Right now NASA is diligently at work looking for life on Mars. However, one researcher is now theorizing that back in the 70’s when the first landers arrived at the red planet, our quest to find living organisms may have killed the very life we were trying to discover.
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00:00Right now NASA is diligently looking for life on Mars, however one researcher is theorizing
00:09that back in the 70s, when the first landers arrived at the red planet, our quest to find
00:13living organisms may have killed the very life we were trying to discover.
00:18Astrobiologist Dirk Schultz-McCoo outlines that there were myriad experiments used by
00:21the two Viking landers.
00:22We have long known that one of them conducted on the Martian surface, which involved heating
00:26the samples, could have burned up organic compounds.
00:29Now he outlines that the other experiments could have destroyed organics as well, namely
00:33one that involved flushing soil samples with water and then testing for evidence of metabolism
00:38and photosynthesis.
00:39Schultz-McCoo says that when the Viking lander conducted these experiments, they got a positive
00:44result, but subsequent gas tests were negative.
00:46He now says that the experiment was likely problematic from its conception, as life on
00:50Mars would have likely had to adapt to drier and drier conditions.
00:54As the red planet dried up, writing in his critique of the methodology, now let's ask
00:58what would happen if you poured water over these dry adapted microbes?
01:01Might that overwhelm them?
01:03In technical terms we would say that we were hyper-hydrating them, but in simple terms
01:07it would be more like drowning them.