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According to a scientist, NASA may have inadvertently eliminated life on Mars.
A computer-generated image of the dawn on Mars.
No evidence has been discovered in any of our explorations of Mars to date that satisfies the rigorous standards necessary to assert that we have definitively discovered life.
However, decades ago in the 1970s, when the Viking landers became the first US mission to safely land on and explore the red planet, we may have been near.
One researcher suggests that there is a possibility of life residing in a sample of Martian soil. Subsequently, we extinguished it in our endeavor to detect it. Exactly that.
An experiment to identify the presence of microbial life on Mars could have been fatal, according to astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of the Technical University Berlin in Germany.
He posits that our methods may have been deleterious in and of themselves in a column published in Nature Astronomy in September and a column posted to Big Think last year.
If so, it is imperative that we take the ecology of Mars into account in the design of future experiments. Additionally, Schulze-Makuch suggests that humanity should dispatch an additional mission that is predominantly focused on the search for life, with these factors in mind.
The Viking landers had a list of objectives when they landed on Mars in 1976. One of those was to conduct a series of experiments that were intended to evaluate the Martian soil for biosignatures, which are molecules that suggest the presence of life.
These are the sole biological investigations that have been conducted on Mars to date.
The gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS) was employed in one of these investigations to identify chlorinated organics. At that time, the result was interpreted as contamination from human cleansing products, resulting in a null detection for biological signals.
It is now recognized that chlorinated organics are indigenous to Mars; however, the exact mechanism by which they are generated remains unknown.
In recent years, there has been some speculation regarding the Viking biological experiments’ destructiveness. The GCMS required the samples to be heated in order to separate the numerous materials present. Subsequent analysis indicated that this could have resulted in the incineration of the organic materials it was seeking.
Schulze-Makuch now posits that other experiments, such as the labeled release and pyrolytic release experiments, could have similarly obliterated evidence. These experiments involved the infusion of liquid into Martian samples, followed by the examination of the results for evidence of metabolism and photosynthesis, respectively.
The results indicated a positive signal, which appeared to contradict the null results of the fourth experiment, the gas exchange. Schulze-Makuch writes that this was and continues to be perplexing.
However, it is probable that the release experiments were inadequately designed in hindsight. At that time, we believed that life on Mars would be similar to life on Earth and would flourish in the presence of water, with the more the better.
However, as we have recently discovered, life can adapt to excel in extremely arid environments. Additionally, Mars is exceedingly arid.
Changing those conditions, and the thriving may very well come to an end.
“We should now inquire about the potential consequences of pouring water over these dry-adapted microbes.” Would that be sufficient to overwhelm them? Schulze-Makuch clarified in his column that technically, we would refer to this as hyperhydrating them; however, in layman’s terms, it would be more akin to submerging them.
“It would be akin to an alien spaceship discovering you in a semi-dead state in the desert, and your potential saviors deciding that humans require water.” “Let us place the human in the middle of the ocean in order to save it!” That would also be ineffective.
He notes that the life signals identified in the pyrolytic release experiment were significantly more pronounced in the dry control run, which did not introduce water to the sample. This is an intriguing observation. Therefore, it is only natural to inquire, as others have, whether these investigations identified indicators of life that we overlooked.
I want to be explicit that those signals are still contradictory and far from conclusive. Nevertheless, they may be worth further investigation.
In 2007, Schulze-Makuch suggested that Mars could be home to dry-adapted life that utilizes hydrogen peroxide. He and his co-author Joop Houtkooper maintain that the Viking results are not inconsistent with this hypothesis.
“If these inferences about organisms surviving in hyperarid Martian conditions are correct, then rather than ‘follow the water,’ which has long been NASA’s strategy in searching for life on the red planet, we should in addition follow hydrated and hygroscopic compounds – salts – as a way to locate microbial life,” according to Schulze-Makuch.
“Nearly 50 years after the Viking biology experiments, it is time for another life detection mission – now that we have a much better understanding of the Martian environment.”
