Where No E. Coli Has Gone Before – Hackaday

While we’re still waiting for ET to give us a ring, many worlds might not have life that’s discovered the joys of radio yet. Scientists ran a two-pronged study to see how bacteria might fare on other worlds.We currently define the Habitable Zone (HZ) of a planet by the likelihood that particular planet can host liquid water due to its peculiar blend of atmosphere and distance from its star. While this doesn’t guarantee the presence of life, its a good first place to start. Trying to expand on this, the scientists used a climate model to refine the boundaries of the HZ for atmosphere’s dominated by H2 and CO2 gases.Once they determined these limits, they then mixed up some example atmospheres and subjected E. coli to the environments. Their findings “indicate that atmospheric composition significantly affects bacterial growth patterns, highlighting the importance of considering diverse atmospheres in evaluating exoplanet habitability and advancing the search for life beyond Earth.”If you want to look more into what might be out there, how about analyzing the WOW Signal or looking at what the Drake Equation is all about.So they tested standard air, 90% N2 + 10% CO2, 100% CO2, 80% methane + 15% N2 + 5% CO2, and 100% H2 atmospheres. I don’t think it is terribly surprising that they got growth in all of them, as we already knew E. coli was a facultative anaerobe, and most of those gases are present in anaerobic gas mixes, although maybe not at those concentrations. The CO2 atmosphere caused the slowest growth. At a glance they don’t mention monitoring the pH of the LB medium, so I wonder if higher levels of dissolved CO2 were nudging that outside E. coli’s preferred range, hence the slower growth.“Their findings ‘indicate that atmospheric composition significantly affects bacterial growth patterns…’”In related news, I just received a sizable grant to study if heavier objects weigh more. The funding committee asked for a timetable to completion and I assured them my research will be finished the day my car loan is paid off.Take an organism developed and evolved in one environment, place it in another and it’s growth pattern changes. Well, of course it does! What does that tell you about whether something else could or could not develop and grow in that environment originally?I’m normally resistant to complaints about academic studies being wastes of money because I know there is so much anti-intellectualism, anti-tech and anti-science out there. I just assume all that stuff is someone’s crappy bias coming out. But I am starting to wonder if maybe there is more truth to it.Boy we got a bunch of geniuses in the comment section here, instead of doing the study they should’ve just asked you guys since you’re all clairvoyant.To be fair, they may be geniuses indeed. In some way.
Look, in German there’s the term “Fachidiot” (special field idiot) that refers to a person who knows a lot about a very limited topic only.
Such a person lacks knowledge of other fields, thus he/she can’t make the connection to related fields that might be important in relation to the topic.
Hence, laymen with a lot of knowledge from all over the place may “see through” in a situation in which an expert doesn’t.
So it’s not bad if laymen do question experts and challenge them.Yeah you’d think we’d have learned this lesson approximately five years ago. Turns out fachidiots make very poor leaders and are terrible at general reasoning and reading the roomHeh, yeah. Good point! 😉 What I was refering to was a healthy amount of common sense and general knowledge.
Because, so the logic goes, if you have a wide coverage of a little bit of knowledge of everything then you can decide to increase the knowledge of a special field, as well.
It allows you to select special information and learn it.
By contrast, if you’re living in a bubble and know of your own special field only, then you don’t know what knowledge you’re missing and can’t complete your knowledge.
So it’s generally good if people have various interests and hobbies.
Even experts can benefit from general knowledge that’s not directly related to their fields.
Because if they’re just a little bit more than one-trick ponies, then they can already call out for help. Experts of other fields then can join the discussion and they all can work together as a team.Or let me put it this way, the Titanic was being designed and built by experts, while Noah’s Ark had been built by laymen, ;)I keep writing to them with my enormous treatise on alien life which was all revealed to me in a dream, but they aren’t calling me back for some reason…Run the experiments for 20 years and then you may have useful data about what bacteria can and cannot evolve to handle. BTW there have been similar experiments of very long time periods. Would be interesting to start with different synthetic genomes, minimally and maximally complex metabolic capabilities, then see what is gained or lost over time.Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
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Source: https://hackaday.com/2025/02/24/where-no-e-coli-has-gone-before/