A group of scientists has proposed to infect another world and see what happens as an experiment. His candidate: The Enced Moon

While NASA’s rovers are still looking for clues on Mars, Jupiter, and Esturno, Saturn’s icy moons, of Jupiter, of Jupiter, They have become the main candidates to house microbial life outside the earth in the solar system. But what will we do if we discover that they are not inhabited?

A controversial idea. Encard, with Your subsurface ocean and confirmed presence of crucial elements for lifeIt is a usual focus of scientific fascination. The European Space Agency Plan to send a probe there which would arrive in 2054.

Anticipating a disappointment, a group of astrobiologists has launched a bold proposal: if it turns out to be uninhabited, we can consider “infecting it” deliberately with terrestrial microbes to observe how life spreads in a habitable but virgin world.

An unprecedented experiment. Since they began to explore the solar system, large space agencies have taken very seriously not to contaminate other planets and satellites, building their probes in clean rooms to reduce the number of bacteria that could survive on board.

This experiment would be to do the opposite. It would be the first planetary scale attempt to build a biosphere. It would force us to learn how to assemble complex ecosystems from scratch, which organisms are the most appropriate to do so and how they behave in extraterrestrial conditions.

Why sow life in another world. Charles S. Cockell, Holley Conte and M. Dale detail their idea in an article published By Space Policy magazine. The group argues that, if future missions confirmed the absence of native life in Encela, the deliberate inoculation of the satellite would help us understand how life spreads in permanently dark oceans.

Inoculation would allow to investigate how bacteria ecosystems were organized On the ground snowball or even If hydrothermal chimneys From a primitive land they could be the place where life arose on our planet during the early or early archaic times.

A multiphendary economy. Entering a more speculative field, an inhabited brain could, in theory, become a source of materials for the exploration of the exterior system if humanity would become a multiparaneary species.

The authors even mention the engineering of organisms as an option to make the new biosphere, transforming the ocean of the Saturn moon into a “biofuel production plant”, once our metanogenic bacteria have prospered. It could even resort to synthetic biology to design optimized organisms.

Faster than terraft Mars. The experiment would, of course, a multigenerational company, but unlike Mars the terraftwhich would take centuries, the inoculation of an extraterrestrial ocean could be achieved with current technology and would be “much simpler and less expensive.”

But there are also ethical implications. How many missions are needed to be sure that it is really uninhabited? Is such an experiment more valuable than studying the geological and geochemical processes of a virgin world?

And perhaps it is also possible to ask: will we be able to guard a second biosphere, in addition to that of the earth, for multiple generations? It is worth thinking in the long term, but we must previously intensify our sense of responsibility for the Earth’s biosphere.

Image | POT

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