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Meet The Toughest Living Thing On Earth (and Maybe Beyond)

Meet the _Deinococcus radiodurans_, the toughest living thing that exists on Earth. It's a form of bacteria known as an extremophile. Freeze it, burn it, suffocate it, dump acid on it--_Deinococcus radiodurans_ can take it all. It can also take life on...

Meet the Deinococcus radiodurans, the toughest living thing that exists on Earth. It's a form of bacteria known as an extremophile. Freeze it, burn it, suffocate it, dump acid on it—Deinococcus radiodurans can take it all. It can also take life on the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons and one of the top spots in the solar system we might expect to find life. Albeit that life is likely to be living deep under the moon's surface ice in a subterranean ocean.

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In a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print science paper clearinghouse, researchers at Universidad de Buenos Aires detail recreating Europan surface conditions: essentially creating a vacuum and bombing the bacteria with UV light. They tried it with three organisms, Natrialba magadii and Haloferax volcanii and Deinococcus radiodurans. Natrialba magadii, a somewhat recently discovered bacteria hailing from the salty Lake Magadi in Kenya, and our friend the Deinococcus radiodurans were the only survivors.

What does that mean? Well, we could maybe shoot a bunch of bacteria to Europa and they could "seed" life there. Weirdly enough Deinococcus radiodurans has also been theorized as an extremely hearty information storage vehicle. In 2003, US scientists successfully coded the song "It's a Small World" into _the bacteria's DNA and found that code still existing 200 generations later. Perhaps more than anything, these tough little bugs are proof, to some degree, of the decreasing specialness of Earth, that something can survive Out There.

And that's reassuring.

An interesting side note to all this is the barest hint of a possibility that seeding could have already happened. Turns out matter ejected from Earth — knocked off of it by an asteroid, say — has a better chance of winding up out by Jupiter than Mars, and a good chance even of passing out of the solar system entirely. These things can last a long time in space, plenty of it to find even other, better planets to seed.

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It's an interesting point to consider that if and when we do find life beyond Earth, maybe we're still just finding Earth-life.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv

Via Technology Review