[HN Gopher] Moss Survives 9 Months in Space Vacuum
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Moss Survives 9 Months in Space Vacuum
Author : ashishgupta2209
Score : 154 points
Date : 2025-11-22 03:57 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scienceclock.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scienceclock.com)
| r721 wrote:
| Better source:
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/20/moss-spores-...
| adrian_b wrote:
| Link to the research article:
|
| https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)02088-7
|
| The link provided in The Guardian is broken.
| ordu wrote:
| So... Now we have a way to commit an act of biological terrorism
| on the whole Milky Way? Just get a hundred of tons of moss spores
| to space and accelerate them in all direction to spread them all
| over Milky Way. It is somehow a very satisfying thought. Maybe
| I'm a born terrorist deep down, and just didn't get the chance to
| become one?
| Rooki wrote:
| Is it 100% certain that's not how they got here in the first
| place?
| esseph wrote:
| Goldilocks theory is pretty interesting
| askvictor wrote:
| It's pretty difficult to accelerate hundreds of tons (or even a
| lot less than that) of stuff out of the gravity well of the
| Sun. Let's start by terrorising things a bit closer to home
| (the moon, Mars)
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| A bootstrap station that can turn asteroids or space dust
| into probes sounds like a solution for that.
| lukan wrote:
| My definition of terrorism was always more in the lines of
| destroying life, not spreading it. Life might be very rare,
| even possible that life only developed here .. then our job
| might be exactly this, find ways to spread life.
| kakacik wrote:
| Spreading foreign life that kills local life (even if by just
| out-competing on resources) sounds a bit like terrorism
| though.
|
| But I have hard time believing even hardened organisms like
| moss or tardigrades could survive millions of years of hard
| vacuum and extreme cosmic radiation. Maybe embedded in some
| properly protective envelope, 1 out of billion trillion
| might. And then that one has 1 out of billion billion
| trillion chance to land eventually on a place that could be
| called livable. Or add few extra zeroes.
| lukan wrote:
| To kill local life, it first must exist, which is not
| confirmed at all. And if it exists, it is likely way better
| adopted to the local conditions.
|
| In genetal, nature works with small chances, look how many
| seeds a plant gives and how few of them will be a new
| plant.
|
| (Or how many sperms are created for 1 human)
|
| But sure, chances here are way, way lower.
| hereme888 wrote:
| You're wrong for many reasons, and I have no sense of humor.
| lukan wrote:
| The latter is your problem I guess, but I am interested in
| the reasons why you think I am wrong.
| hereme888 wrote:
| I don't, at all. I thought it was a funny response to
| state the obvious: that terrorism is about killing, not
| spreading life.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure, but some forms of it - like weaponized anthrax - do
| both.
|
| (And terrorism is often more about causing _fear_ than
| raw death counts.)
| ordu wrote:
| _> My definition of terrorism was always more in the lines of
| destroying life, not spreading it_
|
| When you come to some place and change it drastically, is it
| a good thing or a bad thing? I don't think it is. There are
| some excuses that I can accept, but if you do it "just for
| fun" of it, I think it is an evil deed.
|
| Places have their own history, their own shapes and forms,
| and then someone comes and wipes it off just because they
| can. It cannot be Good, can't it?
| lukan wrote:
| You talk about dead stones as if they have life. But they
| are dead. Spreading life is for fun in a way, that without
| life there is no fun at all. Just nothing, dead matter.
| (unless you believe in animism)
| b800h wrote:
| "Life on our planet was a delight, until _the day the moss
| came_. "
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| While spores seem hardened against the extremes of space, we
| haven't shown that _any_ of this hardy life is capable of
| colonizing a barren world. It seems like all life on Earth
| depends on some already functioning biosphere. In other words,
| even if we sent tardigrades to a world with oxygen and liquid
| water, what would they eat? Where would they get nutrients such
| as vitamin B? All the vitamin B we consume is created by
| bacteria, no animal produces it on its own. So we would have to
| send thousands of interdependent species. And I'm willing to
| bet the majority of them aren't nearly as hardy.
|
| Sending spores to a planet that already has life might work.
| But I can't help but think whatever life we introduce would be
| at a disadvantage. Maybe life on that planet never incorporated
| certain proteins, vitamins, or amino acids and whatever we send
| just ends up getting scurvy and dies out.
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| For a photosynthesizer minerals water, sun and co2 should be
| enough I think? Maybe oxygen is needed too unless it's able
| to store oxygen for respiration. Now eventually it might
| start running out of some resource or building up toxic
| levels off something so you gotta hope that that happens slow
| enough that evolution is in time to fix those issues.
| metalman wrote:
| you missed something, in that it is impossible to get
| perfectly sterile living animals or plants, and all* of them
| are carrying a large vaiety of bacteria, viruses, spores, and
| other animals eggs, etc. everything is an inoculant
|
| * I am aware of various experiments that did attempt to raise
| animals in perfectly sterile environments, where they died,
| but the only way to sterilise and maintain sterility, are
| extream, and largely impossible while keeping any single
| lifeform, alive.ie: it is far from the default
| adrian_b wrote:
| While animals could never live by themselves, some
| autotrophic bacteria can.
|
| A community of several different kinds of bacteria would have
| better chances than a single species, but for bacteria there
| is certainly no need for thousands of species.
|
| Autotrophic bacteria would need only an environment providing
| less than 20 essential chemical elements (most of which
| belong to the most abundant elements, a notable exception
| being molybdenum) and either solar light for energy, neither
| too little nor too much, or a chemical source of energy, like
| dihydrogen + carbon dioxide, which can be provided by
| volcanic gases or by the reaction of water with volcanic
| rocks.
|
| There would have been many places in the Solar System
| suitable for bacteria, except that where there is water, it
| is usually too cold, and where it is not too cold, there is
| no water.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Think fewer cells. Like one.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Well, plants famously don't eat much more than sun light,
| water and carbon dioxide. Otherwise they just need
| phosphorus, nitrogen and some trace elements.
|
| Moss has already adapted to barren environments. Its niche is
| growing where nothing else grows. Like, on top of rock. It's
| not having roots, not mingling with modern temptations in the
| soil. Most mosses actually aren't doing well in competitive,
| complex ecosystems full of nutrients and such.
| spragl wrote:
| The sheer number of civilizations, that it is normally believed
| there is in the Milky Way, pretty much guarantees that some of
| them, some of the time, do exactly this. For whatever alien
| reasons they might have. The Milky Way should be drizzling with
| moss spores already, or whatever exobiological life that can
| survive interstellar conditions.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I always wonder what would happen if you put a fully enclosed
| glass terrarium in space. How would it fair. Not big either.
| Grape fruit sized.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| If it was in the sun it would be incinerated and in the shade
| it would freeze right?
| nine_k wrote:
| The other side would radiate, losing the heat. Earth, being
| in a similar position, is neither incinerated nor
| refrigerated, though different sides of it can be hot or
| cold.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Earth has the benefit of a thermal mass that's at least a
| couple times larger than your average terrarium.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Everything exposed to the sun will heat up until the
| energy it emits balances out the incoming energy.
|
| Being a larger mass just means an object will take longer
| to heat up.
| cma wrote:
| Depending on how rich in internal radioactive sources of
| heat it isn't scale free with mass. Larger masses of the
| same makeup will reach different thermal equilibrium
| since the surface area grows at a slower rate than the
| internal heat production from decay which scales with
| mass.
|
| I don't know if it is significant, but tidal sources of
| heat might not scale the same either.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I think we can safely say the planet made of uranium is
| an edge case.
|
| The Earth's internal radioactivity is a miniscule energy
| source compared to the sun.
| cma wrote:
| Yes it's small, but:
|
| At least during emergence of life there was the faint
| young sun + higher proportions of radioactive elements,
| so could have made up 0.2% of outgoing thermal radiation
| or so on earth (ignoring outflow of residual heat from
| early collisions). I think 5-10 earth masses is the limit
| for terrestrial planets, and you can imagine having say
| 10x more radioactive elements and still hospitable to
| life, rather than being made of solid uranium. So maybe
| double digit percentage radiant heat outflow differences
| between very small and very large on those.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Presumably a spherical ball of air would be able to
| transfer heat more quickly (from the hot to the cold
| side) than the same volume spread out as a very thin
| hollow layer.
| nine_k wrote:
| Sphere's surface grows as radius squared, but volume grows as
| radius cubed. Hence a small terrarium will quickly freeze, and
| a huge terrarium will eventually fry. There is an optimal size
| for a terrarium, given its orbit, that keeps its internal
| temperature within the habitable range.
|
| Also it would need many more plants than animals. I would
| rather go with an aquarium.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| What does volume have to do with energy balance?
| thfuran wrote:
| Heat is transferred through the surface area and produced
| by the volume (assuming there's something going on in the
| system that's exothermic).
| jjk166 wrote:
| Heat isn't produced by the volume. Heat may be produced
| by something within the volume, but it's not the volume's
| existence that causes heat to be produced. There is no
| fundamental reason a bigger terrarium should produce more
| heat, nonetheless that heat production should be directly
| proportional to volume.
| thfuran wrote:
| Yes, obviously it'd be the stuff in the terrarium rather
| than the space it occupies that produces heat, but the
| amount of stuff you can fit in it is determined by the
| occupiable space. And if that stuff is producing heat,
| such as by decay, there's going to be more heat with more
| stuff. Though even if it cooks itself for a while, it
| should eventually settle on a temperature determined
| mostly by orbital parameters and material properties
| rather than size, since the stuff can't be net exothermic
| forever. But greater atmospheric depth probably still
| increases equilibrium temperature by reducing heat
| transfer through that side of the terrarium.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > but the amount of stuff you can fit in it is determined
| by the occupiable space.
|
| You can fit more into a larger terrarium, but that
| doesn't require a larger terrarium to contain more.
| Regardless of what is contained within the terrarium,
| it's heat production is limited by what it receives from
| the environment.
|
| > But greater atmospheric depth probably still increases
| equilibrium temperature by reducing heat transfer through
| that side of the terrarium.
|
| Greater atmospheric depth affects heat transfer by
| changing the density of the atmosphere, which is relevant
| for an atmosphere held to a body by gravity, but not for
| one contained in a pressurized vessel like a terrarium. A
| terrarium with a 1 atm internal pressure has an
| atmosphere depth equal to earth's atmosphere regardless
| of size (at least up until the point where the
| terrarium's gravity is comparable to a planet).
| askvictor wrote:
| Is there a 'just right' size that neither freezes nor fries?
| thfuran wrote:
| About Earth sized, I think. A bit bigger if the soil is low
| on hot isotopes.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I imagine one like that in my kitchen which is currently
| moss, a succulent, and some weed that happened to germenate.
| All three are alive after two years so far. The bottom is
| rocks and soil. There's a clear water cycle too as water
| evaporates and collects on the surface of the glass and then
| drips down.
| jjk166 wrote:
| That's not how space or terrariums work. A terrarium does not
| spontaneously produce energy out of nothing, it gets energy
| from the sun. Heat input from the sun is proportional to
| cross sectional area, while heat loss to space is
| proportional to surface area, which scale the same for a
| sphere. A larger object will have more thermal mass which
| would make it take longer to change its temperature, but it
| will still have the same thermal equilibrium. Terrariums do
| not need to be spheres, so the volume does not necessarily
| scale as the radius cubed.
| ilamont wrote:
| Giant terrariums in space was the premise of one of the great
| science fiction films of the early 1970s: Silent Running
|
| https://cult-scifi.com/silent-running-1972-movie/
| wowczarek wrote:
| I am me and I approve this message. The habitats, the people,
| the robots, and a beautiful theme song by the great Joan
| Baez. Silent Running is a great film indeed.
| zkmon wrote:
| Any idea that Earth-bound life need to migrate to outside of
| Earth, is a stupid sales talk, good for selling fiction stories.
| Any research work in this direction is purely to protect the
| jobs, work and funding.
| nathias wrote:
| and yet, it dies after 1 week when I bring it in as a houseplant
| symbolicAGI wrote:
| One wonders where else in the solar system moss from Earth may
| have taken hold. Spores and such could be making the journey
| randomly from gravity well to gravity well.
| r721 wrote:
| A mechanism by which this could happen:
|
| >A Martian meteorite is a rock that formed on Mars, was ejected
| from the planet by an impact event, and traversed
| interplanetary space before landing on Earth as a meteorite.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite
| the-mitr wrote:
| Fred Hoyle with Chandra Wickramasinghe have posited mechanisms
| for such events in their model of Panspermia
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Moss requires quite a bit of liquid water to actually
| reproduce, since (IIRC) their sperm need to swim around to
| mate. So we're left with, like, maybe Europa, if there's enough
| light and enough water gets into the surface via cracks? I
| doubt there's enough light under the surface, even if you found
| a moss species that can survive being totally submerged in
| whatever saltwater hellscape is under there. Basically there
| are still going to be huge problems for moss anywhere besides
| Earth. They already mostly stick to wet environments here.
| kineticdaffodil wrote:
| We should shoot life towards any planet in the solar system..
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Fulfilling our purpose as an rna based von Neumann machine.
| tokai wrote:
| Earth is already exchanging material with other bodies
| constantly. So there is a chance that it is already happening.
| mason_mpls wrote:
| probably not to mars, europa, ganymede, or enceladus though
| shevy-java wrote:
| Finally we know how to expand into the universe - just send that
| moss out there!
|
| I always thought this was peak exo-earth evolution though:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SK0cUNMnMM
| netbioserror wrote:
| Would be interesting to see what sorts of motile creatures
| could descend from mosses in a few hundred million years.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Let's put this on mars asap
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| But how does it taste? Safe to assume in 1000 years we'll have
| moss farms thriving in orbit.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| No one even knows complex societies are going to survive 2C of
| warming.
| Alex04 wrote:
| Interesting point.
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