One scientist has proposed that humanity may have previously discovered life on the Red Planet, almost 50 years ago, as the search for life on Mars continues. The Mars Sample Return mission is scheduled to return samples of the planet in the early 2030s. Then we demolished it, making for a less than stellar first impression.
Two landers made contact with Mars long before the Curiosity rover arrived there on its own two feet. As part of NASA’s Viking Project, the landers conducted biological tests on the Martian soil particularly to hunt for indications of life in addition to taking the first-ever images from the Martian surface.
Scientists found the results to be quite unexpected and perplexing. The majority of the experiments were unimpressive. Despite the fact that they were initially thought to be contaminants carried in from Earth, chlorinated organic residues were discovered in one section of the experiment.
In one experiment, soil on Mars was supplemented with water containing nutrients and radioactive carbon. The hypothesis was that if life existed, the microbes would eat the nutrients and release the radioactive carbon as a gas. The first experiment did discover this radioactive gas (the control experiment revealed none), but subsequent findings were contradictory. If there were bacteria in the soil, feeding them more radioactive nutrients and allowing them to grow for a longer period of time should result in more radioactive gas being produced. However, a second and third injection of the mixture had no effect on the amount of gas that was produced. Perchlorate, a chemical found in pyrotechnics and rocket fuel that may have digested the nutrients, was blamed for the original favorable result.
There are other suggestions, though. The experiment’s water addition, according to Dirk Schulze-Makuch, professor of planetary habitability and astrobiology at the Technical University of Berlin, may have killed out the bacteria we were looking for.
He mentions instances of life on Earth discovered in the planet’s harshest settings, surviving totally within salt rocks and absorbing humidity from the surrounding atmosphere, in a post written in June for Big Think. These bacteria would be destroyed by water, which may help to explain why additional nutrition injections failed to detect radioactive gas. You usually aren’t that hungry after being drowned by an extraterrestrial robot.
When you’ve just been drowned by an alien robot, you don’t tend to be all that hungry.
In the past, Schultz-Makuch hypothesized that life on Mars would contain hydrogen peroxide in its cells.
“This adaptation would have the particular advantages in the Martian environment of providing a low freezing point, a source of oxygen, and hygroscopicity,” Schultz-Makuch and co-author Joop M. Houtkooper noted in a 2007 research.
According to Dirk Schulze-Makuch for BigThink, the Viking results could be explained if it is assumed that native Martian life may have adapted to its environment by incorporating hydrogen peroxide into its cells. He also noted that the gas chromatograph mass-spectrometer heated samples prior to analysis.
“Hydrogen peroxide would have killed the Martian cells, if there was any in them. Additionally, it would have led to the hydrogen peroxide reacting with any nearby organic molecules to produce significant levels of carbon dioxide, which is precisely what the equipment picked up.
It’s a big if, but if this were true, it would mean that humanity discovered life on Mars almost 50 years ago and exterminated it, just like the evil aliens in sci-fi movies.