What's happening right now due to the global outbreak of COVID-19 should make us rethink our desire to meet alien lifeforms.
pointed out last week, NASA has a long history of working to protect the Earth from biohazards from other planets and to protect other planets from biohazards from Earth. The space agency even has an entire division dedicated to that goal, formally known as the, but more commonly and descriptively known as the Planetary Protection Office.
As OSMA puts it, its mission is to “carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft” and to “rigorously preclude backward contamination of Earth by extraterrestrial life.” If you have any question about which of those mission statements is the more important one, just consider the difference between a promise to “carefully control” something and to “rigorously preclude” it.
NASA’s most extensive experience with the risk of backward contamination was during the Apollo era when both lunar samples and humans who had been on the moon came back to Earth. For the first three landings, no sooner had the crewmen opened their hatch after splashdown than frogmen handed them biohazard suits to wear for their trip back to the Naval recovery ship. From there they were flown to Houston, where they were kept in three weeks of isolation.
Mars will be a very different matter, because Mars, which was once awash with water, might once have been fairly churning with life too—and some of it may well linger in spots in which the water endures. As the Space.
The odds of finding life on Mars are unknown and unknowable. The odds of being able to scoop it up and bring it back to Earth intact add a further degree of uncertainty. And the risk of a pathogen escaping and a pandemic ensuing, while not impossible, feels far more the stuff of a screenplay than a journal paper.
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