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Mars surface more uninhabitable than thought


Claire.

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Mars surface 'more uninhabitable' than thought: study

Hopes of finding life on Mars, at least on the surface, were dealt a blow Thursday by a study revealing that salt minerals present on the Red Planet kill bacteria. In lab tests on Earth, the compounds known as perchlorates killed cultures of the bacteria Bacillus subtilis, a basic life form, a research duo from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy reported. Perchlorates, stable at room temperature, become active at high heat. Mars is very cold.

Read more: Phys.org

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I bet this was a result of their last leader pulling out of their version of the Paris climate accord, or their version of the Russians were at fault. 

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Read the original article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-04910-3

Actually - don't bother.  Scroll down to Figure 1 to see the irrelevance of this 'research'.  With UV & perchlorates all the bacteria are destroyed in under 30 seconds.  Impressive?  With UV and no perchlorates they're all gone in... 60 s.  Okay, it's a logarithmic scale, so there's a probability a few will linger on another ten, twenty seconds, but that's hardly long enough to sustain life.

And they only tested ONE species of bacteria.  A bacteria, please note, that is incredibly well adapted to survive on Earth, and has no reason to have adapted to Martian conditions.  Assuming any atmospheric changes on Mars occurred over significant time-scales we must consider the possibility that even fragile bacteria could adapt.  Look at how quickly humans have inadvertently 'created' superbacteria here through overuse of antibiotics designed explicitly to destroy them.  Nature will find a way.

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Perchlorates, oxides and hydrogen peroxide. I'm surprised that the surface of the planet hasn't detonated, that's a potentially explosive mixture they've got there!

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Life on Mars would have evolve a resistance to that...

It's a little bit like : the Saharan atmosphere is toxic to fish, it will be hard to find aquatic life in the Saharan desert...but you turn a corner and you spot a snake.

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It takes more oxygen than is free in the martian atmosphere to sustain enough fire to have and explosion but bringing that dirt into an Earth type atmosphere might be interesting. Life seems to find a way though so I wouldn't write it off as possible yet. There is life in the water around the black smokers in the bottom of the ocean. If life can find a way to exist in a freaking hot dark pressure cooker type of environment it should be able to survive nearly anything. 

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Mars makes the driest, most desolate and undesirable real-estate on Earth look like a veritable paradise. If no one wants to live there, why would anyone want to live on Mars?

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On 08/07/2017 at 11:58 PM, Jon the frog said:

Life on Mars would have evolve a resistance to that...

It's a little bit like : the Saharan atmosphere is toxic to fish, it will be hard to find aquatic life in the Saharan desert...but you turn a corner and you spot a snake.

The two situations are not necessarily comparable.

Earth is a planet that is ideally suited to life and has been for a huge amount of time. This has lead to highly complex life on Earth with an immense variety. Given this it is hardly surprising that life has evolved to survive in the less hospitable corners of the planet.

That is a totally different situation from a planet that is almost entirely hostile to life and that had a very small window (if any) in time where it was hospitable. This would make it less likely that life would evolve the great variety and complexity that we see on Earth (if it arose at all). This, in turn, would make it less likely that it could rapidly adapt and survive on a planet that suffered (from the point of view of life) a global catastrophe.

There are still so many unknowns about the Martian past (and the genesis of life in general) that it is simply not possible to say whether life exists there now or ever existed there in the past, but it seems unlikely to me that the snake in the desert analogy will be a good one.

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if life ever exists in mars , you should be able to find remains of Petrified wood, Petrified Leaf, Coprolite, etc ... 

after so many years , if you can't find anything mean there are no life ever exist in mars before or now.

 

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