I was sitting in the doctors office one day and looked at the box he keeps used needles in (sharps). I thought for a moment of all the germs and viruses that would be in that box, and also where they would wind up.
Then I thought about space, being a vacuum where oxygen is non existent. Can germs and viruses live in outer space? Could I take a shipment of sharps, put them in space for a week or so, and then collect sterile needles that could be used again?
Even if a germ could do without the oxygen for a week, would it be able to survive in vacuum conditions with no gravity?
I suspect it depends largely on the bug. Viruses don’t need much of anything from their environment, so most of them could survive in space. Many bacteria have a spore form that seals them against the environment, so those would probably do okay. [An example is tetanus, which is anerobic. Free oxygen will kill it, so it ‘spores up’ to shield itself when exposed to air. Then it just waits on the end of that rusty nail to get injected deep enough into living tissue that it can start actually living again.]
A lot of microbes don’t have these defenses, and would have their protoplasm dry up if they were in a vacuum.
So, the vacuum of space would not sterilize things all that well. But, the hard ultraviolet of space might. I’m just not sure about that.
As I recall, viruses aren’t technically alive until they combine with a living cell, and during their “inert” period they can survivee just about anything. As for bacteria, I guess it would depend on what medium they exist in. If it’s moist, and the moisture evaporated in the vacuum, I guess they’d die. But if you’re just talking about cold and air-free, they could simply go dormant until they got back into a warmer, oxygen-rich environment.
In the late eighties a socio-biologist named Terrance McKenna presented the theory that life on Earth might have evolved from spores or microbes which might have migrated to primordial Earth via solar winds and/or comet vapour (this is actually the most palatable way of presenting McKenna’s theories, the guy is a bit of a froot loop).
Extensive testing showed that no spore, microbe, organism tested could withstand the pressures of a vaccume and that even viruses tested require a positive internal pressure to remain viable.
a theory I’ve heard about how life started here:
Life of some kind was thriving on Mars, which had an extensive ocean and a harty eccosystem. something impacted Mars and ‘broke off’ a piece that crashed into earth where some microbs survived and began life here.
Another thing I’ve heard is that some believe viruses come from space - somewhere and occationally infect earth. Some supporting evidence sited is that after a heavy meteror shower, some new disease like a new strain of the flu pops up 6 months later or sumting like that.
Yet another one is that we sent a space probe to Jupiter. at the end of it’s useful life (low fuel) NASA decided to crash it into Jupiters atmosphere as not to risk it one day crashing into eruopa and contaminating it with Earth bugs.
Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere block a huge amount of cosmic radiation. I highly doubt a virus would be unperturbed by a space voyage without some kind of Faraday shield.
There are several major meteor showers each year. Meanwhile, name any event that you choose, and there’s a very good chance that a new flu strain or some other virus will show up within six months. This just means that the flu mutates rapidly. As for fear of contaminating Europa with Earth germs, that doesn’t imply that there are any Europa germs, and there are parts of the Galileo spacecraft not directly exposed to vacuum or ionizing radiation.
Regardless of what that source is, it’s almost certainthat all life currently on Earth is from the same source, since it all uses the same genetic “language”. Maybe it’s from space, but the simplest explanation is that if life had to form somewhere in the Universe, why not here?
The Andromeda Strain…I’ve been meaning to read that.
I don’t think anything cellular could survive in space because cells are techinically living things and living things need tons of stuff that they just can’t get from space. Oxygen, obviously is one of them. Then there’s the fact that space is frickin’ freezing. Also, since there is no pressure in space like the air pressure we have on earth, most cells would likely rupture, wouldn’t they?
I don’t know all this for certain, just trying to set up a logical explanation from what I know. As for spores and seeds and stuff, it would have to be experimented on. I recall that in second grade we obtained tomato plant seeds that had ‘been in space’ for three years or something like that. Now whether the seeds were actually outside in space or in a capsule or something, I don’t recall. However we planted the space seeds along with normal tomato seeds and lo and behold, they grew perfectly fine!
Those tomato seeds were in an airtight capsule. Nobody really expected them to be any different from seeds that stayed on Earth; the main idea was to get elementary school kids interested in science (which apparently was a success).
Most cells would rupture from the pressure difference inside and out, but they wouldn’t necessarily be bothered by the lack of resources. As mentioned above, many bacteria (and other organisms) can go into a sort of suspended animation mode.
The radiation in space is pretty danged intense. I tend to think that would do it right there.
It sounds like we’ve decided that bacterial cells would die pretty quick, but the jury’s still out on viruses and spores. As for viruses, most of them tend to be very unstable in the environment, even when things are relatively benign - think HIV, which can only survive a few minutes outside the body. OTOH, in space there are no reactive chemicals to break them down. Still, I’d tend to say no to viruses. Ditto to spores, though they’d have a better chance, methinks.
You couldn’t reuse the needles and syringes though. The needles have plastic hubs, and the syringes are also made out of plastic. All of the radiation and negative pressure (and temperature) would cause them to degrade, presumably.
Life can survive in space without any protection. Right now the Mir space station is infected with fungus that is eating the metal and plastic of the ship from the outside and the inside. Try space.com for the article. Bacteria lives in some of the most hostile conditions on earth, ie in volcanoes. There has also been bacteria found on meteorites, the bacteria not coming from earth. A virus can easily survive space.
Yeah, as imaginative little second graders we envisioned giant purple tomatoes with yellow polka-dots and the like. Imagine our disappointment when they were the exact same as regular tomato plants!
