Microbes stuck in the International Space Station are adapting to survive’.
Apace has made problems for the flat earthers and intelligent designers. As long as life was confined to the surface of Earth. the believers could feel safe. God never mentions space and DNA can not replicate in a true vacuum. UNTIL NOW
Thousands of different microbes have been carried to space and even to the moon. Now, the International Space Station is home to these smallest of DNA based earthly life forms .. AND THEY ARE EVOLVING, getting selected for its ability to deal with the difficulties of space.
Microbes are evolving. Some are undergoing natural selection for traits already present in the population from Earth. Others are mutating to adapt to weightlessness, radiation and human efforts at sanitation aboard the station. The good news is that so far the space bugs are not mutating into especially dangerous or antibiotic-resistant superbugs muche less into the classical BEMs (bug eyed monsters). THE BAD NEWS IS THAT THIS IS NATURAL SELECTION AND WE CAN NOT PREDICT THE RESULTS.
Northwestern University’s Erica Hartmann led the study. She reports “There has been a lot of speculation about radiation, microgravity and the lack of ventilation and how that might affect living organisms, including bacteria. These are stressful, harsh conditions. Does the environment select for superbugs because they have an advantage? The answer appears to be ‘no.'”Ryan Blaustein, a postdoctoral fellow in Hartmann’s laboratory and the study’s first author. wrote “We didn’t see anything special about antibiotic resistance or virulence in the space station’s bacteria.”ng into space, the future of private space travel could offer whole new challenges as weaker and more unhealthy people are offered the option to pay to fly into space.
“Everywhere you go, you bring your microbes with you,” Hartmann said. “Astronauts are exceedingly healthy people. But as we talk about expanding space flight to tourists who do not necessarily meet astronaut criteria, we don’t know what will happen. We can’t say that if you put someone with an infection into a closed bubble in space that it won’t transfer to other people. It’s like when someone coughs on an airplane, and everyone gets sick.”
For microbes on earth it’s evolve or perish, and professors think they have it hard. So it’s not at all amazing that microbes would evolve in space.
For real fun though we gotta have pigs in space. Apparently pigs are not flat earthers.
Of course there are lots of things the bible does not mention. Helium, the number of kelvins in a cashew, New Brunswick, and zero. Nor are Anacardium occidentale(cashew, yum), corn, chocolate, potatoes, tobacco, and tomatoes all from the New World which an all knowing god would certainly have included in his or her great book of knowledge.
Didn’t the flat Earth concept go out sometime in the Renaissance. The telescope disproved a flat Earth centuries ago, and yes flat Earthers Vasco de Gama did sail around the world (the globe as he would put it). These guys did they not get the memo? Attend public school? Climb a really tall hill or mountain? Realize microwave transmission links are limited by the curvature of the Earth.