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King face of mars7/12/2023 According to King, though, we've already found microbes on Earth that can tackle (at least individually) every curveball Mars could throw, from radiation resistance to the ability to survive long (even multi-year) stretches in a deep-freeze. It's clear that Mars presents any first-generation microbe with a slew of major challenges, including (but certainly not limited to): extremely limited amounts of hyper-salty liquid water, incredibly cold and radically swinging temperatures, and little protection from the harsh radiation of space. In other words, wherever Mars's subsurface water pools the most, that's where we'll want to start. On Earth, King adds, no matter how extreme an environment ("from the dry Atacama desert to geothermal vents under the Atlantic," he says) life almost always finds a way.Īs for finding the most potentially habitable spot, "that's a task which I think basically continues to come down to a question of water," King says. However, "there's no reason to suspect that the entirety of the planet is effectively sterile-that Mars is so limiting, and so extreme, that it can't support any microbial life anywhere," King says. The scant amount of subsurface water recently discovered does not suddenly transform Mars into a fertile Eden. If we want to grow life in the watery-subsurface of Mars, King says, the opening move is identifying the right spot to start. And for future (human) Mars colonists, this terraforming could not only make the Red Planet more habitable, but a colony more sustainable and independent from Earth. Like a series of scaffolds, each generation of new terraforming microorganisms could make Mars more suitable for the next wave of life. And "over the long term, a different atmospheric composition could be more suitable for a wider range of life than the current atmosphere could support," King says. First, it would insulate the planet due to a greenhouse effect-both warming it up and making liquid water more widely available. The bigger question is, why? Why the heck we would even want to seed Mars with Earth bacteria and other microorganisms? What could we possibly gain?Īll those atmospheric changes the bacteria begin could serve a few purposes. We owe all our planet's atmospheric oxygen to microbe photosynthesis. Such a process has already been proven already in Earth's history, King says. Microorganisms that munch on Mars's natural resources could not only transform the red planet's soil, but could pump out gasses to bolster the Mars's embarrassingly thin atmosphere to boot. But because the Red Planet's has that life-friendly trio-the energy sources, nutrients and water-we could grow microbial life there ourselves. We may never find native Martian microbes, and they may, in fact, be long gone. To Gary King, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University who studies life that survives in extreme environments, this presents humanity with an amazing opportunity. But it certainly looks at least possible that there could be environmental niches, probably connected to one of these brines, where life could thrive." The scientists behind the water discovery, including Morten Bo Madsen at the Niels Bohr Institute, say that " finding life on Mars still doesn't look very probable, because it's simply just too cold and/or too dry" on large swaths of the planet. We now know Mars has soil-bound nutrients, a carbon monoxide energy source for hungry microbes, and liquid water. Nonetheless, it completes the trifecta of requirements for Earth-like life. Still, this is no life-friendly oasis: The water is hyper-salty, ultra-cold, and contained in fleeting layers of sludge trapped beneath the red planet's regolith soil. Back in April, NASA's Curiosity rover found evidence of liquid water on Mars.
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