Common yeast can survive Martian conditions

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-common-yeast-survive-martian-conditions.html

38•geox•1w ago

Comments

oh_my_goodness•1w ago

So send the yeast.

pbhjpbhj•2h ago

My first thought on reading the title of the OP was 'I wonder if we've already ruined Mars with unhelpful yeast?'.

Surely there's nothing for it to eat there yet though.

IsTom•2h ago

When jupiterians come to explore mars they'll face a horror movie scenario with long dormant alien pathogen eating through their carbohydrate shells.

ghkbrew•46m ago

I think they prefer "Jovians".

Tade0•17m ago

That's just our word for them, just like Protestants is a Catholic umbrella term for most other denominations.

gus_massa•2m ago

More seriously, they send only sterilized landers to Mars, to avoid killing all life there (if there is any), and to avoid the problem of finding in a few years the contamination we sended there. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection

dib258•2h ago

Yeah, we can make beers on mars!

alexpotato•2h ago

Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%, Panspermia is starting to feel more and more likely.

malfist•2h ago

Something to blow your mind with. The early days in the universe there were millions of years were the average temperature in the universe supported liquid water.

kaashif•1h ago

I don't think millions of years is long enough for anything interesting to happen life-wise, is it?

vizzier•1h ago

hard to know with so few data points

ben_w•1h ago

On the one hand, (primitive) life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions allowed it.

On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.

gweinberg•40m ago

Okay, but this is the average temperature of a big cloud of hydrogen with oxygen yet to be invented right?

notepad0x90•1h ago

all of those theories depend on one assumption, that life and our existence are products of a purely random collision of events.

IMHO, "We don't know" is the only answer to the question of how many planets have life on them or the probability of some forms of live existing somewhere. 0 is as valid as 10^128 until more than one other life supporting planet or moon is found to establish some baseline for speculation. otherwise, we're talking sci-fi here, in which case I think stargate's version seems decent.

metalman•1h ago

I think by "survive" they mean that yeast spores can briefly be put in a "mars jar" and then be revived, not that they can become metobolicaly active, or even last for an extended time on mars

mhb•14m ago

And yet the stuff in my freezer went bad.

WalterBright•9m ago

We should be dropping bags of extremophile organisms into the Martian atmosphere to get a start on terraforming it.

schwartzworld•9m ago

The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago. The second best time is now.

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