The original War of the Worlds was set in London, the Orson Welles radio broadcast was a much later occurance. The novel did however make no mention of what was happening in America or any other part of the world except for South East England So one can probably assume NJ was getting an asskicking at the same time that London was.
There is one environment the Martian microbes might thrive in; the cool lithosphere in Antarctica might be similar enough to their own environment that they could survive long enough to adapt.
I expect that if we do find life, it will have a common origin with our own, and spread from planet to planet on space dust and ejecta.
However if Martian organisms are not related genetically to Earth biota we will be in the interesting position of life following two separate evolutionary paths on the same planet.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
This point is misleading to some degree. There are indeed more examples of species from larger continental systems displacing organisms in smaller systems such as Australia. However it I invalid to imply that this is due to some superior ‘fitness’ of the Eurasian continental species. It is due to many factors, and none of them seem to be fitness related.
Far more species have been introduced to Hawaii, Australia, Mauritius etc than have been introduced from those places to the larger continents. This probably account for most of the discrepancies. Quite simply few serious efforts have been made to introduce Australian species to the rest of the world. Those that were made were of plants, and a respectable proportion of these have gone feral. It should be noted that the North America suffers from as many feral European species as Australia does despite the comparable sizes the cause is the same.
When importing stuff from Mars we have the same problem, except that we are deliberately importing stuff from Mars, whereas anything going the other way has o be a hitchhiker.
Those places were unpopulated and prone to the buildup of exotic animals. Conversely the feral wallaby populations of England are considered cute and tolerated because in such a densely populated area they pose no threat at all. Microbes don’t suffer this problem and so tend to move both ways with ease.
These areas were colonised by new people along with new species. The changes wrought by the altered practices of the new colonists produced the disrupted ecosystems favoured by invasive species. Microbes from Mars will have a large number of dynamic ecosystems to play with here on Earth compared to the relatively stable systems of their home plant.
There are simply more species in larger land areas. If we assume that 5% of animals in any area are potentially invasive then obviously the continental US will be the source of far more such species than Hawaii. The size scale of microbes tends to rule out any effect here.
There are of course numerous examples of species from isolated areas invading larger landmasses. Off the top of my head:
Florida alone has severe problems caused by Australian euclaypts, melaleucas, chinaberry, acacias, ‘pines’, carrotwood, umbrella trees, climbing ferns and several other species.
Africa has a massive problem with several dozen Australian genera including Eucalyptus, Hakea and Acacia… Italy has problems caused by Australian acacias.
Australian pillwort has invaded waterways across Europe.
There is species of New Zealand flatworm that is rapidly exterminating native earthworm populations across northern Europe.
There are flocks of feral Australian budgerigars in Florida
This reminds me of a novel I read (by Stephen Baxter, I believe) where a rock sample from the moon is carelessly released into the environment, and contains alien nanoorganisms that metabolize rock and end up devouring the earth itself. Quite unlikely, but it does bring up the point that an alien lifeform need not be able to out-compete earth life in its own environment in order to pose a threat.
I know I’ve seen an anthology of stories by other writers set in the War of the Worlds universe at the same time. One story had Martians landing in Russia, another in China (amidst the Boxer Rebellion, IIRC), etc.
Here’s a cheery little thought:
Suppose the decontamination efforts on the Viking Probes didn’t kill everything. The microbes that made it to Mars survived and have mutated into something lethal to humans!
So we know that terrestrial bacteria can survive years of being in space.
Spores are practically indestructible life forms (i.e. as long as they’re not incinerated); they can survive space travel. Spores are very light and can drift on winds to higher altitudes than just about anything. A few may escape from the atmosphere and enter outer space where they can drift for indefinitely long periods of time until being captured by another planet’s gravity.
They can enter another planet’s atmosphere and drift slowly down to the surface without being burned by atmospheric friction thanks to low velocity.
Once on the surface, given a suitable environment, they can resume propagating rhizomes and fruiting bodies.
Terence McKenna’s theory that Psilocybe mushrooms are alien intelligences, that came to earth in the form of spores, goes like this.
I remember around 7 years ago, a UCSJ microbiology professor succeeded in “waking up” some ancient bacteria that he found in the guts of honeybees, which were preserved in 100-million-year old amber (from Central America). Haven’t read too much about is since, but apparently these bacteria were not too different from their modern descendents.
What is amazing is the viability of such ancient spores…I also read about a japanese botanist who was able to make 3000 year old lotus seeds sprout…makesyou woncer of there might be some martian plant seeds frozen in some deep lake, surviving from a martain warm period…if these could be revived, what a story that would be!
What’s the worst that could happen?
We could get a microbe that evolution has designed to make efficient use of the trace amounts of oxygen in the Martian Atmosphere, and is not affected by the specific mixture of the same four gasses that make up the bulk of both atmospheres (we have lots of nitrogen, Mars has lots of carbon dioxide), nor by the extreme differences in pressures.
What’s more, whatever factors in the Martian ecosystem that reign in this microbe’s population growth might be nonexistent here, which (combined with the richer oxygen atmosphere) cause the microbe to reproduce explosively.
Earth organisms that occupy the same ecological niche, and have predators that thin out their numbers, find themselves suddenly in competition with these new invaders, which for whatever reason, the predators can’t/won’t eat. The natives die off, followed by their predators, and the effect propagates through the food web. Over too short a time span for evolution to create a check to their growth, the Martain germs thrive, altering the world ecosystem to the point where it is no longer hospitable to humans.
The second part of this scenario is the standard model of what happens when an unchecked introduced species edges out natives.
As for the first part, the existence of a bacterium that could survive the change from Mars to Earth, I’ll say this:
The last couple of decades have seen the discovery of extremophiles, organisms that can survive extreme conditions, and extreme changes in conditions. For example, there are bacteria that have adapted to the point where they can exist comfortably on either side of a halocline, the boundary at the mouth of an ocean-bound river where fresh water meets salt (no, the two do not necessary blend smoothly into one another. I have seen film of the often sharp boundary between the two.) For any other organism, the two environments are mutually exclusive. Discovery of these and other extremophiles have turned on their heads whatever ideas we’ve held about what life can and can not do.
The current Earth atmosphere is: Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide, Argon, water and other stuff.
The current Mars atmosphere is: Carbon Dioxide, Nitrogen, Argon, Oxygen, water and other stuff.
Could there exist a microbe that could withstand the transition of composition and pressure?
Given that we have only the barest clue of Mars’ geological and atmospheric history, and no idea at all about what kind of life (if any) developed there, we have essentially no basis for speculating on what evolution can or can not have introduce there.
You be the judge of how PROBABLE my little scenario is, but it’s certainly POSSIBLE.
Hey scotandrsn,
“More oxygen=more growth” is a common misconception in microbiology. The problem with aerobic respiration is that it creates toxic oxygen species, which damage all number of cellular structures and processes. Microorganisms growing in oxic conditions have evolved solutions (including dismutases and catalases) to this problem. However, microorganisms growing in environments with very low oxygen concentrations generally lack these “solutions.” Therefore, expose them to oxygen & they die.
Any native microbe on Mars would have been living in anoxic conditions for a very long time. Bring them to Earth, and they must either find anoxic niches to live in, or die.
-Apoptosis
We might be about to find out how well Earthly microbes will do on Mars.
(Sadly, the article deals more with what’s going wrong with the probe, then how the thing got shipped out there without being decontaminated first.)