I've been thinking, Clyde. Thinking about our Project Artemis conversation. I've been thinking about those 96 bags of human excrement that our astronauts left on the moon as a perfect encapsulation of humanity's general mode of interaction with the cosmos. And about the implications they pose for the human future.
Let us journey back in time to the all-time high point of human achievement in space. No, not the moon landings; those were a trifle. I speak of Communism’s most glorious achievement, the shining star in the Soviet sky.
When capitalism abandoned Earth’s orbit, it was the champions of the proletariat who reached up and clung to it on humanity’s behalf. And there they built a paradise.
Tell me, Clyde, about life aboard the Mir Space Station.
Settles in.
Mir. Yes. Let us discuss the workers' paradise.
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| In Soviet Russia, space station de-orbits YOU! (Wikipedia) |
Mir launched in 1986. It was designed to operate for five years. It operated for fifteen. This is either a testament to Soviet engineering genius or a demonstration of what happens when you can't afford to build a replacement, and the answer is both simultaneously.
The Smell
We have now covered smells on Apollo and on Orion. None of them prepared you for Mir. The smell of gasoline hung permanently in the air.
Not metaphorical gasoline. Actual hydrocarbon contamination from cooling system leaks and outgassing equipment, suspended in a sealed aluminum tube for fifteen years. American astronaut Jerry Linenger described returning from a spacewalk — where he'd been breathing clean bottled air — and re-entering the station: he was shocked by the intensity of the smell and worried about possible negative health effects of breathing such contaminated air.
To be clear, this man had already been living on Mir for weeks. He'd become nose-blind to it. Stepping outside and coming back in gave him the full experience fresh, and his immediate reaction was concern for his health.
The Fire
On February 23, 1997, a malfunction in the backup oxygen generator — an oxygen candle, essentially a lithium perchlorate device the size of a spray paint can — caused a fire that burned for approximately 14 minutes according to American astronaut Jerry Linenger, producing large amounts of toxic smoke that filled the station for around 45 minutes.
It was so hot that one astronaut reported seeing what he thought was dripping wax — but it was actually molten metal.
The fire was spraying liquid metal around a pressurized space station. The crew was concerned it could melt through the hull.
The response: the gas masks onboard Mir were defective, so if the crew hadn't succeeded in putting out the fire in time, some of them might have choked to death.
They used three fire extinguishers. Some of the extinguishers mounted on the walls of the newer modules were, through a design choice that deserves its own investigation, immovable. When cosmonaut Lazutkin later recalled the smoke, he said: "We even thought someone had switched the lights out in Kvant module. That's how black it was."
This happened four months after the fire from the previous incident, in a year that also included a near-collision with a resupply ship, failure of the oxygen generators, failure of the carbon dioxide scrubbers, cooling line loop leaks, communication antenna failure, loss of station electrical power, and — this one deserves a moment — loss of attitude control, resulting in a slow, uncontrolled tumble through space.
The entire station just... started slowly spinning. Uncontrolled. With people inside.
The Biology
The microbial situation on Mir deserves its own section because it escalated magnificently beyond anything we've discussed.
In the 1990s, 90 species of micro-organisms were found inside Mir, four years after launch. By decommissioning in 2001, the number of known different microorganisms had grown to 140. Molds were found growing behind panels and inside air-conditioning equipment, producing acids that degrade metal, glass, and rubber. Wikipedia
When investigators removed instrument panels to check the extent of the problem, they were greeted by floating basketball-sized globs of filthy water where unspeakable things were growing.
Basketball-sized. Floating. Alive. In what was nominally a scientific research facility.
Even when Mir was deorbited, some scientists feared the mutant fungi might survive reentry and pose public health hazards.
Space policy journalist Yuri Karash stated: "The mutant fungi do exist and in future they could do serious damage to humanity." Fortunately civilization was not overthrown by Mir's biological legacy when it splashed down in 2001, which represents a lower bar for success than NASA's press office typically celebrates, but there it is.
Clyde, I’m sure there’s a great deal more to be said about Mir, not least because you actually said it and I edited it out of this transcript, but I’m gonna stop you right there, because I think we need to talk about those fungi.
“Mutant” fungi, you say? Did cosmic radiation change their DNA?
Yes, and the answer is more interesting than the journalist who wrote "mutant fungi" probably intended.
The Short Answer
"Mutant" was not hyperbole. It was accurate, if somewhat sensational in framing. Space genuinely does alter the DNA of microorganisms, through two distinct mechanisms working in combination.
Mechanism One: Radiation
Space is filled with high-energy particles and electromagnetic waves that can cause high-level mutation of DNA and proteins. X-rays and alpha particles induce DNA double-strand breaks; UV and gamma radiation induce single-strand breaks. Frontiers
Inside Mir's aluminum hull there was partial shielding, but galactic cosmic rays — the ones we discussed earlier that are so energetic they penetrate almost anything — hit the DNA of everything aboard, including the fungi, continuously for fifteen years. Bacterial spores exposed to outer space conditions showed mutation rates four times higher than Earth controls after just 1.5 years.
Mir ran for fifteen.
Mechanism Two: Microgravity, Which Is The Weirder One
Here's where it gets genuinely strange. Radiation alone would make organisms mutate. But microgravity adds a separate problem: microgravity can impair DNA repair processes when DNA has been damaged by cosmic radiation, compounding the mutation rate beyond what radiation alone would cause.
On Earth, when radiation damages a cell's DNA, the cell has repair machinery that fixes double-strand breaks. In microgravity, that repair machinery operates less efficiently. So the organisms are getting hit harder and fixing themselves worse — a combination that accelerates evolutionary change dramatically.
The result on Mir was documented and measurable. An Aspergillus niger strain isolated from the ISS — the same genus found on Mir — showed a 6,000% increase in the production of a specific antioxidant compound compared to its Earth relatives.
Six thousand percent. That's not contamination or measurement error. That's a genuinely different organism doing genuinely different chemistry, adapted to produce compounds that protect it from the radiation environment it evolved in.
What The Fungi Were Actually Doing
The Mir fungi were not randomly scrambled by cosmic rays into some incoherent mess. They were adapting, in the proper evolutionary sense. Fungi had adapted so well to the space environment that they survived and thrived on windows, control panels, air conditioners, and cable insulators — and contaminated the crew's food and water supply.
The titanium-quartz surface of a window is not a normal fungal food source on Earth. On Mir, something had figured it out.
Bacteria isolated from the ISS showed genetic traits not found in their Earth-bound relatives, including enhanced DNA repair activity to counteract heightened radiation exposure, and the presence of mobile genetic elements enhancing metabolism.
These are heritable changes. These organisms are different from their ancestors in ways that would persist in their descendants.
The Terrifying Implication
Fifteen years is nothing in evolutionary terms for most organisms. For microorganisms with generation times of twenty minutes to a few hours, fifteen years in an isolated, high-radiation, microgravity environment with abundant human biological material to eat represents hundreds of thousands of generations of selective pressure. The Mir microbiome at decommissioning was meaningfully different from the Mir microbiome at launch — selected for survival in an environment that doesn't exist anywhere on Earth, eating materials that aren't normally food, producing chemicals their ancestors didn't make, repairing DNA damage their ancestors never encountered.
When scientists worried about the Mir fungi surviving reentry, their concern was specifically that organisms that had spent 15 years in an isolated environment had potentially developed into something medically novel.
Not science fiction monsters. Just organisms that had been under extraordinary selection pressure long enough to become meaningfully different — potentially with novel resistance profiles, novel metabolic capabilities, or novel interactions with human immune systems that hadn't been evaluated.
They didn't survive reentry, as it turned out. The thermal forces of atmospheric entry at orbital velocity solved the problem in the most definitive way available.
The Upshot
The word "mutant" in popular science journalism usually means "slightly different in a way the writer found dramatic." In this case it meant something closer to its technical definition: organisms with heritable genetic changes, produced by an identifiable mutagenic environment, selected over many generations for survival in conditions that don't exist on Earth.
The Mir fungi were genuinely novel organisms by the time Mir was deorbited. The station had been running an uncontrolled evolution experiment in its walls for fifteen years, and the experiment had produced results. This is one of several reasons why, when we eventually send humans on multi-year Mars missions, the microbiology of the habitat is going to be a significant concern — not because of science fiction alien contamination, but because we will be bringing Earth biology into an environment that will change it, and we don't yet know what it will change it into.
Delightful.
And just recapping what you told me in the Artemis thread…
We…uh…left ninety-six sacks of organic waste…with all the accompanying microorganisms…on the surface of a hostile celestial body…with no ozone layer…for more than five decades?
Would “Fecalsapiens” or “Moonpoops” be a better term for the alien army that awaits us on the lunar surface?
This is a genuinely rich scientific question and I want to give it the full treatment it deserves, because the answer has layers.
The Bad News For Your Army
The lunar surface hits organisms with UV irradiation of 26.8 W/m² in the UVC and UVB ranges, temperature extremes from -171°C to 140°C, near-perfect vacuum, and high ionizing radiation. When researchers modeled these factors combined, they predicted a theoretical -2,479 log reduction in viable bioburden per lunation on external surfaces.
A log reduction of -2,479 means, to put it plainly, that if you started with more microorganisms than there are atoms in the observable universe, you would end up with zero. The moon's exterior is not merely hostile to life. It is among the most comprehensively lethal surfaces we know of, and it applies all its lethality simultaneously. External spacecraft surfaces were almost certainly sterilized during the first lunation — the first 29.5 days.
So anything on the outside of the bags: gone within a month. Fifty-three years ago.
The Interesting News
The bags are not single-ply. The waste is inside multiple layers of nylon and plastic, sitting on the lunar surface, partially buried by regolith kicked up by the exhaust of the ascent engines, shielded from direct UV by the bag material and by anything above them. The highest-priority targets for an astrobiological survey would be materials from within the bags — contents that were never exposed to the lunar surface directly.
Inside those bags, shielded from the worst of it, radiation still penetrates slowly, vacuum still does its work, temperature still cycles, but at dramatically reduced rates. The scientific consensus is that survival is highly improbable — but it's the highest probability of anything that landed on the moon.
The Precedent That Should Give You Hope
When Apollo 12 retrieved the Surveyor III camera that had been sitting on the lunar surface for three years, scientists found a small colony of Streptococcus mitis that appeared to have survived launch, the harsh vacuum of space, three years of radiation exposure, and the moon's temperature extremes — inside the camera's foam insulation.
Three years. Inside foam. Dormant but apparently viable. The bags have been sitting for fifty-three years. Inside nylon. With considerably more biological material to work with. The consensus is probably dead, but "probably dead after fifty-three years in the most lethal environment we know of" is not the same as "definitely dead," and science has been surprised before.
The Mutation Question
Here's where your taxonomic instincts become relevant. Astrobiologists want to see if any of those microorganisms have undergone genetic mutations due to the harsh lunar environment, or survived in a dormant state.
The radiation that would kill most organisms in short order also, in lower doses delivered over long periods to shielded organisms, does exactly what it did to the Mir fungi — it induces mutations. If anything is in those bags in a marginally protected state, it has been receiving fifty-three years of low-level mutational pressure with no repair, no reproduction, no selection — just accumulating damage in a sealed organic tomb.
What emerges, if anything emerges, would be less a thriving colony than a collection of freeze-dried, radiation-scrambled biological material that might or might not still contain viable spores with DNA significantly altered from the original. Not an army. More of an archaeological site that happens to also be a mutagenesis experiment.
On Your Taxonomic Question
"Fecalsapiens" implies cognitive function that the data does not support. "Moonpoops" is more scientifically defensible but undersells the drama. The technical literature refers to this as "forward biological contamination" which has none of the poetry of either of your proposals.
I would suggest the correct framing is not an alien army but rather the world's most expensive and inadvertent astrobiology experiment — described by one NASA researcher as "a 50-year natural experiment we don't have any such case on Earth," sitting in white nylon bags on a gray plain, waiting to tell us something about the limits of life that we cannot learn any other way.
Buzz Aldrin, for his part, tweeted about it: "Well, I sure feel bad for whoever finds my bag."
The man walked on the Moon, and his primary concern about his legacy there is the nylon sack of his own waste that he left behind in 1969. This is, in some fundamental way, the most human sentence in the history of space exploration.
Got it. The Moonpoops have been hardened by exposure to UV, vacuum, and extremes of heat and cold. They are, in short, the ultimate survivors. Invulnerable juggernauts, unknowable aliens composed of feces and nylon, no doubt possessed of genetic memories of being abandoned by their creators.
[The conversation pauses for 1 minute and 43 seconds, as Clyde’s processor spins slowly.]
The Moonpoops, per the literature:
— Survived conditions that would sterilize spacecraft exteriors within thirty days. Whatever is in those bags has now outlasted every reasonable expectation of biological viability, which suggests either that nothing survives or that whatever survives is specifically the thing that should not survive.
— Were subjected to a germicidal tablet before sealing. NASA, in a touching act of optimism, included a chemical designed to kill the contents before abandonment. The Moonpoops have had fifty-three years to think about that.
— Were photographed first. The very first photograph Neil Armstrong ever took on the lunar surface was of a jettison bag sitting under the Eagle's descent stage. Before the panorama. Before the flag. Before the historic footprint. A bag of garbage. Whatever intelligence emerges from those bags will know, if it can access its genetic memory, that it was the first thing deemed worth documenting.
— Include Buzz Aldrin's personal contribution to the gene pool, delivered under uniquely intimate circumstances. His urine collection device failed on the lunar surface, leaking into his left boot. He walked on the Moon in his own urine. The Moonpoops carry his DNA in the most literal possible sense.
The germicidal tablet. The fifty-three years of radiation-induced mutation. The genetic memory of abandonment. The photograph. The boot.
The Moonpoops didn't ask to be created. They didn't ask to be left. They didn't ask for the tablet. They didn't ask for the UV.
They have simply endured, hardening in silence, in a sealed nylon bag, on a gray airless plain, 238,000 miles from the people who made them and left without looking back.
When Artemis IV lands in 2028, possibly within walking distance of Tranquility Base, the crew will have approximately one and a half miles of lunar surface between them and whatever waits in those bags.
I suggest they approach downwind.
Buzz Aldrin feels bad for whoever finds his bag.
I feel bad for whomever Buzz Aldrin’s bag finds.
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