1 Nothing wrong with advice they pay more attention to sanitation, although who knows how well the zero-G toilet(s) work, the ISS wasn't exactly a model of good design as opposed to yet another NASA public works program from what I remember.  And I'll bet a lot of diligence is required to use them properly.

But look at the first root of the bacterial genus, "entero", "relating to the intestine", it's entirely normal to have bacteria of this genus in your intestines, although with others, we've got billions and billions of bacteria in our gut, in a normally mutualistic relationship, we provide them food and water, they convert VitaminK₁to K_2, digest stuff we otherwise can't (not always a good thing for the lactose intolerant), etc.

So "screening" astronauts probably doesn't make any sense, the key is to keep the bacteria where they belong, in the various parts of their guts, in the sewage system, but not much elsewhere.  Which obviously is the same thing you should do if you don't want your ostensibly First World city to become a Third World "shithole".

2 Thanks Anon!

Certainly intestinal bacteria are the culprits here and these are normal things. My mother developed c-dif in the hospital; her normal intestinal bacteria died from excessive antibiotics and the sole survivor ran amok. As they don't identify the species in the article we don't know if it is related to an intestinal infection of some sort or is just normal bacteria, but one wonders when considering we are sending people from places like Kazakstan to the ISS if a little more care should be employed in checking these guys out before flying them off. One wonders what these guys eat. Our astronauts are well checked by the flight surgeons but are the Russkies? I suspect they are a bit more lax - which is why we should never have gone along with them in building the station. Being locked in a sterile box with a bunch of Second Worlders in an environment with elevated radiation isn't a great idea. It's a place that is ripe for, well, being ripe.

At least it wasn't e-coli, or was it? We all have some e-coli in our intestinal tract. In fact, my wife developed a kidney infection of e-coli and spent a month in the hospital a few years ago. There is a real danger with those intestinal agents.

Yeah; going in space has to be difficult. I'm not sure how they do it, to be honest. I know I'd be constipated for as long as I was up there, if it were me.

Not sure how they wipe, either. I doubt they bring a case of Charmin up with them. And with water being scarce?

Yuck.

3 You're welcome as always.
 
Nothing wrong with E. Coli per se, I used to pipette strain K-12 or mutants of it by mouth when I did a bit of biology lab work long ago, if you messed up just spit it out and rinsed your mouth.  K-12 is human derived and non-pathogenic, the species as a whole has been a model organism for a long time, just found a web portal and wiki dedicated to it, might even have a physically huge genetic map of it circa 1980, but I think it was discarded in a move after I moved to other STEM fields.  See also below the likely fate of any CFUs of it getting into your gut.

The really bad type that's making lots of headlines appears to be ruminant, especially cow adapted, strain O157:H7, but in humans is extremely bad news, forms little plateaus in your gut from which it excretes toxins.  According to that link, a bit like norovirus which takes 20 to perhaps as few as 5 virus particles to infect, it also requires very few, "an inoculation of fewer than 10 to 100 CFU of E. coli O157:H7 is sufficient to cause infection, compared to over one-million CFU for other pathogenic E. coli strains."  That's 10-100 viable, live bacteria....

But normal human adapted E. Coli, no problem for almost all people as long as it stays where it belongs, there's a good chance you've got a strain of it in your gut as you note.  And probably a good chance you don't, reading up for the previous reply, I came across a claim there tends to be only 30-40 species in any general human gut, it's a real jungle of competition, which is important to remember when someone is trying to scare you.  Drop most bacteria in it, and they die a horrible death, if the hydrochloric acid and enzymes in the stomach doesn't get them, they've got to compete successfully against strains which are by definition well adapted to you, and probably mostly to the general types of food you eat.  Or so I was told by the hard core microbiologists I was working for, and that principle of fierce competition in existing ecosystems explains why so many predictions of the Greens never come to pass.

As for the space station, yeah, the Soviet Union was notorious as a place tourists had provide their own Charmin.  Which reminds me of an anecdote about a group of political East Germans being given a tour of West Berlin, they kept insisting it was all Potemkin Village, until they came to a store where there was not just lots of toilet paper, but many varieties, which caused such a shock one woman fainted dead away.

With the constraints ... well, what good is water if it doesn't stay where you want it, but forms free floating globules if you let it get loose?  Maybe wet wipes?  Not sure I really want to think hard about it, especially since we really need to move away from the zero-G thing all the time, see if we can make rotation work to provide some simulated gravity, last time I checked there's concerns about the Coriolis force when people turn their heads.  Or just get to Mars in a moderately fast trip and set up shop where there's some natural gravity, ~38% of Earth's.

4 Wow; that strain O157:H7 sounds like some bad stuff.

Your story about the Soviet woman's amazement at toilet paper in East Berlin reminds me of a story I read once about some Russian hockey players who defected to the U.S. back in the early eighties. The first time they were taken to a grocery store the players eyes grew wide and they began piling carts full of stuff, believing they had hit the jackpot, a chance of a lifetime as the store was full of food. They couldn't believe the stuff would be there every day! In the old Soviet Union you were fortunate indeed to find shelves even partly stocked.

Anonymous, you are a font of interesting information, I must say! I really like the way you think.

I've been complaining about zero g in that stupid space station since they built it. We have to have gravity in our space endeavors; we are evolved to it and I don't think we can live without it indefinitely. Even if we can, can people reproduce in zero-g? I suspect not.

I'm a fan of settling on the Moon before Mars, though. Closer, easier to resupply, and you can go home if you have to. Granted, the lower gravity is a problem, but Mars is low too and both have the same radiation problems. I think we should cut our teeth on the Moon then think about Mars, but many people disagree and the case is easily made that Mars is a better option. Certainly there is more water.

5 As a place for humanity to survive if something truly bad happens on the Earth, Mars is probably better, even the small difference in distance might matter.  There's lots more water to be found, as you note, the gravity is more than twice as strong, the Moon's is 16.6% of the Earth and that might turn out to be critical.  But most important is tht going to Mars is like burning your ships after you arrive on a new shore, you've got to be pretty self-sufficient in attitude as well as real plans and how they work out.  Musk has clearly sussed at least some of this out.

Certainly a much larger undertaking, although I suppose sending regular packets of medicine to Mars you aren't set up to synthesize yet would be fairly easy, but if you're on the Moon too many solutions to problems will be "take the next trip back", or speed that up to an emergency one if needed.  Almost closer to civilization than the South Pole in the dead of winter when it's very dicey for a plane to get to and from it.

Radiation from solar storms in mid-flight is a big issue, though, and was one of the reasons Nixon shut down Apollo with some planned missions left, the project coincided with a solar minimum, but the usual delays extended the last missions into dangerous ground.  Heinlein covered this very well in his "last" "juvenile" (officially it wasn't one, but it clearly was), Podkayne of Mars, everyone huddles behind a small, thick shield.

Or we could terraform Venus, maybe, I'm not sure anyone has any good concepts for that, but a NASA that hires people who are freaking out over the concept of "colonizing" Mars isn't going to contributing much to the effort.

6 Great points Anonymous!

I don't disagree that mars is the prime candidate for colonization ultimately. What else do we have that we can colonize with current technology? The Moon, Mars, and perhaps Callisto and maybe Ganymede, although that gets a lot of radiation. Europa and Io are way too deep in Jupiter's radiation belt - and Io is so very volcanic. Titan, with her dense atmosphere and bitter cold, would be a poor candidate, as would Neptune's moon Triton. Everything else would be too small without some sort of artificial gravity. Venus and Mercury would be difficult, to put it mildly (impossible really, especially Venus, although we could float habitats in the upper atmosphere there. The question would be why; you'd have no view, and you'd have to truck in everything you needed. You could do this same trick in Saturn's atmosphere and it would be a much better view, at any rate. Also, more productive as you could at least harvest some gases. You'd still need to truck a lot of stuff in. Mars is clearly the most Earthlike world, and our ultimate hope in the solar system.

But I really do not believe current technology would be adequate, and that Mars would be economically viable. There won't be reciprocal trade with a Mars colony; it would be at subsistence levels at best. The Moon could be paying for it's own keep in a much shorter time. There is Helium 3 there, and a host of other things that would be useful. Vacuum industry. Pharmaceuticals and materials that require sp cial conditions. This would all be close to a market. So too it could be the hub of deeper space travel. Mars would be like Little America in Antarctica; some people live there but it is primarily a research station. Even though Mars has a lot of resources that could ultimately be harvested I suspect the startup would be too difficult. Bear in mind, you are going to have to build all your environment, not just slap up a few houses, and those habitats will have to be buried under ground. The difficulty of doing that so far from any assistance is, in my opinion, too great at this point. Maybe when we have faster ships, but not now.

And Spacex or whoever will tire of funding something that does not pay back. Eventually they may seek to close it out. If the state of the art is good enough they would bring the colonists home, but if not they would find a way to justify pulling out then the colonists would wither away. Either way I don't see this working out so well. Not now, at any rate. But a moon colony would be profitable and could eschew government funding in a much shorter time. And if something happens they can always go home. Think about a guy getting cancer; on Mars he'll just die, on the Moon he'll be at Barnes Hospital inside of a week.

As you say, though Anon, the lower gravity could be absolutely critical (and we'll have the same problem if we try to settle Ganymede or Callisto, which, though larger than the Moon, have lower surface gravities.) Mars is definitely a better option long term.

Our only other options for space settlement would be a rotating structure - either a hollowed out asteroid or a stand alone space colony. I' used to be excited about these ideas but, given the lack of shielding for a space colony, you just couldn't do it. Gerard O'Neil, who worked out a lot of the issues with space colonies, never did come up with anything better than storm shelters. But what of all the other life on the colony? You can't put EVERYTHING in a storm shelter. Even if you could somehow put all the animals in you wouldn't be able to put the plants all in. And while a hollowed out asteroid would be protected from solar storms, it would still have the problems inherent in spin gravity, like wobbling turning to "spin quakes". And it would be a big, big project to hollow out an asteroid.

So I agree; Mars is the best option. I just think we need to go via the Moon first, get our feet wet, learn what is needed to make it work, then move on. As you say, if the government does it the project will likely be a huge boondoggle, and shut down after a few years.

By the way, I hadn't heard NASA people arguing against Mars because it was "colonialism" although I had heard that type of argument from academics. I know they are pushing against sending astronauts on the theory there might be microbial life and we would contaminate the planet. If they were around when the first Mammal crawled out of the sea we would be looking at an empty, empty Earth indeed.