There's Still A Bunch Of Poop On The Moon And Scientists Really Want To Get Their Hands On It
Vox – It’s been nearly 50 years since the Apollo 11 moon landing. Neil Armstrong’s iconic footprint is still there, undisturbed; there’s no atmosphere, no wind on the moon to blow it away.
But the bigger human footprint on the moon is, arguably, the 96 bags of human waste left behind by the six Apollo missions that landed there.
Yes, our brave astronauts took dumps on their way to the moon, perhaps even on the moon, and they left behind their diapers in baggies, on humanity’s doorstep to the greater cosmos.
The bags have lingered there, and no one knows what has become of them. Now scientists want to go back, and answer a question that has profound implications for our future explorations of Mars: Is anything alive in them?
Imagine this. You spend your entire life being a nerd. You probably did all of your homework in school. You spent your weekends studying. You devoted your entire life to science and now you’re at the top. You’ve worked your whole life for this moment. You’ve wanted to be a scientist since the day you were born. And now what is the task put in front of you? What is this dream job that you so desperately wanted?
You have to go dig through some shit that a bunch of astronauts left behind on the moon in 1969. You have to study 50-year-old human feces. Poop. That came out of somebody else’s butt.
All those weekends you wasted. All that time and energy you put into your studies. And your job is to look at 96 bags of human shit. Is it worth it? I mean I guess if you’re a poop guy it probably is.
But other than that? I don’t know, man. I think it’s even more weird to think about it now considering Neil Armstrong is dead and Buzz Aldrin is super old. Like I understand that the poop that they’ll be looking at was from a younger Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. But now that you have to look at the poop of a guy who died and a super old dude? That’s just gross. Even weirder than the fact that you’re looking at a bunch of 50-year-old turds.