To Prevent a Martian Plague, NASA Needs to Build a Very Special Lab
Aug.31, 2022 @ The New York Times [Orignal Article]
by Sarah Scoles
[Sec.#1]
When Carl Sagan imagined sending humans to Mars in his book "The Cosmic Connection," published in 1973, he posed a problem beyond such a mission's cost and complexity: the possibility that life already existed on the red planet and that it might not play nice.
"It is possible that on Mars there are pathogens," he wrote, “organisms which, if transported to the terrestrial"terrestrial" - ground, land. environment, might do enormous biological damage — a Martian plague. ►" Michael Crichton imagined a related scenario in his novel "The Andromeda Strain." ► Such situations, in which extraterrestrial samples contain dangerous tagalong"tagalong" - to follow another's lead especially in going from one place to another. organisms, are examples of backward contamination, or the risk of material from other worlds harming Earth's biosphere. ► "The likelihood that such pathogens exist is probably small," Sagan wrote, “but we cannot take even a small risk with a billion lives."
[Sec.#2]
Scientists have long considered Sagan's warnings in mostly hypothetical"hypothetical" - involving or being based on a suggested idea or theory : being or involving a hypothesis. terms. But over the approaching decade, they will start to act concretely on backward contamination risks. NASA and the European Space Agency are gearing up for a shared mission called Mars Sample Return. A rover on the red planet is currently scooping up material that will be collected by other spacecraft and eventually returned to Earth. ► No one can say for sure that such material will not contain tiny Martians. If it does, no one can yet say for sure they are not harmful to Earthlings. ► With such concerns in mind, NASA must act as if samples from Mars could spawn the next pandemic. "Because it is not a zero-percent chance, we are doing our due diligence to make sure that there's no possibility of contamination," said Andrea Harrington, the Mars sample curator for NASA. Thus, the agency plans to handle the returned samples similarly to how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention handles ebola: carefully.