I was going to leave a remark about "wow, Class 10000 cleanroom?!"<p>Then I decided to look it up.<p>Turns out, the larger that number is, the LESS clean it is!<p><a href="https://www.mecart-cleanrooms.com/learning-center/cleanroom-classifications-classes-1-10-100-1000-10000-and-100000-fs209e/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mecart-cleanrooms.com/learning-center/cleanroom-...</a><p>From above site: "Class 10,000 cleanrooms are one of the most common, if not the most common, level of cleanliness across the industry."<p>The bulk of the article's message is still valid, but less astonishing.
The 10.000 was a misquote from the original paper they referenced:<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01550-6" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01550-6</a><p>Here you can read that, in fact, a class 1.000 cleanroom was used.<p>This is also consistent with the description of the facility:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_Sample_Curation_Center" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_Sample_Curati...</a><p>According to the paper, five different chambers were used. You can read the entire procedure down to materials of cleaning spatulas.
It makes sense when you look at that the number as a count of “junk” floating around. Higher number, more junk. More junk==less clean.<p>The fun backwards measurement is always AWG. Smaller number means thicker wire. Larger number means thinner wire.
I have been in one. Its just a room with an air flow rating and slight positive pressure vs ambient. There's no entry control, no special clothing, no hair nets. There was visible dust on top of the equipment and no one seemed to care, not even the people who you think should. I honestly think its there for a check mark on the paperwork.
Gotta open it in a semiconductor fab I guess, best inside a tool where you get clean-room inside clean-room.
>Clean-ish room
Previous discussion: "Rapid colonization of a space-returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganism" <<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maps.14288" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maps.14288</a>><p><<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42238603">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42238603</a>><p>3 days ago, 59 comments.<p>It's not clear to me that the phys.org restatement of that article (which is what it's discussing) adds anything new to the story, which would be HN's criterion for non-dupe status.
This argument from the article meshes with my own thinking:<p><i>The reason there have not been new forms of life originating on Earth, evolving alongside our microbial cousins, could be that there is simply no room for a newcomer. In a system where every niche is filled with more advanced life looking for a next meal, even if a new form of life got started, it would not last long.</i><p>There are a number of related issues regarding life, including LUCA and the emergence of mitochondria in eukaryotic cells, which suggest to me less that a single ancestor <i>existed</i> at that time than that that ancestor's <i>descendents</i> out-competed (or out-lucked) all other comers, <i>and that once established other contenders for life simply couldn't find an available niche</i>.<p>Oh, and bad news for the fans of LGM / panspermia, at least in the "absence of evidence" sense:<p><i>Population statistics indicate that the microorganisms originated from terrestrial contamination during the sample preparation stage rather than being indigenous to the asteroid.</i>
So it's all the more amazing than we can't find life anywhere.<p>We grab a sample of asteroid "soil", try to keep it in conditions as hostile to life as possible, and yet within days it's teeming with (terrestrial) life.<p>So where is everyone?
>So it's all the more amazing than we can't find life anywhere.<p>Maybe because it destroys itself, then gets blasted out into such far reaches the two races are never within a distance (in terms of space or time) they could communicate?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia</a><p>Doesn't solve the origin of life question, but it would explain the emptiness -- life is rare, and reseeds itself every few very long stretches.
> gets blasted out into such far reaches the two races are never within a distance (in terms of space or time) they could communicate?<p>I know this is not directly related to what you say, but we do have right here and now whales to talk to. And elephants too! There is this idea that to find alien minds to communicate with one has to reach out to the far cosmos. But we can't even talk to the alien minds right on our doorsteps. Maybe we should try that before we theorise that communication between two races is impossible due to distance.
Life formed quickly on earth, but earth has so much special going on: iron core, habitable zone, lots of water, three phases of water, good distribution of elements and minerals, oxygenated atmosphere, magnetosphere, lunar shield, lunar tides, Jupiter to clear out junk, etc. etc. We hit the lottery.<p>And intelligence is an even harder step given how much absurdly longer it took to evolve than basic life.<p>And technology is probably also a hard step where we had tailwinds like massive oil deposits, smallish gravity well, etc.<p>But it's also kind of crazy to assume that we should be able to detect the techno signatures of advanced aliens or AIs given our small and limited understanding of the universe.
Too much gap
> something that has likely already introduced extraterrestrial Earth microbes to the moon and Mars<p>So, life is possibly already multiplanetary?
Atmospheric pressure of Mount Everest is about 1/3 of that of average at sea level on earth.<p>The Martian average is 2% of Earth's atmospheric density, or about 0.6% pressure- very nearly hard vacuum, especially considering how little oxygen is present.<p>Any earth life left behind is almost certainly dead or in hibernation type stasis. There's not much noteworthy about it unless Mars somehow develops a thicker atmosphere, better radiation shielding and warms up a fair bit... And if that miracle occurs, it's probably because far future humans have terraformed Mars to be habitable by humans, and we'll have already brought a whole bunch of algae and fungus and plants with us.
While yes, conditions are incredibly harsh, we've found life in such a variety of places on Earth I can't imagine there's absolutely nothing here that couldn't survive there - it's just it probably didn't hitch the ride to Mars. We've found bacteria(alive!) deep in polar ice, miles under the ground, on radioactive waste and in geothermal vents with no oxygen and in hundreds degrees celcius.
A non-clickbait title. Science communication still hold some hope after all.
Maybe we are also result of such contamination crashing into earth few million years ago?
A few million? Absolutely not. We can trace continuous lineages connecting all living things on earth to each other, and to ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago.<p>Could early single celled organisms have come from an asteroid? Perhaps, but almost certainly not. It is <i>strictly</i> less likely than Earth-bound abiogenesis. Life still had to spring from nothing <i>somewhere</i> - all panspermia does is layer on an additional series of long-shot coincidences.
> It is strictly less likely than Earth-bound abiogenesis<p>> all panspermia does is layer on an additional series of long-shot coincidences<p>Disagree. There is a <i>lot</i> more of not-Earth than Earth. I agree that the probability density (per unit volume of the universe) of life originating on Earth is much higher than anywhere else, but there's just so much more room out there for life to originate that the probabilistic cost of traveling to Earth is tiny in comparison.<p>All you need is a proto-life that's stable in an inert environment with sufficient radiation shielding. It could've originated billions of light years away and still have had enough time to arrive on Earth 4.2 billion years ago. That's a mind-boggling number of Earth-like environments.<p>In fact, proto-life doesn't even need to look like Earth life, so even environments that are hostile to current Earth life today could've been the cradle of origin (as a wise man once said, "life, uh, finds a way"). Additionally, environments that used to be Earth-like but eroded away are candidates too since all we need is for life to have escaped before the erosion.<p>In my opinion, panspermia is strictly <i>more</i> likely than Earth-bound abiogenesis.
I don't understand panspermia enjoyers. The Earth was just sitting there for a couple billion years; what sensibility of yours does it offend to accept abiogenesis occurred on it that you have to imagine weird impact ejecta delivery systems.
We are not such a simple thing that we should be the result of a simple random collision.
Like your body -everything is cut out according to its innate abilities with perfect measure and order, and put together with the finest art, in the shortest way, the best form, the lightest manner, and most practicable shape. Look at the clothes of birds, for example, and the easy way they ruffle up their feathers and continuously use them. Also, things are given bodies and dressed in forms in a wise manner with no waste and nothing in vain
Check out the giraffe's cardiovascular system. It seems you're alluding to intelligent design and there's a lot of very unintelligent "design" everywhere.
Perhaps that's true of your body, but my body was manufactured in the Soviet Union, and it shows.
Tell that to the laryngeal nerve which loops around your aortic arch, for no good reason. And to our inferior eye compared to the octopus. Amongst other things.
> and put together with the finest art, in the shortest way, the best form, the lightest manner, and most practicable shape<p>Yeah nah. Ask any doctor or biologist. Humans and most other organisms are definitely not put together like that. It's pretty cool and it works very well, but many things are just... why? There's lots and lots of hacks, questionable cable management, backwards design, dead code, and leftovers from previous iterations.<p>Just because we're a pretty successful organism does not mean we are anywhere near the pinnacle of what can be achieved.
The complexity of current life could have still formed from incredibly simple means over time.
I'd like to speak to life's manager. The human body is full of dumb shit. Who designed these shit ass joints!
change the protocall
sample returnes are too earth orbit
initial examination and repackaging for on earth study is done at a space station in vacume with a robot
control samples are stored in orbit
[flagged]
maybe they were already there?
<i>Population statistics indicate that the microorganisms originated from terrestrial contamination during the sample preparation stage rather than being indigenous to the asteroid.</i><p>From TFA.
unlikely
anything that could survive a billion years of hard radiation,hard vacume, zero humidity, and wild temperature swings.....
and then spring back to life is going to be instantly recognisable as "not from here".And as the sample return capsule was leaking asteroid dust everywhere when it landed, if it is alien, we are so fucked.
There is a vanishingly small chance that life could endure space as a spore of some kind,but it would require bio mechanisms that are unknown, and as of yet, inconceavable.
What it does point to, is just how tennatious life is here on earth and how easily it gets around,inside of our biosphere, and to the general problem of
building truely hermetic capsules and seals,and handling protocalls.
A related problem is the study of the element iron(fe), which in its purest form
us the most expensive substance on earth.
This is because iron will combine with almost anything, from any source, under any conditions, to the piont that, introducing any instrument or probe to actualy test the sample...contaminates it.
So the study of pure iron, is exceptionaly
challenging.
Likely that the asteroid sample has been compromised just by the closing mechanism
bieng jammed with asteroid dust, and it never realy sealed.
The moon missions were plagued with dust
and dust has disrupted operations on mars
,this would make 3 for 3.
Not sure why this was downvoted. First, it could have been written tongue in cheek. Second, this is a perfectly legitimate and admissible explanation, that must be ruled out. Maybe it is very easy or trivial to rule out, as attempted in another comment, but it is important to keep all options open for scientific rigor. I believe the fact that the first scan did not reveal such life is a strong indicator that these organisms were introduced later.
I think maybe the first step in this scientific rigor is to read the article. On the other hand, maybe scientific rigor is primarily in the amount of repetition of ideas already dismissed. Perhaps the most rigorous scientists simply repeat the same hypothesis unchanged when another of them finds evidence to dismiss it.<p>I have heard tales of a truly scientific rigorous civilization. Every human there replicates every study. They’re currently confirming that using cutting rocks to tear flesh is advantageous to survival.
Article talks about it. Known Earth microbes.<p>If it was already there it would have been something novel
Unless panspermia is much more common than usually imagined.<p>If much of the thousands of tons of extraterrestrial debris that falls to earth every year was teeming with microbes we might not easily tell the difference.<p>But I very strongly suspect this is not the case.
They dismissed it as being from earth based on "Population statistics", not determining them to be known earth microbes.
From clicking through to the study, that was counting the microbes over time, measuring the growth rate, and noticing that there would have been a lot more if they'd been there since the beginning.