[ weird things ] | world of weird things podcast: are we getting our germs all over space?

world of weird things podcast: are we getting our germs all over space?

A recent crash landing on the Moon was an astrobiologist's worst-case scenario, raising the question of whether we're just doomed to contaminate every world we'll ever touch.
swimming tardigrade

Thanks to a crash landing by an Israeli lunar experiment, the nearest world to our own has a small colony of living things alien to its environment. Well, sort of, since the tardigrades, the extraordinarily hearty creatures on board, are in a state of suspended animation and won’t be doing much of anything for millions of years if left alone. But this incident does raise a few red flags we need to address before we keep exploring space, especially with privately built and financed experiments, and brings up some very bizarre questions about the origin of life on Earth and other inhabited worlds we have to take seriously.

Subscribe to get the latest episodes…

            

Articles covered or touched on in this episode…

The Planet’s Toughest Creatures
A Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Tardigrades On The Moon
So Just How Intelligent Can We Make Our Space Probes, Revisited
Discarding Panspermia With Insufficient Evidence

Related articles and further reading…

Charles Darwin And Otto Hahn’s Alien Fossils
Should We Spread Our Germs Across Space?
How A Flare With The Power Of A Quarter Of A Trillion Nukes Could Create Life

Intro/outro by Absolute Valentine, courtesy of Lazerdiscs Records

# podcast // astrobiology / extremophiles / space exploration


  Show Comments