Oops ?
Life on Mars may have been discovered – before it was accidentally destroyed during a NASA mission almost 50 years ago, a scientist has suggested.
In 1975, just six years after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, two landing craft, Viking 1 and 2, were sent to the surface of the Red Planet. The goal was to experiment to find out if its soil could produce something living.
However, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch fears that the machines could have killed potential life on Mars by putting water there. He hypothesizes that salts with the ability to absorb moisture from the Martian atmosphere could normally provide all the water needed by the microbes there; as such, these living components might have been too sensitive to handle the direct addition of even more liquid.
A key factor in the Viking project, which lasted several years, was adding water to the desert planet’s soil to see if plant life could grow as it does on Earth. Ultimately, both landers found inconclusive microbial material in Mars soil, leading to decades of debate and wonder.
Schulze-Makuch gave the parallel example of an alien on a spaceship coming to Earth and finding a human “somewhere in the desert.”
“Then they said, ‘OK, look, it’s a human and it needs water,’ and you put it right in the middle of the ocean. You wouldn’t like that, would you? Schulze-Makuch recently told Space.com.
He cited another study of the Atacama Desert on Mars, which showed that torrential rains killed 70 to 80 percent of the region’s natural bacteria “because they couldn’t handle that much water so suddenly.”
Instead, future life finds a different and unique way to absorb an appropriate amount of water on the red dot planet, compared to Earth.
With the removal of external water sources, the water already absorbed by the planet’s salt remains longer than expected. This is “crucial” to increasing water activity microscopically for microbial life, Schulze-Makuch said.
“Life is very good for enjoying these physical or chemical effects. There are many examples in biology, which are very good at using these kinds of effects – I would almost call them tricks because they use this kind of original physics or chemistry.
Schulze-Makuch recently published a commentary on his theories, titled “We May Be Looking for Martian Life in the Wrong Place” in the journal Nature Astronomy after presenting the admittedly “controversial” conjecture to his peers at a conference in the Netherlands last year. .
“I thought I might get some negative reactions afterward, but they took it surprisingly well,” he said, calling the Viking experiments revolutionary in their time.
“These people weren’t stupid, and I think the approach was the right one at the time…And now we have much better tools, much better knowledge and better methodologies. »
Schulze-Makuch, who previously investigated whether the Moon once had life, can’t say with certainty that a Mars-based organism would follow his argument. However, he hopes to get a definitive answer one day.
“Eventually we’ll get evidence, one way or another, and that’s good. I’m fine if I was wrong,” he said.
“I think it was an interesting idea anyway, even if some people don’t think so,” Schulze-Makuch continued. “But ultimately we’re looking to learn about life, and to do that we have to think outside the box.”
