(NewsNation) — When NASA first sent modules to Mars, it may have inadvertently killed microscopic life during the only life-detection mission to another planet, a German astrobiologist theorizes.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch — professor of planet habitability and astrobiology at the Technical University of Berlin — theorizes NASA’s Viking missions actually did find life on Mars but unintentionally destroyed it during experiments.
The Viking 1 and 2 modules landed on Mars in 1976, taking photographs and samples in hopes of determining if life existed on Earth’s planetary neighbor. Experiments performed by NASA indicated no signs of life on the red planet.
However, Schulze-Makuch points to the fact that a pair of initial experiments contrasted each other. One test found trace evidence of metabolism, while later organic matter tests were negative. According to the professor, that might be due to the actions of scientists.
Schulze-Makuch told NewsNation that microbes on Mars may have evolved to deal with the extremely dry landscape by developing novel ways to get water. So when NASA scientists did what appeared logical at the time — adding water to samples to see if it would help revive any life — it might have been too much of a good thing.
“Just imagine you’re in Nevada in the desert, and you really need water, and an alien comes by in a spaceship and says, ‘Oh, you poor soul you don’t have any water,’ and puts you in the middle of the ocean,” he said. “That wouldn’t be good for you.”
Schulze-Makuch points to life in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where microbes live within salt rocks because the salt draws moisture from the air.
“Salt is able to extract the water directly from the atmosphere, and that water the microbes use,” he said.
In the 1970s and ’80s, when experiments on the Viking samples were performed, scientists had very little idea about the Martian atmosphere, Schulze-Makuch said. They may have assumed life on Mars would behave the same as life on Earth, accidentally drowning samples instead of reviving them.
Microbes may not be what most people imagine when they think of extraterrestrial life and is considerably less dramatic than science fiction depictions of alien civilizations.
When it comes to more sophisticated life, Schulze-Makuch is keeping an open mind, even though there’s been no evidence of advanced civilizations so far found.
“The more complex, more sophisticated a life form, I think the easier it will be to detect,” he said. “But of course, if there’s a civilization that has a technology which is thousands or millions of years ahead of us and they don’t want to be detected, then they probably have the ability or the technology that we cannot detect them.”
Regardless of whether extraterrestrial life looks more like Star Trek or the view through a microscope, any discovery would be groundbreaking for scientists hoping to understand more about how life on Earth evolved.
If life on Earth and Mars appear to be related, it would suggest that life can be exchanged between planets easily, Schulze-Makuch explained. But if microbes on Mars had their own independent origin, it would have huge philosophical and scientific implications.
“That would mean that life in general would be very frequent in the universe,” he said. “We would assume that, well, there are at least, probably one planet in nearly every solar system where there’s life.”
Looking forward, Schulze-Makuch hopes NASA or other space agencies will consider another life-detection mission to Mars since technology and scientific understanding have advanced so much since the Viking missions.
While some may doubt the need for such a mission, Schulze-Makuch thinks it’s needed not just for scientific knowledge but as a plan for the future when Earth could face asteroid collisions or supernovas that could make it impossible for us as a species to survive.
“If we want to survive as a species, we have to start to go to other planets, and eventually settle on our other planets. If on Mars, there’s no indigenous life, then we should populate it with Earth life,” he suggested.