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Is there life on Mars

Updated: 8/10/2023
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6y ago

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As for the existence of intelligent life on Mars now or in the past, there has never been any evidence that could support that conclusion. The same goes for other bodies in our solar system other than our own planet. Advanced life forms as we know them require liquid water. Since the mid 1960's, we've known about the presence of frozen water at the Martian poles. The presence of liquid water on Mars, however, has never been proven. Until liquid water is found on the Red Planet (hint - the place to look would be at receding glacier melts in solar system bodies), the odds of any life forms or microbes abiding on Mars is extremely remote.

In recent years, NASA Rover robots on Mars (Mars Pathfinder, the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers and the Phoenix Mars Lander) coupled with data from Mars orbiters proved the previous existence of liquid water on Mars billions of years ago, thus raising the spectre that life had once arisen on Mars during the early solar system and perhaps died out. Billions of years ago, Mars was a hot planet harboring shallow salty seas. The hematites (dubbed 'blueberries') discovered by the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers are a remnant of those early seas. A new study of a system of gullies on the surface of Mars recently published in the March 2009 issue of the journal Geology, appears to indicate that the most recent period of water flow on the Red Planet was only 1.25 million years ago. That gully system was located on the inside of a crater in Promethei Terra, observed in close-up images taken by the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE camera. If that interpretation of those images is correct, it may mean that Mars goes through warming and cooling cycles and that some liquid water may flow during warmup.

The Phoenix Lander, which studied Mars for some months after its landing on May 25, 2008, conducted various experiments testing the Martian soils at that site. Phoenix conducted wet chemical analysis through its Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer or MECA, which mixes the soil sample with water and bakes the mud to 1832°F to test for chemical composition. The results show the martian soil had a pH between 8 and 9, meaning it is alkaline -- the kind of soil you could grow vegetables in if you brought it back to Earth, tossed in some cow manure and watered it regularly. MECA detected the presence of magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride but no carbon, the crucial ingredient necessary for life on Earth. Interestingly, JPL tells us that the mineral content of the soil is not much different from the upper dry valleys in Antarctica. What Phoenix' wet chemical analysis strongly suggests, however, is that there was no life in the soil sample tested by MECA. The Phoenix Lander's follow-the-water strategy for searching for organic compounds is, to be sure, exactly the right strategy for NASA to pursue. The European ExoMars rover will drill down 2 meters into the surface for its tests. Missions to Enceladus or Titan (or elsewhere in the solar system where liquid water might be found), may similarly find no trace of lifeforms. Even on Earth, however, simple organisms have survived once removed from a source of water. The existence of Earth-like life should necessarily be restricted to planets where Earth conditions exist or have existed. No evidence of life on Mars, or on any other body in the solar system other than Earth, has been uncovered. The quest for other life, of course, does not stop at the edge of our solar system. Astronomers are eagerly searching for exoplanets outside of our sun's orb. The Hubble Team has recently discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of HD 189733b, a Jupiter-like gas giant exoplanet. Previous observations of HD 189733b by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope also detected water vapor and methane on that planet. But, by itself, these discoveries are not chemical proof of extraterrestrial life. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet is not unexpected. Earth's early atmosphere consisted largely of out-gassing of volcanoes: H2O, CO2, SO2, CO, S2, Cl2, N2, H2 and NH3 and CH4 -- not a particularly attractive brew for the emergence of life on our planet three billion years ago. But it seems to have been enough. The apparent fact that there is no life on Mars, however, does not entail that there is not life elsewhere in the cosmos. In early March 2009, NASA successfully launched the Kepler Mission into an orbit around the sun. This spacecraft will search for Earth-size rocky planets outside of our solar system in habitable zones orbiting stars at a distance where liquid water might potentially be found. Kepler will focus on the star-rich area of the sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Over the next six years it will measure variations in the brightness of more than 100,000 stars, searching for slight periodic dimming in a star's light output that may evidence an orbiting planet. ------- The suspicion of life on Mars was supported by the stream beds (water and lava), and frozen water ice at the poles. So there might be CO2 or hydrogen or nitrogen and other gases there as well.

There's life there, but not native to Mars. NASA sent up a car to Mars to take some pictures. There's some bacteria that made it through the sterilization process. So that's the life. It survives on grease in the machine. The grease never gets quite cold enough to kill the bacteria riding in it; however, it's cold enough that their life processes are rather slowed down.

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6y ago
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10y ago

No. There is no atmosphere, no liquid water, and no magnetic field to shield against radiation.

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14y ago

no. definitely not. anything would burn to a toasty crisp if it came anywhere near a comet.

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15y ago

I don't think any have ever been analyzed that closely.

But it would be very, very unlikely. Asteroids do not have atmospheres.

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7y ago

You could land on one but you wouldn't survive there.

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11y ago

heck no!you can only live on comets if you want to die in 2 seconds on one

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7y ago

There has not been any life detected on Mars as of December 2016.

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11y ago

No

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Q: Is there life on Mars
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