I am interested! I know bacteria survived the trip to the moon and back and satellites have been retrieved with microbes still living!
off-topic but kind of related - have you seen the blue planet series? specifically "the deep"?
they filmed the "hot vents" and "cold seeps" - if you haven't seen it - check it out!
if you have then you'll know what i'm talking about when i say it feels like your looking a the first video of life found on another planet! same goes for some of the cave creatures in the "caves" episode of planet earth. That one thing that looks like a stalactite that drips hydrochloric acid - holy cow amazing stuff.
Wow, microbes were still alive after being brought back from moon! Hardy lil buggers they are. I suppose that's why they go to so much trouble to not contaminate a probe/satellite before sending it off, especially the ones looking for life, else they may come across some earth life they took with them. I did watch the blue planet series, and yes "the deep" was my favourite. Amazing footage , it makes you look at life with new eyes so to speak, unclouded by our accustomed feeling towards the life we see everyday. It's a totally different ecosystem down there; as you probably know all life was previously thought to depend on the Sun, but this discovery blows that out of the water (pardon the pun). The extreme conditions down there is what I can't get my head around, but the life down there just seems to thrive around these hydrothermal vents, with crabs and these strange worms that all feed of the bacteria, which feeds of the chemicals the the vents bring up? Am I on the right line there? The Planet Earth one was outstanding especially the cave one. Did you notice when the scuba guys went through the caves underwater they came across this area where salt and fresh water met, and made it look as if they were coming into fresh air, it looked really weird. Sorry about the rant, I feel a lot better now.
Amazingly cool stuff! yeah - the "coral" strains the nutrients soup from the vents and then something eats them and something else eats them and so on. i figure it will be something like that when we finally find life elsewhere - unless on the off chance it comes to us.
OverGrowers
heheheheh
