Ask any Star Trek aficionado about space and they will quickly tell you that it is the final frontier for humanity. For thousands of years, we have been stuck on this planet looking up at the stars wondering what might be...out there. In the futuristic series, a team of intergalactic travelers span the universe seeking out new life and new civilizations in an effort to boldly go where no one has gone before.
I imagine they brought a microscope.
Of all the possible extraterrestrial entities, microbes are considered to be the most numerous and prevalent, just as they are here on Earth. While humans only discovered microbes a few hundred years ago by Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, they have been around since the dawn of the universe. In 1998, the fascinating science of astrobiology was developed in the hopes of understanding the past, present, and future of life, the origins of life, and the search of extraterrestrials, including germs. Their efforts have had little success to date but the current mission to Mars by the Curiosity Rover offers hopes to find the first of no doubt signs of microbial life on another planet.
While the mission to find alien microbial life is just a burgeoning activity in the grand scale of extraterrestrial research, the fact that Earthly germs can survive in space has been believed for well over 40 years. During the second mission to the moon in 1969, Apollo 12, the crew brought back a camera that had been sent some two and a half years earlier. When they returned, the camera underwent extensive testing including microbiological analysis. Much to their surprise, they found a colony of earthly bacteria; apparently the microbes had survived the inhospitable lunar environment.
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