• Question: Do you think there is life on Mars?

    Asked by name130ham on 17 Feb 2020. This question was also asked by part130ham.
    • Photo: Peter Fawdon

      Peter Fawdon answered on 17 Feb 2020:


      Hi,

      I don’t think that there is life from Mars alive on Mars today. but I could be wrong!

      I do think that is likely that all the pieces of the puzzle where there but I don’t know if the conditions were right for long enough to bring them all together to make the earliest life forms. this is what ExoMars is all about trying to find out!

      Peter

    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 20 Feb 2020:


      I think there will be life in other places in the Universe. Just on the basis of how enormous the universe is, and how many other stars and planets exist. While we humans like to think that we are special and unique I personally think it is unlikely that we’re that special, and think that life will have evolved in other places just the same.

      Whether it is on Mars or not right now is a different question. It might have once been on Mars but now died out. It could have been transferred from Earth to Mars by meteor strikes that blasted chunks of Earth off the Earth and eventually they landed on Mars. It could be that Earth life evolved from chunks of Mars rock that did the opposite journey, and actually all Earth life started on Mars! But the more we learn about life on Earth, the more we realise that life can survive in very extreme and harsh conditions, so it if it was ever there, I think there is a reasonable chance that somewhere on the planet, there still is life.

      Whether we find it with our rover is yet another question – if we don’t find it, that doesn’t definitely mean that it isn’t there. We can only travel so far and we can only dig so deep with our rover, so there are lots of habitats that might be suitable for life on Mars, like deep in caves, or in underground lakes and ice, that we will not be able to sample with this rover, but life could be in.

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