Do manmade satellites carry bacteria to other planets or eventually other solar systems where they may reproduce and thrive, or are there safeguards to prevent this from happening and/or there are too many threats in space for the bacteria to survive the trip?
Artificial satellites don’t leave earth orbit so I fail to see how they could carry bacteria to other planets.
And deep-space probes are routinely sterilized to prevent contamination. This is covered in the Outer Space Treaty that the United States signed in 1967. From Article IX of the treaty:
“States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose.”
The Galileo probe to study Jupiter and its moons was deliberately crashed into Jupiter at the end of its mission, specifically to avoid the chance that it might eventually crash into the moon Europa, which is expected might be hospitable to life, and might in fact already have some of its own. When we do eventually build a probe to bore through the ice of Europa to the liquid water beneath, we’re going to have to be insanely careful to very thoroughly sterilize it first.
And no human-made object is going to reach anything outside our Solar System for a very, very, very long time. Voyager 1 is travelling at about 17 km/s, at which rate it would take about 75,000 years to reach the nearest star, if it were even pointed in that direction, which it’s not. Far more likely is that it’ll never come close to any star at all, in the entire history of the Universe.
Does interstellar space count? :dubious: