The Japanese space agency sent a probe, Hayabusa 2, to an asteroid that returned with physical samples from its surface. The samples are being scrutinized closely in a search for signs of microscopic life — they have found plenty of organic molecules, as was expected from a chondrite.

They did find some suggestive shapes, tiny rods and cylinders, that have dimensions in the ballpark of what we see in terrestrial life. Maybe these are examples of extraterrestrial organisms crawling over the surface of space rocks? Maybe?

Except…no, the observations are more compatible with the idea that the organic molecules on the rock are suitable fuel for the growth of earthly contamination.

The presence of microorganisms within meteorites has been used as evidence for extraterrestrial life, however, the potential for terrestrial contamination makes their interpretation highly controversial. Here, we report the discovery of rods and filaments of organic matter, which are interpreted as filamentous microorganisms, on a space-returned sample from 162173 Ryugu recovered by the Hayabusa 2 mission. The observed carbonaceous filaments have sizes and morphologies consistent with microorganisms and are spatially associated with indigenous organic matter. The abundance of filaments changed with time and suggests the growth and decline of a prokaryote population with a generation time of 5.2 days. The population statistics indicate an extant microbial community originating through terrestrial contamination. The discovery emphasizes that terrestrial biota can rapidly colonize extraterrestrial specimens even given contamination control precautions. The colonization of a space-returned sample emphasizes that extraterrestrial organic matter can provide a suitable source of metabolic energy for heterotrophic organisms on Earth and other planets.

The paper gives a detailed timeline of how the sample was treated, from the moment of collection with sterilized instruments in space to all the cutting and polishing they needed to do to expose a ‘clean’ surface, and examination with various instruments. It turns out that you can store it for long periods of time in extremely low pressure chambers or pure nitrogen gas, but at some point you’re going to have to expose it to our atmosphere so you can cut it and embed in epoxy and grind and polish it, and that’s an opportunity for contamination. The authors think that’s what happened.

The change in the population of microorganisms over the course of 64 days suggests the sample was contaminated with microorganisms during the preparation of the polished block. Indeed, the sterile handling and storage under which the sample was kept from its return to Earth (Yada et al., 2022) until it was removed from a nitrogen atmosphere, immediately prior to XCT analyses, makes it highly unlikely it was contaminated prior to sample preparation. The possibility that the sample contained indigenous spores is also unlikely since only a small number of microorganisms were initially present despite the 280 days it had spent at ambient temperature since the return of Hayabusa 2.

I can’t call this a disappointing result because, after reading the protocols and the unavoidable exposure to our filthy, dirty planet, I think this should have been an expected result. I am impressed with how avidly our bacteria will leap into action to gnaw on even a dead rock containing organic carbon.

Somebody finally says what our colonies in space would look like (although, to be fair, there are so many distopian science fiction novels that have repeatedly said it): they would be slave compounds, or at their most charitable, company towns.

A million inhabitants live in the city under the soft pink sky of Mars, just a century after the first robotic probes from Earth visited the Red Planet. They farm and labor in habitats that shield them from dust and harsh ultraviolet radiation.

Promoted as a society unshackled from earthly laws, this town is in fact as unfree as possible. The company rules everything, owning not only the buildings but the water and air people need to survive. If a person took out a loan to pay for passage, the company effectively holds them in indentured servitude. Human rights are not a given, nor is bodily autonomy.

Matthew Francis makes that bold prediction in Scientific American. He goes on to say, though, that

Thankfully, this dystopia isn’t inevitable.

It isn’t? How does one plan to trick people into living in a brutally unsurvivable environment that lacks any appeal or relief from drudgery short of economic compulsion? I’m going to disagree. I think the entire plan is deadly, built entirely on corpses and bloody backs in the long run, and I see no other alternative. I would love to hear about this alternative plan that isn’t a product of capitalist exploitation. Instead, we get the familiar refrain naming the usual obscenely rich people scheming to take advantage of those less powerful.

However, some of the world’s most powerful men believe it’s part of humanity’s multiplanetary future, and as leaders of the private space industry they have the potential to realize much of the vision. For years, SpaceX chief Elon Musk has pushed claims that he will resettle a million people on Mars by 2050 using a thousand rockets built by his company, with the first settlers arriving by the end of this decade. Even sooner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company is plotting to build an “office park” in low-Earth orbit in the next five years called the Orbital Reef. His ultimate vision, however, is trillions of people in space colony canisters, to produce “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” in his questionable phrasing, in coming centuries.

The only good news about space colonies designed by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is that they aren’t going to happen. Musk will not be launching a million people to Mars in 15 years, not even close (although I do see some fantasy synergy between Musk and Trump’s plan to deport millions of people on day one of his presidency — maybe he’s dreaming of filling his Martian city with Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and South American gang-bangers). Bezos is not going to build an office park in Earth orbit, not as long as he can bulldoze farm land for cheap and assemble giant concrete boxes here on Earth. Those are two professional liars. Don’t believe anything they promise, because all they really promise is controlling you to their benefit.

All you need to do to see their true vision of the future is look at what Musk does in the present. He’s a control freak. He’s building a compound in Austin, Texas. It’s creepy and controlling, and just the idea of building a “compound” for your family reeks of Mormon cultishness and Saudi dictatorships.

On a quiet, leafy street of multimillion-dollar properties, one stands out: a 14,400-square-foot mansion that looks like a villa plucked from the hills of Tuscany and transplanted to Austin, Texas.

This is where Elon Musk, 53, the world’s richest man and perhaps the most important campaign backer of former President Donald J. Trump, has been trying to establish the cornerstone of an unusual family compound, according to four people familiar with his plans.

Mr. Musk has told people close to him in recent months that he envisions his children (of which there are at least 11) and two of their three mothers occupying adjoining properties. That way, his younger children could be a part of one another’s lives, and Mr. Musk could schedule time among them.

He’s got lots of money, he could afford to give his wives and children complete freedom and the ability to be autonomous agents of their own will, but no — he wants them conveniently close to do his bidding. Do you really think his Martian workers would be allowed any kind of independence? If they whispered the word “union” he’d shut off their air. Musk is very concerned about birth rates, too. Workers would not only have quotas of profitable units produced, but would have quotas of children to pump out. Having a self-perpetuating labor force totally under his control is the main virtue of a Mars colony to him. The only pronoun he values is the possessive pronoun that he’d apply to children, workers, and women.

Francis has it right.

To put it bluntly: if our space overlords behave this way on Earth with governments looking over their shoulders, how will they behave off-world with little possibility of oversight or redress? Even returning to Earth from Mars might be technically impossible. Trusting your life to private space companies is a big gamble, not least since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in May signed a bill shielding SpaceX and other companies from liability from death or injury incurred from spaceflight.

If you want a glimpse of the real future of space colonization, read this story about how Saudi princes control their own daughters. It’s got compounds. The few things it has that a Mars colony wouldn’t is gilded cages and shopping trips to Dubai (under armed guard, of course). That’s the fate of any people who find themselves at the mercy of wealthy, grasping autocrats, like Musk or Bezos.

We should not even be considering space colonization — take it right off the table.

Musk and Bezos don’t serve a fascist regime, but like von Braun, their visions are rooted in 20th-century colonialism, resource extraction and disregard for labor rights. Martian company towns off-world won’t be the libertarian paradise promised by our tech billionaires.

Space exploration, yes; space exploitation, no. It should not be in the hands of billionaires, who we have learned, are the worst people on the planet.

Mars is for robots, not people. I’ve thought that for a long time, and as someone who reads a fair bit of science fiction, I can say that there are many books I have hurled across the room for proposing that we can save humanity by building colonies on Mars…which, admittedly, is the second most hospitable planet in the solar system. Unfortunately, there’s a huge distance between #1 and #2.

I’ve compared colonizing Mars to colonizing Antarctica, to set the bar really low. Except for a few scientific research stations and a few obsolete whaling stations, no one has built long-term, productive homes in Antarctica. It’s just too hostile. But still, it does have air and plentiful water, unlike Mars.

Here’s a better comparison, though: why haven’t we colonized the upper reaches of the Himalayas?. There, air and water are scarce, but not as scarce as on Mars, and it’s only a difficult hike, or a risky helicopter ride, from human population centers. It’s all right there! We can shuttle to and from the place in days, pessimistically, and not months, and it doesn’t require multi-million dollar spaceships to get to it!

The summit of Mount Everest is around 8,800 meters above sea level, squarely within those balmy Earth latitudes that get nice long sunlit days all year round. Compared to anyplace on Mars, it is the very womb of God. No plant life grows there. No animals live there.

Even with steady year-round subtropical sunlight, even with conditions infinitely more nurturing than those found anywhere on Mars, the summit of Mount Everest cannot support complex life. It’s too cold; the air is too thin; there is no liquid water for plants and animals to drink. Standing on the top of Mount Everest, a person can literally look at places where plants and animals happily grow and live and reproduce, yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population on the upper slopes of Everest. Even microbes avoid it.

Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?

I could be wrong. The author of that essay could be wrong. I think Elon Musk ought to build a mansion on top of Mount Everest as proof of concept, along with a weed farm and an artificial womb. I think he should move there permanently, just to prove it can be done, and sit there happily stoned and make mountaintop babies.

Except…I think Elon Musk is almost as pessimistic as I am. He has to know he’s not going to be establishing a Mars colony in his lifetime, but he also knows it’s a successful grift to pretend he’s going to.

I’m such a fool. You’d think competition and privatization would improve the space program, but now we’ve got multiple examples of corporate failure.

I’ve mentioned the embarrassment of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which seems to be a total piece of junk. It got astronauts up to the International Space Station, but it’s so untrustworthy that they’re considering using SpaceX to rescue them.

Except…Boeing and SpaceX space suits are incompatible. The astronauts might be stuck up there for as much as 8 months, or they can chance it and descend in a capsule with no suits. It’s probably OK. They have an old-fashioned fix: prayer.

Meanwhile, another billionaire has stepped up and is buying a trip into orbit. This is not just a joyride, he says, they’ve got a serious scientific purpose. That purpose is unclear. They’re going to go into a high orbit on a SpaceX Dragon capsule, high enough that it will pass through the Van Allen belts, and while they’re there, Jared Isaacman and one of the crew will go on a tethered spacewalk, exposing themselves to increased radiation. I don’t know why. It seems to be more of a daredevil gimmick.

Extra bonus stupidity: the Dragon capsule does not include an airlock, so they’re simply going to vent all of the atmosphere inside the capsule, forcing the other 3 crewmembers to sit in their spacesuits so Isaacman can go outside and wave at the camera. Yay! Decompression is fun!

Can we just put NASA back in charge? Bring back the grown-ups to run the show.

Apparently, Jupiter’s red spot may be transient and repetitive, coming and going.

Sánchez-Lavega et al. concluded that the current Red Spot is probably not the same as that observed by Cassini and others in the 17th century. They argue that the Permanent Spot had faded by the start of the 18th century, and a new spot formed in the 19th century—the one we observe today, making it more than 190 years old.

Others remain unconvinced of that conclusion, such as astronomer Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas. “What I think we may be seeing is not so much that the storm went away and then a new one came in almost the same place,” he told New Scientist. “It would be a very big coincidence to have it occur at the same exact latitude, or even a similar latitude. It could be that what we’re really watching is the evolution of the storm.”

It would be such a bummer to plan a vacation to Jupiter and have a major tourist attraction evaporate, so NASA better get right on this mystery and give me a firm schedule for Red Spot fluctuations.

I stayed up late to try and see the northern lights. They were nice, but a bit dim here — they did stretch out further than I’ve seen previously, streaking practically all across the sky. I tried taking some photos (f/1.8, 15s exposures, with a tripod, of course), but I wasn’t entirely satisfied. Too blurry, mainly what I captured were fuzzy swirls of red and green.

I should practice more, but it’s late and way past my bedtime.

Sometimes it’s good to see that conservatives in every country are freakin’ morons. Look who the Tories appointed to be Space Minister in the UK:

The Conservative space minister has apparently confused Mars with the Sun.

Andrew Griffith, who has been in charge of the space sector since November, also mistook Jupiter for Saturn.

On a walk around the Science Museum in London, Mr Griffith pointed to an exhibit showing the surfaces of different planets, the House magazine reported. “Now we have got Mars,” he said, before being told by a member of museum staff that it was actually the Sun.

He went on to say “that one is Saturn”, after the display changed, before the employee said “no, no, that is Jupiter”, according to the magazine.

Insisting he is learning on the job as space minister, he said: “I’m not an encyclopaedia.”

No one expects a bureaucrat to be an encyclopedia, but why does he even have this position? He’s clearly not very curious or informed about space — last summer, my 4 year old granddaughter was getting hooked on space science, reading children’s books about the planets, drawing pictures of different planets…maybe the UK can appoint her to the position of Space Minister?