Contamination in Space Travel It’s funny how when I get news alerts from different companies, many of them echo the same headline at times which truthfully are not interesting. The other day I was thinking about this when I caught one that was catching on and it made me chuckle. I say that because it was about something I have talked about many times for years and yet it was never mentioned very much before. It was the fact that NASA may have killed life on Mars. Now before you get too upset at this thought, we are talking about microbes. If they died, I am sure they didn’t suffer. I picked up on this years ago when I found out NASA had missed sterilizing part of a Mars rover. I mean, who knows what our microbes could do to their microbes? Not only that, if there is larger life on Mars or even intelligent life, perhaps hiding in underground areas we could have endangered it. We never took the idea of microbes seriously and this can be seen when one watches the return of Apollo 11. The astronauts were picked up in a raft by a couple of sailors. They were not protected and the astronauts were just in NASA jumpsuits if I remember correctly. They were brought to an aircraft carrier where they walked through a crowd and finally into a protected chamber. I have to put it this way, TOO LATE!! If they had been infected, they would have spread it already. When I talk about killing life or getting contaminated, this might turn out to be one of the biggest problems with making contact with non-humans. They might contain organisms which are harmful to us or visa versa. Advanced extraterrestrials may have protection against this, I am not so sure we could protect ourselves against every contingency. Yes, we have protective clothing but that has only been tested against the germs and chemicals we know about. Just traveling into space might be killing life. We are learning some organisms can exist in space and there has been talk lately where the question was asked, can beings live in space without a planet? We might already have an answer to this question thanks to the Russians when two different crews of an old Russian space station saw beings outside and having no problems out there even though they were unprotected. The beings seemed to be made of plasma and were described as being about 12 feet tall with wings. We were shocked to find microscopic animals called Tardigrade can exist in space, at least for months. The name means little water bear. It makes one wonder what else can exist in space. We found out plankton formed on the outside of the space station and it was said it did not come from earth, leading to the idea it floats free in space. One has to wonder if our tiny spot in the universe is representative of the rest of space, or could there be a lot more life out there which just exists floating around and could even be intelligent? As we launch rockets into space, could these rockets be doing damage we know nothing about, because they might be destroying life we don’t know exists with there exhausts? We have to realize how little we know about this situation. So, what do we want to do next? Launch nuclear powered rockets into space which could be even more dangerous. Imagine all the radioactivity we might be spreading around. Even if the rockets are safe to travel in, it seems since nothing is perfect, some might crash in the future and a vehicle which contains a nuclear reactor could be very dangerous to the environment of any world it blows up on. Look at all the problems we had with reactors just on earth. It is said the reactor building at Fukushima, Japan is still dumping nuclear contaminated water into the ocean. The plant and its reactors were too close to the ocean and it was hit with a tsunami. Now there is talk of restarting the reactors which were not working which makes the original threat still existent. Who could ever forget the Chernobyl nuclear disaster which killed people and created an area which was a nuclear waste land. This wasn’t even the first Russian nuclear disaster. There was one at Kyshtym where waste from a plutonium processing plant blew up and forced the evacuation of 10,000 people. We, among others, have also had nuclear plant accidents, but not quite at the severeness of the Russian ones. Now we want to take this technology out into space? We should not even consider nuclear propulsion until fusion is perfected. Fusion is so much safer since if anything happens during the nuclear energy process, the fusion just stops. It also produces no waste, which is a really big deal since the waste stays harmful for hundreds of thousands of years in some cases. Just by us walking on another world could be life threatening to it, after all, we are walking germ factories. Look what happened when the Europeans came to the new world, their germs which they had built immunity against, infected the natives who had no immunity to them and many died. Since we were so harmful to fellow humans, imagine what we might do accidently to aliens. On the other hand, could they do this to us, or we might infect each other if we are not careful? Even when outfits are sterilized, there could still be germs if the entire inside of the ship was not sterile and it would never be because the humans living inside the ship would be spreading more germs every second. I guess there could be a decontamination area on the ship where a human could get disinfected and put on a disinfected spacesuit before leaving the ship. Many say that 100% effective sterilization is not possible. While companies are striving to get to 100% sterilization, they are close, but there are no cigars being given out yet. So, this means we know we might be contaminating the moon and mars and if my memory serves me right an Israeli craft crashed on the moon which was carrying a few thousand Tardigrades which could have survived. This is just one of the things we probably contaminated the moon with. On the return trip from the moon by Apollo astronauts they reported moon dust had gotten inside their capsule, so when it was open that dust got into our air. Again, it seems careless to me.
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