Читать книгу The Zombie Book - Nick Redfern - Страница 58

When the space shuttle Columbia was catastrophically torn to pieces during its reentry on February 1, 2003, in addition to the astronauts who died in the explosion, nearly ninety on-board science experiments were lost as what was left of Columbia plummeted to the ground. Three weeks later, however, it was revealed that Texas State University-San Marcos biologist Robert McLean had managed to save something completely unanticipated from the widely spread debris: namely, a strain of slow-growing bacteria that had survived the crash. It was a discovery that may have significant implications for the concept of panspermia, which is the scenario of life—perhaps even viruses—“hitchhiking” on rocks ejected from meteorite impacts on one world, and that could travel through space and seed other worlds with life under favorable conditions.

Examination of the debris from the space shuttle Columbia disaster showed that bacteria could survive being in space and even the high-temperature process of reentry into the atmosphere.

Notably, found within the wreckage of Columbia was a bacteria called Microbispora: a slow-growing organism, normally found in soil, that McLean determined had probably contaminated the experiment prior to launch. “This organism appears to have survived an atmospheric passage, with the heat and the force of impact,” McLean said. “That’s only about a fifth of the speed that something on a real meteorite would have to survive, but it is at least five or six times faster than what’s been tested before. This is important for panspermia, because if something survives space travel, it eventually has to get down to the Earth and survive passage through the atmosphere and impact. This doesn’t prove anything; it just contributes evidence to the plausibility of panspermia.”

It also demonstrates that when we head into outer space, we may bring back something terrifying, something viral, something that may lead to a real-life dawning of the dead. Or, a case of: one small step for man, one giant leap for zombiekind.