Key Points
Extraterrestrial life on Mars may not be as far fetched as some believe.
Mars possesses many building blocks of life including water and seasonal methane
Meteorites recovered from Mars contain microbes
(Courtesy of Backtotheviewer.wordpress.com)
In my last article " Space Exploration: Water on Jupiter and the Mars, Valles Marineris area" (https://steemit.com/science/@moonknight1977/space-exploration-water-on-jupiter-and-the-mars-valles-marineris-area) I jokingly received comments from my friends such as "Let's vacation on Mars", "I'm ready to go!", and the ever popular "Get Your Ass to Mars" and I appreciate a good joke as much as anyone. Everyone has a right to believe what they want to believe, but for those who scoff or disbelief that extraterrestrial life could have existed on Mars at one time or presently, in this article, I postulate why the idea of extraterrestrial life on Mars may not be as far fetched as some believe.
In an article posted below, (by Leonard David Space.com's Space Insider Columnist) Gilbert Levin was the principal investigator of the Viking landers which in 1976 landed on Mars. Levin studied the life detection experiment's instruments on the Viking Landers and determined the instruments received positive responses for life at both landing locales. 40 years later (2018) Levin, still concludes life on Mars was detected and believes NASA has not followed up on the Viking Lander's results. "I am certain that NASA knows there is life on Mars," he said this past July on David Livingston's popular online program "The Space Show." (Space.Com) http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/09/04/life-on-mars-40-years-later-viking-lander-scientist-still-says-yes.html
The Viking Space Lander (NASA)
The reason for Levin's belief that life exists on Mars is two fold, water and methane. Recently in 2018 an underground lake was discovered on Mars. "Radar scans of the red planet suggest that a stable reservoir of salty, liquid water measuring some 12 miles across lies nearly a mile beneath the planet’s south pole. What’s more, the underground lake is not likely to be alone." (Nadia Drake, National Geographic) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/07/news-lake-found-mars-water-polar-cap-life-space/.
(Photograph by Science History Images, Alamy Stock Photo)
This is also coincides with the fact that water may have been abundant in the past on Mars. "NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on the Red Planet in January 2004. Within a few months, they'd found evidence that liquid water once existed on the Martian surface. Opportunity had found particular rock patterns inside a crater that indicated the presence of flowing water sometime in the past, and nearby chemicals suggested the site was once the shore of a salt-water sea." (Space.Com, Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Assistant Managing Editor | March 12, 2013 slide 7 of 15)
Further the discovery on Mars of seasonal methane in the atmosphere has been detected. Methane is a greenhouse gas, which is also produced here on 90% of the earth. Here on earth a majority of methane is produced via living organisms or microbes. It is that thought which has scientists thinking the discovery of methane on Mars could be related to microbes or underground microbes, or even seasonal microbes. "But, Webster said at the meeting, the seasonal signal is some three times larger than those mechanisms could explain. Maybe the methane—whatever its source—is absorbed and released from pores in surface rocks at rates that depend on temperature, he said." Another explanation, "one that no one talks about but is in the back of everyone's mind," is biological activity, says Mike Mumma, a planetary scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "You'd expect life to be seasonal."" http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/mars-atmospheric-methane-sign-life-earth-changes-mysteriously-seasons (Eric Hand, ScienceMag.org. January 2018)
ALH84001 on display at Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Further evidence in my opinion relates to the meteorites, specifically in 1984, a team of meteorite hunters discovered in the Allan Hills section of Antarctica discovered Allan Hills 84001 meteorite. Scientists working on the meteorite discovered it originated from the planet Mars and "in 1996 NASA scientists who carried out microscopic and chemical analyses on ALH84001 touched off a controversy by suggesting that the carbonates in the meteorite had been produced by Martian microorganisms. The carbonate grains are associated with organic compounds, contain minute crystals of iron minerals similar in size and shape to those produced by bacteria, and exhibit elongated objects resembling microscopic fossils." https://www.britannica.com/topic/ALH84001 (Encyclopedia Britanica, Harry Y. McSween)
Final Thoughts
The reason I bring up meteorites is because it is my belief meteorites may be the origins of life not only on Mars, Earth but on other planets. Garbage Theory postulated by Thomas Gold of Cornell University hypothesizes "microbes" or "biological contaminants", or "DNA transference" left on sterile worlds could possibly seed life if the conditions were correct or suitable. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/G/garbagetheo.html while the theory was originally about alien life stopping here and depositing the microbes on different planets, one can now see because meteorites have been found to contain microbes, they could almost act as a type of life carrying vessel to start the evolutionary process on barren lifeless planets.
The electron microscope revealed chain structures in meteorite fragment ALH84001 (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
I also want to now ask how many planets, has human kind visited or sent probes to including Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn is it possible we have been unintentionally leaving our DNA via transference on these planets? For a list of the intentionally left landers and probes we have left on other planets see the attached list from Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landings_on_extraterrestrial_bodies (Hint we have left over 22)
Author's note: This article is all my opinion and should not be relied upon for any scientific fact or expertise. It is all my opinion. The opinion of someone who enjoys learning, science and good science fiction. You can follow me on Twitter @TheMoonknight77 where I mainly follow NWBO, send prayers for cancer patients and post Steemit articles on topics which I enjoy. Yes I am NWBO Long and a share holder.