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> Some of these rocks were ejected under conditions where bacterial spores inside them can survive the trip to Mars. I fully expect we will find life on Mars th
by drewblaisdell 11y ago
> Some of these rocks were ejected under conditions where bacterial spores inside them can survive the trip to Mars. I fully expect we will find life on Mars that looks just like Earth life.
I hope that, if we do find life on Mars, we are able to discern whether it came from Earth at some point or originated on Mars.
- danieltillett 11y agoThis is actually my biggest worry with the search for life on Mars - if we find life and it is related to life on Earth is it native or is it Earth-life contamination that came with the spaceship? There will be no easy way to tell.
- eveningcoffee 11y agoGenomics. Organisms from current Earth and early Earth should have vastly different genome. It would be more tricky to determine if life originates from Earth or Mars if we make an assumption that early life went through many iterations.
- danieltillett 11y agoIf only it were so simple. The problem is we are not sure of all the genetic diversity of the life we have on Earth, especially the extremophile bacteria and archea [1] that are the most likely to survive the trip to Mars as contaminants. My best guess is we will find organisms related to microbes on Earth. The really interesting thing is we might find organisms that are more distantly related than the our current last common ancestor. This would be amazing as we would then know that life originated on Mars and came to Earth later. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile