Why NASA Is Right to Hire a ‘Planetary Protection Officer’

The invasion is nigh! You knew it would happen eventually — that the Roswell aliens would not only turn out to be real, but that they’d one day return to finish their job of Earthly conquest. Now, NASA, which was surely part of the conspiracy of silence for the last sixty years, has come clean, announcing the creation of the new position of Planetary Protection Officer. It’s a sweet gig, actually, paying up to $187,000 per year. That makes for a pretty big pot of disposable income — at least until, you know, the world ends. Actually, however, you can sound the all clear: The planetary protection job is real, though its purpose is only partly to save Earthlings from the ravages of alien life forms (and by life forms we mean microbes, not green guys). A bigger part of the job is to protect aliens from us — the real bad guys. Human beings have long hoped to find life in space and we may not have to look far. In our solar system alone, there are at least five worlds other than Earth that, thanks to the presence of water, may have the conditions to support biology: Mars, Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Pluto. The problem is, discovering and recovering that life requires sending robot probes or even human beings out to explore. Robots could contain trace bacteria, viruses or other biological contaminants from Earth, and a human being is nothing but one gigantic, walking contaminant. If an earthly organism g...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Apollo 12 Biology cassini Contamination exobiology Galileo jupiter Mars NASA saturn space Source Type: news