A mysterious disease from outer space, threatening to wipe out people from the face of Earth or creating monsters, has turned into a popular science fiction trope. Could this fantastic scenario become reality? Expert in emerging technologies Dov Greenbaum has tried to guess.
Professor Dov Greenbaum, who is the director of the Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies at Israeli academic institute IDC Herzliya, has suggested that humans’ seeking life beyond Earth could pose contagion threats worse than the coronavirus. In a piece for CTech, he pointed out that in an era of rapid travel and ease of movement, viruses, such as the recent scare of the coronavirus, can spread rapidly and broadly. At the same time, as he noted, research over the past few decades has shown that some bacteria become more deadly and resilient when grown in space.
In spite of the popular sci-fi trope about deadly contagions from space, used, for example, in the hit movie The Andromeda Strain, NASA keeps experimenting and dispatching samples of genetically engineered bacteria to the International Space Station (ISS). Although “the spread of an out-worldly virus is deemed particularly unlikely in real-life”, as the analyst added, he warned against being too optimistic.
More Than Sci-Fi Trope?
Greenbaum suggests that if the existence of extraterrestrial life is true, “there is a possibility that, as was the case of the fictional Andromeda strain, seeking it could introduce novel contagions, far worse than the coronavirus”.
He, additionally, pointed out that life has been discovered in places, which used to be imagined uninhabitable and impossible for living beings. This goes together with the lack of tools for scanning objects for viruses during work in outer space, although researchers already have the equipment to hunt for the existence of viruses on rocks brought back from there. As he concluded, this “may be found sooner than you think might happen”.
While NASA is planning to deliver rocks from Mars, the Japanese mission Hayabusa2 is on its way from the asteroid Ryugu with rock samples. It is to arrive later this year. And, as Greenbaum points out, the danger that some mission could bring back space contagions exists.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
