Space bugs

Space Station research shows that hardy little space travelers could colonize Mars

They've been exposing various microscopic lifeforms to the space environment at the ISS for some time now, and yes, some bugs have survived and are obviously very hard to kill.

I was wondering yesterday, on a related topic, as I made my first batch of "no knead" bread, about how much research has gone into the possibility that space radiation may make a normally mild natured (so to speak) microscopic lifeform into one that was dangerous.   As I was dealing with yeast, which is pretty much wandering all about the place all the time, that was the microscopic life that I was thinking about in particular.

Remember the story about the Texan man who by some fluke had a permanent colony of yeast in his gut that was brewing alcohol inside of him?   Well, you would hope that no future Moon or Mars colony ended up with at souped up yeast version which could take up home in everyone's gut and prove very difficult to remove.   It would be a particularly ignoble way for a colony to collapse (pretty much from unintentional alcoholic poisoning), wouldn't it?

OK, so maybe it's not a big enough premise for a science fiction blockbuster, but a short story at least...