A Lunar Pandemic | AEON Magazine

“Hard as it is to believe now, in the summer of 1969, millions across the US worried that the returning astronauts would spark a lunar pandemic on Earth. Nor did their fears lack merit. Scientists, bureaucrats and engineers across the federal government and the major universities of the US had spent years preparing for that possibility. It was one potential outcome of what they called ‘back contamination’: the introduction to Earth of alien microbes that could multiply exponentially in our benign biosphere.”

Read the Article | Aeon Magazine | Dagomar Degroot

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Gregory H. Revera, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons