I realise that any of the probes that we've launched in the last 50 or so years haven't gone out that far but I was watching the BSG episode, A Measure of Salvation, where a Cylon Base ship came across a man made probe from what is assumed to be from Earth and the Cylons had picked up a virus from bacteria that was dormant on it, and I was wondering if there was any chance that any form of bactieria could be present on any probes that we've sent out and if this could prove fatal to any alien species that may encounter it and possibly lead to disatrous first contact?
Long range probes and first contact?
- Thread starter Crewman47
- Start date
Not likely. Bacteria evolve in concert with the life forms they infect. Even if aliens were exposed to our bacteria, unless their physiology is very similar to ours there's little chance they would be infected by it.
Lorna
Lieutenant Commander
It stands to reason IMO that most life out there will be the same make up as we are. Sure, there will possibly be exotic forms of life extremely different to us but the building blocks of Earth life seems to be out there on asteroids.
Not necessarily. As long as the basic chemistry is similar, bacteria might be able to feed on the flesh of alien organisms. How similar the chemistry might be remains to be seen, though.
Of course, even addressing that question is getting ahead of ourselves. The fact is, the possibility that any bacteria might survive on a space probe for the tens or hundreds of millennia (at least) it would take for any extant probe to reach an alien star system is exceedingly remote. Some bacteria have shown an ability to survive in vacuum and hard radiation, but such extremophiles are rare, and the more exposed they are and the longer they're in space, the lower the odds of their survival.
Not to mention that the odds of any Earth space probe ever being intercepted by alien life in the first place are comparably remote. None of our probes are specifically aimed toward any nearby star system. And the odds of a coincidental rendezvous in interstellar space are vanishingly small. Random encounters with space probes are a commonplace trope of sci-fi, but as with so many fictional tropes, it shouldn't be taken seriously as something that could happen in reality.
Left handed amino acids vs right handed amino acids, arsenic based life.....
Yeah, but viruses from trees don't infect people. Just because life is made up of the same stuff doesn't mean the things that infect people will spread to the alien life.
Actually there's a new theory suggesting that the predominance of left-handed amino acids on Earth may be a galaxywide phenomenon:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/supernova-life-origins-spin-chirality-100816.html
Google is your friend: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090713195003AAJFAqr
When will the Pioneer probes reach the nearest star?
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker
They won't - they are not headed in that direction.
Pioneer 10 is heading in the direction of the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus at roughly 2.6 AUs per year. It would take Pioneer 10 about 2 million years to reach it.
Pioneer 11 is headed toward the constellation of Aquila. It will pass near one of the stars in the constellation in about 4 million years.
^And of course, "pass near" is a relative term -- "near" meaning within a couple of light years, not close enough to crashland on a planet or something. It's hard to grasp just how immensely empty space is. It takes incredibly precise aiming just to get these space probes to have successful encounters with planets in our own system. The tiniest error and they miss altogether, as we've seen with multiple failed Mars probes -- and Mars is very close, relatively speaking. So to expect any space probe to have any remote chance of directly encountering alien life at random, with no specific targeting involved, is completely unrealistic. You'd have a better chance of winning the lottery every day for a month.
^Not unrealistic, just (very very very VERY) statistically improbable...but still possible.
Just to make it even more unlikely though, even *if* a probe found it's course altered by a (relatively) near encounter with a gravity well (like an asteroid for example) and found itself heading for a planet, the odds of it not getting pulled in and consumed by either a Jupiter-like comet sweeper or the star itself are even narrower. On top of that and assuming it isn't just catapulted back out into interstellar space or obliterated by a dense matter cloud, planetary ring of solar eruption and *if* it does make re-entry on a rocky planet and *if* it doesn't burn up on the way in, chances are it just landed on a dead rock that never had a chance to bare life.
In shows like Star Trek the usual conceit is that intelligent life everywhere and there's been countless interstellar civilizations knocking around for billions of years at one time or another so the Enterprise is always tripping over their old junk. In reality, it's far more likely that any civilisation that encounters an alien probe does so deliberately. Either sent after they were remotely detected or a TMA-1 type devise that is actively on the look out for life forms and has billions of years to burn looking for them. In either case unless the other race is malicious, it's almost a certainty that they'd have taken enormous precautions against contamination.
Just to make it even more unlikely though, even *if* a probe found it's course altered by a (relatively) near encounter with a gravity well (like an asteroid for example) and found itself heading for a planet, the odds of it not getting pulled in and consumed by either a Jupiter-like comet sweeper or the star itself are even narrower. On top of that and assuming it isn't just catapulted back out into interstellar space or obliterated by a dense matter cloud, planetary ring of solar eruption and *if* it does make re-entry on a rocky planet and *if* it doesn't burn up on the way in, chances are it just landed on a dead rock that never had a chance to bare life.
In shows like Star Trek the usual conceit is that intelligent life everywhere and there's been countless interstellar civilizations knocking around for billions of years at one time or another so the Enterprise is always tripping over their old junk. In reality, it's far more likely that any civilisation that encounters an alien probe does so deliberately. Either sent after they were remotely detected or a TMA-1 type devise that is actively on the look out for life forms and has billions of years to burn looking for them. In either case unless the other race is malicious, it's almost a certainty that they'd have taken enormous precautions against contamination.
Similar threads
