Space Plankton.

[Vanamonde]

No, really. Space plankton.

[Motokid600]

Are.. they seriously suggesting that air currents are lifting plankton to the ISS's altitude? Thats.. quite remarkable. Because plankton is a complex organism, right? Wow .. These things are miniature shrimp upon which I'm guessing get sucked up by storms, but.. how could they get THAT far up?

[Karriz]

Huh, that's interesting. I'm not sure if the "uplifting air currents" could possibly carry plankton all the way up to ISS, though.

Maybe there's been an experiment involving plankton? Although they'd probably know it...

[R0cketC0der]

Air currents sounds.. Unlikely to me. Perhaps plankton got onto a resupply vehicle that carried it up there.

[Streetwind]

Well then. Guess space whales are the logical next step!

(But honestly, maybe it came from one of the super hurricanes we had this year, the ISS even flew straight over them several times...)

[Rabid Bat]

How it got there is somewhat interesting, but this is very interesting....."The study shows that the sea plankton and organisms can live in space despite lack of oxygen, zero gravity, extreme temperatures, and cosmic radiation, and they proved these organisms can even develop."

[KerikBalm]

That is... weird... I wouldn't say they are living in space. I'd say they are still capable of reviving after having been in space.

Air currents lifting sea plankton into the upper atmosphere-> fine, documented, no problem... but into space?

I've heard of high energy solar wind/rays heating the upper atmosphere and allowing some gasses to escape... but carying plankton to space (not neccessarily orbit/escape)

Could incoming Meteors somehow kickoff some atmosphere, with microbes whisked away along with it, into space.

Electrical phenomenom?

But then... if these things were just given Apo's at the ISS's altitude, and its smacking into them like bugs on a windshield... even for something that small, I wonder if they'd survive smashing into the ISS at 8 km/sec.

I'd say I'd question if the plankton could have got there during launch/rocket ascent (when its still below orbital velocity, and in the uppermost levels of the atmosphere)

Also... now I will have to prepare for new rounds of people spouting off panspermia hype... its coming, I know it.

[Laie]

Air currents lifting sea plankton into the upper atmosphere-> fine, documented, no problem... but into space?

Anything that gets into the upper atmosphere can conceivably get into space. Over the course of earths' history, mother nature has probably sent more germs to Mars than all our probes taken together.

[lajoswinkler]

Saying that "air currents" reach ISS is preposterous. I can't believe anyone is actually considering that as a possibility. It probably speaks volumes of the stupidity of the Russian academia, something so painfully obvious in the last two decades.

I don't see the big deal here. It's contamination that probably came to ISS by stuff launched from Guiana Space Centre which is very close to Atlantic ocean.

I'm sure various stupid pages will now blow this out of the proportion, so that this:

"Results of the scope of scientific experiments which had been conducted for a quite long time were summed up in the previous year, confirming that some organisms can live on the surface of the International Space Station (ISS) for years amid factors of a space flight, such as zero gravity, temperature conditions and hard cosmic radiation. Several surveys proved that these organisms can even develop."

will become:

"There's throbbing goo in space!"

No organism can live in space. It can hibernate, and that's not living. It's suspended metabolism. Nothing happens inside the cell, but everything is set up to kick back to work after appropriate conditions are met (pressure, water, heat).

Some single cell organisms have the capability to turn into spores which are very resilient to vacuum and low levels of ionizing radiation.

[Kryten]

I don't see the big deal here. It's contamination that probably came to ISS by stuff launched from Guiana Space Centre which is very close to Atlantic ocean.

Remember that all that gets to the ISS is the ATV vehicle, which is in cleanroom environment right until the fairing opens; if there was enough algal contamination to be detectable on different parts of the station, ESA would have a fit. Most probably it's from Dragon, given that's the only ISS VV with unencapsulated surfaces.

Edited August 20, 2014 by Kryten

[TheGatesofLogic]

First off, whales eat krill, not plankton. Very different things there. Second, life is not possible in vacuum. Like it was mentioned above, life can hibernate, however it does not have active processes. Thirdly, it is almost certainly contamination, no doubt about it.

[Aethon]

Also... now I will have to prepare for new rounds of people spouting off panspermia hype... its coming, I know it.

Wow Kerik, you can see the future. What's wrong with panspermia?

[K^2]

Air currents sounds.. Unlikely to me.

I was going to make an estimate on probability using statistical mechanics and the lightest species of picoplancton I could find. Google Calculator insists that it is zero. (Something on the order of exp(-10^10).)

Definitely not air currents.

I suppose, there could be some plancton floating frozen in LEO due to some asteroid impacts or whatnot, but I would look for man-caused contamination first.

[Godot]

First off, whales eat krill, not plankton. ...

With other words, now that we have space plankton, we need to introduce space krill (which feeds on the space plankton), before we can introduce space whales

[YNM]

Sounds nonsense to me... Must be from LVs.

Also, considering that there have been algae on Mir, it could be coming from the ISS itself..

EDIT : For reference, you can look at this paper : http://www.google.co.id/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dtic.mil%2Fget-tr-doc%2Fpdf%3FAD%3DADA392479&ei=kSX0U4jHKdGLuASCg4HYAw&usg=AFQjCNEFFSMWpcRwbwibli5qgpsBtmMKsA&bvm=bv.73373277,d.c2E

Edited August 20, 2014 by YNM

[Motokid600]

Remember that all that gets to the ISS is the ATV vehicle, which is in cleanroom environment right until the fairing opens; if there was enough algal contamination to be detectable on different parts of the station, ESA would have a fit. Most probably it's from Dragon, given that's the only ISS VV with unencapsulated surfaces.

And was Dragon launched from the cape? If so Florida is a very stormy place.

[K^2]

Yeah, they launch Dragon over the Atlantic, so that could be it. But how would contamination get onto Russian part of the station, where only Soyuzes and Progresses dock?

[KerikBalm]

Wow Kerik, you can see the future. What's wrong with panspermia?

Sometimes, yes I can

The notion of Panspermia is fine, particularly in a limited form such as within a solar system (ie earth to mars and vice versa transfers).

What I'm dreading, is that this gets over-hyper as "proof", and then incorporated into increasingly pseudo-scientific claims, that will also then claim to be "confirmed"

I've already had to keep crud like claims of life originating 10 billion years ago and getting to Earth via panspermia off of wikipedia (recently, I discovered that claim was spread and repeated on half a dozen biology related pages).

[K^2]

It definitely lacks validation. But given that all of Terrestrial life has common origin, and we have fossils and modern analogs of pretty much everything down to the oldest bacteria, yet no trace of the much simpler precursor that could have spontaneously formed in the primordial ooze, I find an idea that Terrestrial life doesn't have its origin on Earth to be an appealing one. That said, it's no more than a hypothesis, and even if it's true, Mars is a much more likely suspect, simply due to proximity. So yes, I can definitely understand your complaint.

[1of6Billion]

April fools is early late this year..

[lajoswinkler]

Remember that all that gets to the ISS is the ATV vehicle, which is in cleanroom environment right until the fairing opens; if there was enough algal contamination to be detectable on different parts of the station, ESA would have a fit. Most probably it's from Dragon, given that's the only ISS VV with unencapsulated surfaces.

Whatever it is, it's caused by humans. My concern is about the actual validity of these news. We're discussing something mentioned by some Russian guy. There have been tons of such looney notions in the last decade, all coming from "some Russian guy".

If there really is contamination, it's not living. Those must be spores which were found viable (in some low percentage) after put inside.

First off, whales eat krill, not plankton. Very different things there. Second, life is not possible in vacuum. Like it was mentioned above, life can hibernate, however it does not have active processes. Thirdly, it is almost certainly contamination, no doubt about it.

Plankton means organisms that live in water, but can not swim against water currents.

Nekton are organisms which can swim against currents, neuston are the ones living on the water surface (gliders), benthos are the ones living on the bottom of the water body, and pleuston lives in the liquid-gas interface.

Krill belongs to plankton. Just wanted to make things clear.

[KerikBalm]

It definitely lacks validation. But given that all of Terrestrial life has common origin, and we have fossils and modern analogs of pretty much everything down to the oldest bacteria, yet no trace of the much simpler precursor that could have spontaneously formed in the primordial ooze, I find an idea that Terrestrial life doesn't have its origin on Earth to be an appealing one. That said, it's no more than a hypothesis, and even if it's true, Mars is a much more likely suspect, simply due to proximity. So yes, I can definitely understand your complaint.

We don't have fossils or modern analogs (of course, what constitutes and analogue is subjective) of the oldest bacteria. All we have for the first ~2 billion years of life is chemical evidence, or apparently fossilized biofilms that don't tell us anything about the cellular or subcellular structure.

We do have traces of the "primordial precursor that could have spontaneously formed in the primordial ooze" in that we have shown nucleotides can form abiotically, and that we've identified RNA ribozymes that can copy RNA templates, and "evolved" them in the lab into even better replicators.

I see plenty of evidence showing its plausible for life to have originated here on Earth.

I also see plenty of evidence showing its plausible for there ot be, basically, local panspermia.

However, the life that can survive harsh conditions has a number of adaptations (for example, spore formation can be rather complicated) - during the earlier times, when bombardment was heavier, we don't know how well the early life would have handled an extended trip through space - and when I consider how different the environment will be where it lands... for example, you can't take some bacteria you identified under an arctic ice sheet, and then place it in a hot spring and expect it to survive... I have my doubts.

Occam's razor suggests to me that Earth-life started on Earth.

[K^2]

I see plenty of evidence showing its plausible for life to have originated here on Earth.

Absolutely. If it wasn't plausible on Earth, it wouldn't be significantly more plausible somewhere else. What I'm getting at is the fact that, usually, evolution doesn't result in more complex life completely replacing simple life. If simple self-replicating RNA was a thing on Earth a few billion years ago, I'd expect some of it to still be around in that original form, or something closely resembling it. Not as a mechanism in a comparatively complex bacterium, but free-replicating in organic ooze. However, we don't see anything like that outside of the lab, despite suitable environments being available.

Ocam's razor cuts both ways here. If life on Earth started from a bacterium, then we wouldn't expect to find a precursor. We would also expect absolutely all life to have a common origin. Abiotic origin would allow for multiple ancestors. Panspermia makes a lot of things a lot simpler.

But this is just what makes me lean weakly towards panspermia. What I'd like to see is a lot more research done on Mars, since it's the only likely origin besides Earth. Even simply knowing more about its formation, and gauging whether it could have been habitable early enough to allow for life to start there, evolve into something complex enough to survive travel, and hitch a ride to Earth in time would be a great start. As you've pointed out, it'd need a considerable head start for necessary adaptations. Of course, jackpot would be finding actual life there, confirming common origin, and making sure that it's not a modern contamination. But that might be too much to hope for.

[Mazon Del]

Really this is one of the unfortunate side effects of setting up a colony on Mars,. Any bacteria and such that we find there, if it is genetically similar to Earth based versions (as a result of panspermia) run the risk of being discarded for the discovery that they are simply because of the similarity and now the contamination that is certainly going on.

[G2-]

As a PhD student working on space systems I have to agree that the contamination from a non russian launch sounds much more likely. French Guiana or the US, dragon does sound suspiciously likely. Has Dragon ever docked to the russian segment?