always done, so it sure is a fucking conundrum.

>The only thing that helps is proper cataloging, but that isn't exactly always done, so it sure is a fucking conundrum.
I'm pretty sure all GMOs are catalogued af

Oh, the actual modifications are properly cataloged, but the exact applications aren't. For example, genetically modified strains ending up cross-pollinating with the non-modified, and during crossover events you get really bizarre effects because the genome size is different, like an increase in the total number of broken genes which can change the phenotype drastically- and every successive generation begets more recombination, and while critical "errors" will be fixed by way of selection, there's going to be a weird genotyping that requires knowledge of every potential combination of every genetically modified variant in order to match its heritage.

So far so good, you can still work with that much to figure out a lineage, but the problem arises when a genotype arises that promotes mutation. It could even be selected for- after all, an increase in mutation rate is selected for when an organism isn't fit to its environment. From that point, you're dealing with so many differential rates of mutation that any historical attempt to trace it back assuming normal mutation rates no longer works.

It's not really that big of a deal, since it's kind of assumed we'll keep a good track of all of the records, and be able to even keep track of where strains end up popping up globally, but it just tickles me that the kinds of work some biologists do now will become impossible in a few decades.

C H A D
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It's easily more than that. 10 million? Don't make me chortle. I'll go look up the figures later, but thousands of new species are catalogued every month and the number of bacteria we know of is a fraction of what's in the environment. You could go out to the park and find some animal droppings, then try to grow some cultures off it. You will likely find over 5 bacteriam that haven't been classified yet.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but astronomy has already gone ahead and confirmed that humanity is pretty special. Bacteria is one thing, but where's the aliens if they're everywhere? They aren't out there. Not in this galaxy, at least. That alone shows how rare it is to find some smart critters.

That's where the way we classify comes into account. Normally how we distinguish one species from the next is by the degree of genetic differentiation within vs. between populations. For obvious reasons this doesn't work in microbiota due to being so tightly packed and diverse, as well as having lots of mechanisms like plasmid transfers which make them a lot less discrete than some organisms.

Looking past the fact that it's difficult to measure, let's say you have microbe A and microbe B in different, discrete, relatively homogeneous populations of their respective species. With a genome so small as many of the common commensal and parasitic bacteria have, any differentiation between the species, no matter how phenotypically different they are, is going to fall within the margin of error.

It'd be silly, even though it's been custom to do this so far, to say that two bacteria that function almost identically but with a few slightly different epitopes are separate species. Discussing microbial biodiversity and lumping it meaningfully along with other kinds of diversity that represent a much larger divergence in lineage is meaningless. This is of course not to say that there isn't any meaningful diversity among microbes- just that most of it would classify, if you're looking at it like you would with Eukaryotes, to be "subspecies" at best.

I guarantee ive had a worse life with more disease than you, with past suicide attempts but i still feel life is overall a huge gift and good. It's incomparably valuable to have existed even for a moment.

sounds like overcompensation

>tardigrades
>being able survive long enough act as useful seeding tools

Tsrdigrades are actually extremely fragile beyond the handful of things they would almost certainly never encounter. Even then they can only survive most of the things they can for a few decades at best because they don't actually adapt to the extreme environments they would encounter so much as they just try to tough it out for a bit until conditions improve enough for them to resume normal activity.

But Earth is special and we know it, retard. Honestly crossing your fingers and hoping we find life elsewhere so you can validate your nihilism is pathetic.