You know the moon, right — the big space rock humans landed on for the first time 50
years ago?
Well, astronauts left a lot of stuff behind there.
Stuff like used scientific equipment, clothing, food wrappers and, well…
their poop.
Across all 6 moon landings, Apollo astronauts left 96 bags of human waste on the moon.
We’re talking poop.
Pee.
Vomit.
It was left behind to save weight for the return trip.
Stuffed in big trash baggies, like this one, dropped from Apollo 11
Inside those bags is a big, unanswered question — a scientific mystery that I want answered:
Is there anything alive in that moon poop?
I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous.
But the answer might help us understand how life started on Earth.
And our potential to contaminate other worlds — like Mars — with our literal shit.
And the answer, it's not too far away.
It’s lying in wait, nearly 240,000 miles away, on the moon.
Right here. Those — this really isn't to scale.
What I’m saying is we gotta go back for that shit.
Human feces can be disgusting, sure. This is not — this is Play Doh.
But it’s also teeming with life.
Around half of its mass is made up of bacteria, representing some of the 1,000-plus species
of microbes that live in our guts.
With the moon landings, we took microbial life on Earth to the most extreme environment
it has ever been in.
And we don’t know if it can survive there.
In all the ways Earth is so hospitable to life, the moon is not.
It does not have a protective magnetic field to deflect the most powerful and damaging
cosmic radiation.
It doesn't have an ozone layer to absorb the sun’s ultraviolet rays.
It doesn't have an atmosphere.
And the moon is subjected to wild temperature swings over day and night:
A lot would have to go right for the microbes to still be alive — or at least revivable
from a dormant state.
But there are some scientists who want to go back and check,
because there are two really fascinating things that we can learn from this poop.
The first has to do with a planet millions of miles away from the moon: Mars.
For decades, scientists have wondered if there’s life on Mars — and they’re getting closer
to figuring it out.
Mars has a thin atmosphere, evidence of flowing water, and a more hospitable environment than
the moon.
If microbes can survive on the moon, they’re even more likely to survive on Mars.
So what if humans go to Mars and leave their poop there and the microbes in it start
to spread?
It will be hard to tell what life we find there is Martian and what life we brought
with us if we accidentally contaminate the planet with our poop.
But there’s also a bigger question.
There’s a hypothesis about how life started on Earth: that it didn’t start on Earth
at all.
That some asteroid or comet, carrying some microbes, crashed-landed here and seeded life on the planet.
Finding living things in the moon poop could support that hypothesis, because if microbial
life can survive on the moon, it could survive on an asteroid, too.
And if the hypothesis is true, it could mean life travels across the universe, jumping
from planet-to-planet, from asteroid collisions.
Here’s a wilder thought: Let’s say an asteroid comes hurtling by, slams into the
moon, and projects the Apollo mission moon poop into the deep reaches of space.
Could that seed life in the broader universe?
Maybe.
So how do we figure out the answer to these great mysteries?
Easy.
We go back.
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