An astronaut administers a shock to an alien life form in a Petri dish aboard the International Space Station, in a scene from the movie Life. Bad idea? (CTMG via YouTube)

A real-life organism provides the inspiration for the alien monster at the center of Life, ahorror movie thats set on the International Space Station. But youd never guess which one.

Would you believe slime mold?

We used that as a model, working with the effects team, but ramped it up enormously, said Adam Rutherford, who served as a science consultant for the film. Moviegoers can get a glimpse at the results in the online trailers for Life, which opens in theaters on March 24.

Rutherford didnt just throw a dart at the tree of life to select slime mold. Its a weird kind of fungus-like critter that can be considered a one-celled or multicellular organism. Studies have shown that although it doesnt have a brain, it seems to be capable of learning and even figuring out railway routes.

Thats not a bad model for a fictional organism from Mars that combines neural and muscular functions in one cell. And its not a bad pick for Rutherford, a geneticist who also helped out with the AI movie Ex Machina and wrote a book titled Creation about the origin and future of life.

No one goes to a space horror flick for a science lecture, but the producers of Life took pains to throw in some real-life background about astrobiology, the challenges of studying samples from an alien world, and how to deal with a medical emergency on the space station.

One of the reasons it works so well is because its set in the near future, Rutherford told GeekWire.

China is already gearing up to bring samples back from the moon, as early as this year, and NASAs 2020 Mars rover is expected to lay the groundwork for an eventual Mars sample return mission.

Scientistsare thinking through all the protocols that will be needed to keep Martian samples from getting contaminated by terrestrial life forms, and to keep any potential life forms from getting into earthly environments.

The most likely scenario calls for sending a sealed sample canister directly back to Earth, for study in a specially built containment facility. In contrast, the movie plot is built around the idea that astronauts will study the sample on the space station, supposedly for safetys sake. Of course, something goes wrong.

In real life, the space stations crew would stick to very rigorous protocols to absolutely minimize risk of contamination, Rutherford said. But it wouldnt be much of a space horror thriller, he added.

Dealing with an alien outbreak isnt exactly on NASAs list of potential medical emergencies. But the films producers did want to stick as close to the space stations medical procedures as they could. So, they called in Kevin Fong, an expert on space medicine from University College London, to help keep the plot on the right side of plausibility.

They invented some capabilities that dont exist on the current International Space Station, Fong told GeekWire. I was really gobsmacked by just how much effort they put into creating these fictional modules.

Fong pointed out that the real space station has nothing like the capabilities of a hospital. The average medical astronaut is not thinking about doing open-heart surgery, he said.

Crew memberscan handle minor medical upsets, and theyre trained to deal with the two big emergency scenarios that is, explosive decompression or fire. But if an astronaut is facing a life-threatening medical condition such as acute appendicitis or a heart attack, youd be looking to come home fairly sharpish on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, Fong said.

The filmmakers turned things up a couple of notches for Life, andFong is happy with the results.

I cant speak for the whole film, he said, but for the bits that were medical it was all pretty close to the bone of what reality would be.

For the bits that were physical, the filmmakers turned to Rudi Schmidt, an Austrian scientist who has worked on a long string of space missions for the European Space Agency and served as a consultant for The Martian, one of moviedoms most successful hard-sci-fisagas.

Schmidt advised the actors on how to move in zero gravity, even when they were harnessed in ropes and wires that had to be digitally removed during post-production.

The result, he told GeekWire, is probably as realistic as you can get on the ground.

Schmidt also dealt with questions from filmmakers and actors about life in space. He recalled that Russian actress Olga Dihovichnaya whoplays the space stations commander asked him what it was like to cry in space.

Its different from crying on Earth, because theres no gravity, Schmidt explained. The tears just stick to your eyes. They do not roll down on the cheek. They just stay in the eyes, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So in the end, the idea of crying [in the movie] was not a really good one. (Check out Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfields video demonstrating the real-life effect.)

As a scientist whos actually managed a mission to Mars, Schmidt is also well-placed to weigh in on whether samples from the Red Planet would carry anything like the monster that gets loose in Life.

Schmidt said that samples of Martian rock and soil couldhold evidence for fossilized ancient life, but almost certainly nothing dangerous. Nobody, including myself, would expect that well bring back a living organism from Mars, he said.

Just keep telling yourself that after youve seen Life.

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Horror movie 'Life' draws upon real-life biology and worst-case space scenarios - GeekWire