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Schmidt Meister's Grab Bag


Schmidt Meister
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Humans might return to the Moon one day soon. If they do, scientists would like them to bring back the poop that has been sitting there for decades.There is over 400,000 lb of man-made garbage on the Moon. Of that, almost 100 bags are filled with human waste from the astronauts who landed there. That was simply a by-product of human biology. It was never intended to be some long-term experiment. For astrobiologists, though, those bags are now probably the most interesting thing on the entire Moon. Researchers would like to take a look at the feces and other human waste to see if there is anything alive in it. Under normal circumstances, poop is around 50 percent bacteria from over 1,000 different species. On Earth, this microbial life is so resilient that it can be found in every environment, no matter how harsh the conditions. Considering that the waste has been sitting on the Moon for decades, this would be, by far, the most extreme environment yet. That is why scientists are not getting their hopes up but are also not dismissing the idea outright. Given ideal conditions, microbes could still be alive or at least revivable. Even if the microbes are all dead, researchers still consider the bags worth studying to try to determine how long the bacteria lasted and if they made any adaptations to their environment or not.

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