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No of course not. But I wouldn’t be permitted to do it even if I wanted to. Viruses aren’t the concern but microbes are. Not only that, Earth is protected by many laws. You would not be permitted to do this. Naturally enough - after all we don’t want to risk returning anything from Mars that could be harmful to humans or to the environment of Earth.If you think extraterrestrial life is bound to be harmless, think to yourself - what if half the microbes on Earth had mirror DNA or used different amino acids, or maybe didn’t even have proteins or carbohydrates? Those are all theoretical possibilities. When Earth life is the only life we know of in the entire universe, we have no way to know if they are actual realities that we may find on Mars. Mirror DNA is particularly simple - reflect a cell in a mirror and it should work, but all the chemicals in their mirror forms (most of which are incompatible with Earth biochemistry).Would our ecosystems and the creatures and plants in them still manage just fine? Would you be just fine if half the microbes on your skin and in your stomach were mirror DNA, or didn’t have proteins or carbohydrate or were not based on DNA?Well, perhaps, who knows, but it seems a bit unlikely that they would be “drop in” replacements for Earth microbes. So what happens to Earth if martian microbes did turn out to be different and spread out and evolved and adapted (as microbes do rapidly) and ended up in all our ecosystems?No, we do have to protect Earth at least until we know what we are returning.And we will, for sure. We have many environmental laws. These would all be triggered by the initial Environmental Impact Assessment. Everyone has to do those, inclidng private space before they launch any mission into space. And they should want to do these too.These are not laws you can get around. They absolutely have to do them. There is no way that anything can be transferred from Mars to Earth from any source, no matter who does it, until it is cleared as totally safe for Earth’s environment.- there may well be microbes on Mars. Here are some of the news stories of the last decade all about possibilities of microbes on or near the surface, within the top few cms or mms.News coverage of potential present day habitats of life on MarsThis is one of the most recent - about the possibility that some of these habitats could even be oxygen rich:Sponges on Mars? We ask Stamenković about their oxygen-rich briny seeps modelI know this may seem science fiction. But Mars was a terrestrial planet like Earth in the early solar system. A world with oceans, atmosphere, volcanoes, hydothermal vents. Life evolved here so we have to consider the possibility that it evolved there. And if so it could have evolved indepdently from Earth life and that means it could be any concievable or even not yet concievable extraterrestrial biology.We should explore Mars from orbit first, via telepresence, and from Earth with our robots there, and find out if there is any life there on or near the surface before we even think about sending humans to the surface. We should also be very careful not to return any life from Mars to Earth accidentally. Not even as a bit of dust in a spacecraft flying back and forth. This is not me saying this. This is what the law will say once we go through that legal process. That is - until we know what is there.So - why do we need to do this?A virus is not possible as it has to be adapted to our biology and for a virus to jump from a martian microbe or lichen to a human would be incredible. But there are many other ways that martian microbes could harm us. Perhaps the easiest to understand, a disease of martian biofilms could infect the human lungs. That may seem incredible until you think about Legionnaires’ disease. It is not a disease of humans at all. It is just a disease of biofilms that is able to infect our lungs using the same methods it uses for biofilms. It has gradually started to adapt to human lungs but a martian microbe could do that too after it infects us.So could there be such organisms on Mars that are harmful to us? That was the subject of this study, lead by David Warmflash of the NASA Johnson Space Center: Assessing the biohazard potential of putative martian organisms for exploration class human space missions.First the authors look at the ways that Earth microbes harm us. They can beInfectious, causing damage only if they multiply inside the host - either invasive throughout the host or local in their effectToxic - hazardous components of the cells, or the products of their metabolism may harm other organisms incidentally - not targeted at us but still can kill us.Those two categories are not exclusive - an infectious organism might also produce toxic byproducts.Now, most microbes on Earth are absolutely harmless to humans. They may live on our skin, and even if not at all adapted to us, they cause us no harm at all - unless of course you have a wound and they get inside the wound. Our bodies are well able to cope with them.However, there are a few that are harmful to us, and those are not necessarily adapted to humans or even to macro organisms. One of the best known diseases of this type is Legionnaire's disease. Normally it lives inside amoebas, inside the cellular fluid. However, it can also live independently without any host in biofilms. Yet it can also live inside the lungs of human beings. It uses the same adaptations that let it live inside a biofilm, or an amoeba, to live inside our lungs.This could easily be duplicated on Mars. A similar organism could survive in a biofilm on Mars just as Legionnaire's disease does on Earth. Or it could survive inside a single cell larger microbe on Mars. All that it needs to be a potential risk to humans is to live naturally in an environment similar to what it might encounter later in a human host. As they say in the paper:"The causative bacterium, Legionella pneumophila, is a facultative, gram-negative rod that is one of several human pathogens now known to be carried in the intracellular environments of protozoan hosts. Additionally, L. pneumophila can also persist, even outside of any host, as part of biofilms. In essence, all that a potentially infectious human pathogen needs in order to emerge and persist in an environment is to grow and live naturally under conditions that are similar to those that it might later encounter in a human host. On Mars, these conditions might be met in a particular niche within the extracellular environment of a biofilm, or within the intracellular environment of another single-celled Martian organism.".Next, they give an example of an organism that produces a toxin. Their example is the anaerobe Clostridia, which often lives as spores in soils. Some of its species are locally infectious in wounds. and can release life threatening toxins at times, including C. tetani which causes Tetanus, and C. perfringens.As another example, they mention another species of Clostridia, botulinum, contaminates food stored in anaerobic conditions, which releases a toxin that interferes with the way our nerves work. This microbe can lead to the fatal paralysis of Botulism when ingested. Of course it is not adapted in any way to paralyse humans - there is no evolutionary advantage in that. This is just a byproduct of its metabolism that happens to be harmful to hum ans. So the same could be true for Mars microbes, they might produce byproducts that happen to interfere with our metabolism in ways that harm us.Photomicrograph of Clostridium botulinum bacteria. Though it is not adapted to humans, it produces a toxin which coincidentally is a nerve toxin which causes the rare but serious Botulism disease. This toxin is paralysing if ingested, and can be fatal. This is one way in which Mars microbes could be harmful to humans directlyAnother example is Clavicepts purpurea which produces ergot disease, in crops. When humans eat those diseased crops, it can lead to limb loss, convulsions and hallucinations, and again there is of course no evolutionary advantage in this for the microbe. There is no need for the Mars life to be related to us in any way for it to produce coincidentally toxic substances like this.Here is another example of my own to add to the list. Aspergilliosis, a frequent cause of hay fever in humans. It's a fungus which is capable of surviving in extreme conditions. For most people, it's no trouble at all. For others it's a minor nuisance. It's not adapted to be virulent, and is normally easily kept out by our immune system, However, it can be harmful and even deadly to people with a damaged immune system.It seems an interesting example, seems to me because of Joshua Lederberg's "On the other hand, microorganisms make little besides proteins and carbohydrates, and the human or other mammalian immune systems typically respond to peptides or carbohydrates produced by invading pathogens." which I mentioned above in Why we can't prove yet that Mars life is safe for Earth and his .If some microbe from Mars for some reason is able to adapt to survive in our lungs, and if it is only remotely related to Earth life, our immune system might not recognize it as harmful. If so, we might all respond as if we had damaged immune systems, like the patients who die from Aspergilliosis. So perhaps this may give us an idea of what to expect.Another example comes from Chris Chyba: cyanobacteria killing cattleLake Eyrie in October 2011 during its worst cyanobacteria bloom for a long time. The cyanobacteria produced microcystins which is a liver toxin and can cause sudden death in cattle within hours, also often kills dogs swimming in the water and is a skin irritant for people.As Chrys Chyba summarizes the situation in his abstract:"It is unlikely that these cyanobacteria evolved the toxins in response to dairy cows; rather the susceptibility of cattle to these toxins seems simply to be an unfortunate coincidence of a toxin working across a large evolutionary distance"This is of no advantage at all to the cyanobacteria. Cows are neither predators on them, nor do they eat cows. It's just a coincidence that they happen to produce a chemical that is toxic over a very wide evolutionary distance.In the same paper he gives the example of Serratia marcenscens, a bacterium which is found in water and soil, as a free living microbe - and is an "opportunist pathogen" of animal species as widely diverse as humans and elkhorn coral.This sort of "poisoning by coincidence" is quite common, and you may be able to think of many more examples for yourself.For instance, cocoa plants produce theobromine which kills dogs if they eat too much chocolate. The cocoa plant doesn't need to defend itself against dogs. Cyanobacteria also produce BMAA which is implicated in Alzheimer's. Again there is no advantage to the cyanobacteria to give humans Alzheimer's. It is just a chemical that happens to resemble one of the amino acids L-serine, and so gets misincorporated into proteins causing Alzheimer's. Even life that is based on a different biochemistry from Earth might easily, through near coincidence, produce chemicals that Earth life misincorporates in this way.So, in the same way microbes from Mars could quite easily produce deadly toxins for Earth life and would not need to be adapted to us in any way at all to do that.Now, the worst case is actually if it is an unrelated biology. Not even DNA maybe. Mirror DNA, maybe it uses different amino acids. Maybe it has no carbohydrates and no proteins - after all according to some theories the earliest microbes didn’t have those things. Maybe martian life is like RNA world cells but evolved to incredible complexity and capabilities, with the encymes made up of RNA fragments as ribozymes in much smaller more compact cells.You might think “Oh but how can it infect us if it is so different?”.But then you might reflect “How would our body defend against it if it is so different?”Some microbes are “primary producers” and don’t depend on any other microbes for life. Some can make all their ingredients just from sunlight, air, water and a few trace chemicals.Our lungs, or sinuses, say, or our skin, would be like a petri dish of organics and the foreign life might find it indigestible or poisonous, but it might like it, or like some element of it. It might then start thriving.Joshua Lederberg was a Nobel winning microbiologist, and microbe geneticist, and closely involved in early searches for life on Mars, summarizes it like this (emphasis mine):"If Martian microorganisms ever make it here, will they be totally mystified and defeated by terrestrial metabolism, perhaps even before they challenge immune defenses? Or will they have a field day in light of our own total naivete in dealing with their “aggressins”?That’s in his "Paradoxes of the Host-Parasite Relationship"And in more detail in Parasites Face a Perpetual Dilemma:"Whether a microorganism from Mars exists and could attack us is more conjectural. If so, it might be a zoonosis to beat all others.[a zoonosis is a disease that can be transferred to humans from animals - but here he also means from microbes, though if there is oxygen in the water on Mars it could also have tiny primitive animals there]"On the one hand, how could microbes from Mars be pathogenic for hosts on Earth when so many subtle adaptations are needed for any new organisms to come into a host and cause disease? On the other hand, microorganisms make little besides proteins and carbohydrates, and the human or other mammalian immune systems typically respond to peptides or carbohydrates produced by invading pathogens. Thus, although the hypothetical parasite from Mars is not adapted to live in a host from Earth, our immune systems are not equipped to cope with totally alien parasites: a conceptual impasse."So, he is saying that our immune system and defenses are keyed to various chemicals produced by Earth life. such as peptides and carbohydrates. It's entirely possible that Mars life doesn’t use those chemicals at all.Of course our antibiotics would do nothing to stop them.For all we know a martian microbe might kill the first astronauts to land on Mars as soon as they find its habitat there.As for returning to Earth, I don’t think the worst case is end of humanity with this scenario - maybe was in the 1960s but not now with modern technology. But it is having to live in plastic bubble shelters for the rest of our civilization to keep out invasive microbes harmful to human health that are now ineradically part of the world’s ecosystems. Having to always wear hazmat suits when you leave your habitat and never swim in the open sea, or lakes, only in carefully sterilized swimming pools etc.Knowing that this is a possibility we won’t let anyone risk that. It was possible at the time of Apollo when we were much less careful and hadn’t had the experience of things going wrong with modern technology that we have had since then. But it is no longer permitted.. We can’t return a sample either without first ensuring it is safe for Earth and that includes even a bit of dust that gets into a spaceship shuttling back and forth between Earth and Mars.I am not talking about personal opinion here but strict legal processes. It all starts with an Environmental Impact Statement in the US, which everyone has to do including private space. Normally it is a bit of a nuisance but not much more than a formality though it may take some years.But for a Mars sample return that would spawn numerous other legal processes including examining its effects on ecosystems, agriculture, human health, etc. EvenMargaret Race did a legal analysis and the number of things that would have to be sorted out is just incredible. This is assuming you don’t know what is in the sample and that it could be any concievable form of extraterrestrial biology and even things we don’t know yet how to imagine.Then there are many sample return studies by the European Space foundation and the National Research Council and others that all conclude we have to protect Earth. When asked to give expert witness in legal proceedings these authors will all say that we have to protect our planet from martian microbes. There is no possibility of them saying anything else if you read the literature on the subject.More details here:Protecting Earth's Environment For A Mars Sample Return - Has NASA Started The Legal Process Yet?Some colonization enthusiasts think that they would be able to return material from Mars to Earth just by saying to everyone that it is safe. But it doesn’t work like that.It did used to. They are so familiar with the way it worked for Apollo that it is no surprise if unreflectingly they expect it to happen like that again.Back in 1967 we could have returned a sample from Mars to Earth and so long as we didn’t think it was likely to be dangerous, then it would be like the Moon sample return which is now considered woefully inadequate.With the Moon they didn’t even publish the regulations until the day of the launch. It was not a proper law either. It is not even certain that what hey did was legal by the standards of the day — but there wasn’t any scrutiny of its legality. It just all seems so amazingly haphazard by modern standards. I was a child back then, watched the Apollo landing with great excitement - and I never noticed gave it any thought when the astronauts were taken out of the capsule in an open dinghy. They wore decontamination suits, but to put them on, the divers had to throw them in through the capsule door. The inside was covered in dust which smelt like gunpowder, so for sure some dust got into the sea just by opening the door. Then they wiped them with permanganate wipes and threw the wipes into the sea - they had no idea!(You can read about all this in “When Biospheres Collide”, a history of the NASA planetary protection)There were many breaches of containment. Amusingly, Buzz Aldrin has an anecdote in his biography of how ants crawled into the quarantine facilities while he and Neil Armstrong were staying for two weeks after return from the Moon. But that was just one of numerous breaches.All this simply would not be permitted today. Indeed, NASA are going to send a sample caching rover to Mars this very year, 2020. They hope to return the sample in a follow up mission they have not yet built that they will start work on only after this one has headed off for Mars. They have not yet started on the legal processes as far as I can see.Well - the legal processes would likely take at least until 2040 to complete by my best estimates. Quite possibly a decade or more longer - that is if they plan to return an unsterilized sample that may have alien microbes in it and if they have no idea what type of biology may be involved. This all starts with an Environmental Impact Assessment which is normally a reasonably straightforward but tedious process. For example, Cassini couldn’t launch until its radioisotope was cleared. NASA needed formal approval from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)NASA Receives Approval to Launch Cassini MissionThat approval is required by presidential directive.“Before Administrator Goldin sent the request for launch approval to OSTP, two separate processes were completed to address the environmental and safety aspects of the mission. NASA completed an Environmental Impact Statement in June 1995 and a supplement in June 1997, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act and NASA policy. “The same thing applies to any mission which carries a radioisotop source. We know how to contian them safely but it still needs to go through the process of an EIS. Mars 2020 has to go through the same process. No public hysteria this time AFAIK but still had to have an EIS before they could approve the launch. Final Environmental Impact Statement for Mars 2020.This is nothing to do with it being a NASA mission. If SpaceX want to launch a radioisotope heat source to space too, they have to go through the same process.But Margaret Race looked at the implications of doing one of those for a Mars sample return in her legal review paper for a robotic sample return (Planetary Protection, Legal Ambiguity, and the Decision Making Process for Mars Sample Return).It is just incredible how much is involved. I don’t think NASA have a clue - I don’t know why but I have asked many people if they know of anything they have done on this and done literature surveys and I have posted articles on my blog about it and not found even as much as a summary paragraph of how they plan to tackle the legal situation for a Mars sample return or how they plan to complete it in less than several decades.This is my short summary of what is needed based on her paperShe found that under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (which did not exist in the Apollo era) a formal environment impact statement is likely to be required, and public hearings during which all the issues would be aired openly. This process is likely to take up to several years to complete.During this process, she found, the full range of worst accident scenarios, impact, and project alternatives would be played out in the public arena. Other agencies such as the Environment Protection Agency, Occupational Health and Safety Administration, etc, may also get involved in the decision making process.The laws on quarantine will also need to be clarified as the regulations for the Apollo program were rescinded. In the Apollo era, NASA delayed announcement of its quarantine regulations until the day Apollo was launched, so bypassing the requirement for public debate - something that would be unlikely to be tolerated today.It is also probable that the presidential directive NSC-25 will apply which requires a review of large scale alleged effects on the environment and is carried out subsequent to the other domestic reviews and through a long process, leads eventually to presidential approval of the launch.Then apart from those domestic legal hurdles, there are numerous international regulations and treaties to be negotiated in the case of a Mars Sample Return, especially those relating to environmental protection and health. She concluded that the public of necessity has a significant role to play in the development of the policies governing Mars Sample ReturnProtecting Earth's Environment For A Mars Sample Return - Has NASA Started The Legal Process Yet?To add to all that though you need to look at the likely requirements for a Mars sampel return handling facility. The problem is it has to contain any concievable microbiology based on any form of biology - mirror DNA, RNA world, any amino acids, maybe something we haven’t even imagined yet would work as a basis for life processes.When you add up the timescale for everything - if they start the legal process this year, there is no way they can complete it before 2040 and it could easily take a decade or two longer. I think once NASA realize this, and given that they want it back by the early 2030s at the latest, they will just arrange to sterilize the sample before returning it. There are alternatives but that is the easiest and lowest cost way to do it and can be done without triggering any of our environmental laws. If they find life there first, maybe they return it to above GEO. The ISS would not count as safe because it doesn’t break the chain of contact between Earth and Mars.ANSWERING SOME OBJECTIONSWouldn’t Mars life have got here already?Not too likely. Our meteorites come from at least a couple of meters below the surface. The martian life would most likely be in fragile surface habitats of dust and ice that would not be knocked into space by most meteorites. There are many other difficulties including a shock of ejection that would kill most Earth microbes including just about all known photosythetic life. Some microbes could survive the transition but it is not clear that any have - and we are talking about capabilities of unknown microbes of an unknown biology here, not Earth life.We simply don’t know but it may never have happened even in the early solar system.Isn’t Earth uninhabitable for Earth life with its warmth and oxygen?No. First, the surface is highly oxygenated with perchlorates and with hydrogen peroxide and the characteristically red rusts covering the surface. There is some oxygen in the atmosphere as well. Martian life would not be put off by Earth’s oxygen. Also it has had hydrothermal vents in the past and still may have them not yet detected, perhaps in caves. It might have acid sulfur caves below the surface. Microbes in the dust may well retain capabilities to survive in hot conditions as well as acid conditions such as human stomachs. Or if not could evolve these capabilities. Itis not clear that any niche on Earth is off-limit from spores of microbes that may exist in the Martian dust, likely in small numbers but they could be protected from UV by the iron oxides and imbedded in cracks in dust grains. That is an idea Carl Sagen suggested which is still not ruled out.What about places without life?This wouldn’t matter if Mars was sterile like the Moon. Go to the Moon or an asteroid or even the moons of Mars, no problem. Those are the natural places to go, too.Mars is such an incredibly dangerous place to go early on. Imagine this - you have just left Earth orbit, Earth is receding behind you, and then you get a chemical leak. Or a fire. Or a small meteorite pierces your spaceship. Or an explosion like the one for Apollo 13.This is not fiction. The ISS has had numerous small incidents. Sometimes our spacecraft that we launch into space have glitches. None of this matters because if needs be we know we can abort back to earth.But - imagine you are just leaving Earth orbit and you get an explosion. Vital equipment is destroyed. You now have to try to do a McIver type solution with sticky tape and cardboard, maybe, to keep it together, much like the astronauts did for Apollo 13, but this time your solution has to last 500 days. Not just a week. That is how long it takes to get back to Earth via Mars on the shortest path, after you leave Earth orbit.The retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, former commander of the ISS, interviewed by New Scientist, put it like this in their article "We should live on the moon before a trip to Mars""I think ultimately we’ll be living on the moon for a generation before we get to Mars. If the world and the moon were threatened and the only way to preserve our species was to launch from Earth, we could go to Mars with yesterday’s technology, but we would probably kill just about everybody on the way.""It’s as if you and I were in Paris, paddling around in the Seine in little canoes saying, 'We’ve got boats, we’ve got paddles, let’s go to Australia!' Australia? We can barely cross the English Channel. We’re sort of in that boat in space exploration right now. A journey to Mars is conceivable but it’s still a lot further away than most people think."The Moon is not only safer, it's also a natural place to begin to develop reliable technology for multi-year missions throughout the solar system. If we can achieve that then the cost of human missions to the Moon will go down dramatically to a fraction of the normal cost. Imagine what a cost saving it would be if we could send a crew to the Moon for two years with no resupply from Earth, as if it was an interplanetary mission to Mars? We need these shake out cruises close to Earth first.Once we have biological closed systems working on the Moon, then missions throughout our solar system that last for a decade or more could be as easy to support as ones that last for a couple of years or less. Once we have that capability, we can go to Venus, Mars and beyond, even to Mercury, the asteroids and Jupiter's Callisto, with no worry about narrow safety margins.Or whatever we do, we can do shake down cruises in the Earth Moon system to make sure everything is working well before we send the crew on their interplanetary missions, to Mars, or Venus so far from help from Earth, or any possibility of aborting back to Earth.Protecting Earth's Environment For A Mars Sample Return - Has NASA Started The Legal Process Yet?My draft paper that I hope to publish some day on this topic (encouraged by an astrobiologist friend), probably only a selection from it:Potential Severe Effects of a Biosphere Collision and Planetary Protection ImplicationsMy encyclopedia based on importing articles from Wikipedia and then adding the new research - they don’t cover any of the recent news stories about potential habitats for life on Mars and much of it seems to be about a decade out of date:Astrobiology EncyclopediaAnd my online book on planetary protection - as far as I know only the second complete book on the subject (the first is “When Biospheres Collide”, a history of the NASA planetary protection)OK to Touch Mars? Europa? Enceladus? Or a Tale of Missteps?Then - as I said the Moon is the natural place to go first - not only that - I was astonished to find it is actually more habitable to humans than Mars - at least for the first few tens of thousands of settlers. For instance the vacuum is an asset, better than the best vacuum of any chip factory on Earth, great for making chips and solar panels. The CO2 on Mars is not much benefit - CO2 is a waste gas to get rid of unless you export more food than you import and if you have a reasonably closed system. The thin atmosphere on Mars means that as you walk around on the surface, great clouds of dust would rise and stay suspended in the air - on the Moon the astronauts got filthy with the dust too, but at least when kicked, the dust just flew up in little parabolas and back down again and couldn’t get suspended in the air.The Moon also has potential for commercial exports of various types to Earth. So far the only thing Elon Musk has suggested Mars could export to Earth is intellectual property rights from the inventions they make there (physical exports would be so expensive to return they would not pay for the transport)Have a look at the comparisons in my book and see what you think:Case For Moon FirstThen - once we go furhter afield - the best place for humans in the Jupiter system is not Europa (of course you don’t want to bring Earth microbes there until you know if there is native life and what Earth life does to it) - it is Callisto. Orbiting well outside the dangerous radiation belts that kill humans in hours unprotected on the Europan surface. It turns out to be one of the most habitable moons of the solar system for humans - that is - unless you include Saturn’s moon Titan which surely wins the prize, to find out why see myValue Of Titan As Base For Humans In Saturn System - Surprisingly - Once There - Easier For Settlement Than Mars Or The Moon(also covers Callisto)Eventually humans may transform the asteroid belt into space habitats and perhaps right out to the Oort cloud. The potential here in terms of human habitable area is absolutely vast. Trillions just in the asteroid belt alone, using the asteroids to construct habitats slowly spinning for gravity.Asteroid Resources Could Create Space Habs For Trillions; Land Area Of A Thousand EarthsI actually think we need to be more careful the other way around, to make sure that we explore the galaxy in a way that is sustainable and protects the galaxy both for the sake of other creatures and ourselves.Our pale blue dot - any other home for us in our universe?