Did you know that across the 6 moon landings, Apollo astronauts left 96 bags of human waste on the moon? We’re talking poop, pee, vomit - all this stuff left behind to reduce the weight for the return trip. Gross.
But it can also help us learn a lot about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Poop contains over a thousand of microbes that live in our guts. If those microbes could somehow survive on the Moon for the last 50 years, it could help us answer a couple of huge questions.
One: It could mean that these microbes might also survive on Mars. And we love thinking about life on Mars.
And two: There’s a theory that life didn’t start on Earth but perhaps it crashed here on an asteroid. So if these microbes can survive on the Moon, then maybe they could survive on an asteroid too. And that could mean that life can jump around the universe.
We’re really far away from knowing these answers, but the first steps seem easy. We got to go back for that $#@*.