Could an astronaut’s corpse bring new life to another world?

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2016/10/could-an-astronauts-corpse-bring-new-life-to-another-world

by benbreen • 10 years ago

117 73 10 years ago

Has anything like this been tried before? Maybe not a corpse, but some other organic matter?

te_platt• 10 years ago

Maybe, but not on purpose. Nasa goes to great lengths to sterilize probes going to Mars. http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/technology/is_planetary_protection....

pmoriarty• 10 years ago

If Musk's Mars colonization plans come to fruition, all that trouble NASA went to sterilize their Mars probes will be for nothing.

erispoe4• 10 years ago

We don't know if life exists or has existed on other bodies of our solar system, therefore we take great precautions to avoid contamination. Probes are sterilized, and some regions of Mars (Mars Special Regions) are barred from landings, until we can ensure better sterilization of what we send there. It would be a shame to contaminate life samples from other planets with our own before we can study it.

stevendhansen• 10 years ago

Reminds me of a book I recently finished (Death's End by Cixin Liu). A major plot element is sending a human brain to intercept an alien civilization that is en-route to Earth with the hope that the aliens will resurrect the person and use his knowledge establish a better dialog with humanity.

pavel_lishin2• 10 years ago

I recall reading another novel where one of the protagonists was resurrected far, far in the future by a seemingly incomprehensible race. (Little spiders, of sorts.) Unfortunately, due to unfamiliarity with humanity, they did a bad job, and his body only lasted a few minutes before dying again.

I wish I could remember what the book was.

dmreedy• 10 years ago

At the very least, "poorly reassembled by incomprehensible aliens" is a plot element in the Star Trek TOS pilot. Granted, that character lasted more than a few minutes. And costumes for incomprehensible aliens are expensive, so big veiny heads will do.

kilroy123• 10 years ago

Sounds like a real life version of hell.

Jtsummers• 10 years ago

Rautavarra's Case by PKD is similar. After an accident, an alien race resuscitates one of the [EDIT: human] victims, leading to some interesting consequences related to differing conceptions of the afterlife.

Text: http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/rautaavara...

Synopsis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rautavaara%27s_Case

Probably not the one you're thinking of, but somewhat related.

Lerc• 10 years ago

Dennis potter wrote an intriguing take on this.

When Potter was dying he wrote Karaoke (which was about a dying writer writing a play entitled Karaoke who discovers his characters actually exist)

This is followed by Cold Lazarus which is set in a dystopian future in a lab working on the cryogenically frozen head of the author from Karaoke.

There is a fairly open question as to how much of Karaoke is a prequel and how much of it is a concurrent experience of the mind being experimented upon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaoke_(TV_series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Lazarus

darklajid• 10 years ago

My best guess that kinda, sorta matches your description: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

(I liked that one)

astrange• 10 years ago

I think I read this in a short story collection, but totally can't remember which one.

arunix• 10 years ago

Your description sounds similar in some ways to The Last Legends of Earth, by A. A. Attanasio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Legends_of_Earth

Razengan• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the opening of the movie Prometheus.

happy-go-lucky2• 10 years ago

Creepy yet interesting.

maverick_iceman• 10 years ago

Spoiler alert, dude!

kbenson• 10 years ago

Seriously. I'm at the very beginning of the second book right now.

jessaustin• 10 years ago

Yes, that was ridiculous. I wish mods would just delete spoiler posts.

flukus6• 10 years ago

The book is 6 years old, what's the spoiler limit?

Did you know Darth Vader was Luke Skywalkers father?

pc86• 10 years ago

Well if you were worried about a spoiler, perhaps you should have stopped reading when he mentioned the book name and that he had finished it. Or maybe immediately after that when he said "major plot point"

Pica_soO2• 10 years ago

Even more interesting, given heat, radiation and chemical energy could this corpse become a alive microcosm, with sped up evolution?

cbanek2• 10 years ago

Simpson's did it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_VII#.22The...

Well, except for the space part. I honestly think it could happen. There's also a lot of gut bacteria and other micro-organisms that are alive on their own.

I'm wondering more if this spacesuit hit something like a comet, asteroid, or other small body before hitting a planet. If a part of the living ecosystem makes it to a secure nook or gets folded inside of the asteroid, it might survive landing on a planet.

Pica_soO2• 10 years ago

If it would happen slowly, would a sealing agent bacteria appear?

DiThi• 10 years ago

Well, except for the space part.

Well, Futurama did it again, this time in space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfellas

mrspeaker• 10 years ago

To further quote South Park: "Everything was already done even before the Simpsons. In fact that was just a rip off of an old Twilight Zone episode". (I'm not sure if it really was, but sounds plausable!)

garaetjjte• 10 years ago

https://what-if.xkcd.com/134/

andreapaiola• 10 years ago

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

adekok• 10 years ago

I can't find it now, but I recall an article which simulated interstellar transit times for asteroids. The conclusion was that something like the dinosaur killer asteroid could throw rocks into orbit. After 100M years, some of those rocks could have reached other solar systems (i.e alpha centauri)

Given that life on Earth is ~4 billion years old, there's good reason to be believe we've seeded rocks across a sphere ~100 or more light years across.

Whether those rocks reach another solar system is another question. Space is big, and even giant killer rocks are tiny.

api3• 10 years ago

One of my favorite admittedly speculative evolutionary informatics papers agrees with you:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the...

theparanoid• 10 years ago

It's probably true. The earliest rocks on earth show signs of life.

hamilyon2• 10 years ago

Pre-planetary solar asteroid ring had probably not the worst conditions for life to be created. Water is abundant in solar system now, probably not was then too.

greglindahl• 10 years ago

Here's a paper discussing rocks from Earth being tossed all over the solar system after being ejected by impacts on Earth. It's from 2013, and references a lot of earlier papers on the topic.

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2013.1028

mathattack• 10 years ago

Couldn't those rocks have come to us as well?

azernik• 10 years ago

For more on this theory, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

spyder• 10 years ago

Panspermia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

pjmorris3• 10 years ago

I read a 'Last Man on Earth' short story in an SF anthology with, essentially, this premise. At the end of the story, the exhausted person dies while sitting on the edge of the sea... only to seed the next round of life from all of the lifeforms and organic materials contained therein. Creepy, heady stuff for a preteen. This was the 70's, so the idea has been around awhile.

fnbr• 10 years ago

Do you remember the book? I'd be interested in reading that.

pjmorris3• 10 years ago

VerDeTerre came through, above. I read it in an anthology in the children's section of the public library (another good reason for public libraries), but the anthology title is long lost to /dev/null.

VerDeTerre• 10 years ago

Sounds like Alfred Bester's "Adam and No Eve" from 1941. It's included in https://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Unrealities-Fiction-Alfred-Be...

WalterBright• 10 years ago

I remember that story, too. Arthur Clarke?

happy-go-lucky2• 10 years ago

Because of their resilience, tardigrades come to mind :)

jakebasile• 10 years ago

This is an interesting concept and has been explored in fiction before, most recently (to my knowledge) in Prometheus. Not the best film, stunning cinematography but lacking good writing, but had a similar premise.

eth0up4• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

After many sessions, my past-life-regression therapist and I agreed that I was once a very powerful and influential tardigrade on a glorious faraway planet and that given the prognosis of humanity, I may be once again, but there's more competition this time.

api3• 10 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFkcAH-m9W0

eth0up4• 10 years ago

Man, I wish you lived in my neighborhood with that sense of humor. Seeing Johnny Cash say "I may simply be a single drop of rain", but "I'll remain" and "be back again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again...." had me heaving in a mixture of jovial convulsions and sincere frustration with this dadgum relativity conundrum that ultimately tears us all apart. Brings me to wonder; how many planets might Johnny Cash have thrilled with his reasonably excellent tunes? I just hope that Earth wasn't the only planet in the void to incur the equivalent wrath of Cash + Danzig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUWUY57ar18

PS: I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have a permanent national Mount Nelson, in approximate accordance with the video in which the concept thereof was reasonably placed slightly above the local peak. I mean, humanity always transcends its circumstances. Why not Willie?

miles2• 10 years ago

Reading through some of your other comments, I'm convinced you were P.G. Wodehouse last time around. Seriously though, do you write anywhere else online? Great stuff.

eth0up4• 10 years ago

If you've any connections with academic (cognitive) psychological research opportunities, e.g [1], I might know someone with uncanny 'relations' to the aforementioned (and others).

1. http://dbem.ws/

B1FF_PSUVM• 10 years ago

you were P.G. Wodehouse

"Senator, I knew P.G. Wodehouse! You, sir, ..."

Hrm, ahem. Maybe the fellow who burned acrid poetry?

(Plum would never worry about a "multi-trillion-dollar black-budget", unless it were used to fund a comm network to exchange pics of Pekingese and tips on the care and feeding thereof ;-)

dear• 10 years ago

...Prometheus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(2012_film)

svenhenrik• 10 years ago

So where do I sign up to have my corpse sent to Mars after I die?

thom• 10 years ago

Stephen Baxter's Titan (a fairly bleak novel but not totally outlandish given current world events) ends with astronauts that long ago perished on Titan being resurrected by the sentient race that eventually evolves there. In preparation for the death of our star, they are preparing a rocket to send genetic matter from our solar system to other parts of the galaxy, in some way continuing our lineage.

jejones3141• 10 years ago

Isaac Asimov, "Founding Father". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Father_(short_story)

squarefoot• 10 years ago

Plants are faster to duplicate. Assuming the astronaut falls on a world with air and water, if s/he ate some vegetable food containing seeds before dying, they could grow on soil fed by his decaying body. The question then would be: what happens when all nutrients from the body are depleted?

Could an astronaut’s corpse bring new life to another world?

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