[Medicalidiot]

If we ever have a pathogen like Archaea I will shit my pants. Prions already are able to survive 242F for 15 minutes and caustic chemicals so we already have enough on our plates.

I'm going to pose something that was interesting when the Chief Medical Officer of NASA spoke at my school: bacteria in space will have massive amounts of genetic changes -> bacteria on a Mars mission may become pathogenic to the point where we would not want people who traveled to Mars to come back. He also talked about intracranial hypertension being an issue with people going into space and how to remedy that one. It was fascinating to hear a physician in charge of astronauts talk about what medical challenges needs to be overcome.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/nan... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5509877/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26099128/

[COGlory]

Most hyperthermophilic archaea die well below many bacterial sporulation temperatures already. Additionally, most hyperthermophilic organisms can't live at body temperature, as that's too low, let alone reproduce AND fight off a host immune system. Prions are a special case and not particularly virulent because they aren't genetically tractable.

[Medicalidiot]

When you look at the bacteria that generate spores, the only population that is usually affected is neonates; which is why it's advised not to give honey to anyone under the age of 1-2. For spore forming bacteria, they're not prevalent in the environment and their transmission is usually limited.

[mc32]

But prions are a bit like ice-nine in that they can cause other proteins to become prions.

[jwilk]

242 °F ≈ 117 °C