Practically 50 years after NASA’s historic Viking missions touched down on Mars, consultants are questioning if we’d have truly discovered—and inadvertently exterminated—extraterrestrial life.
Contemporary debates and rising educational views recommend that humanity’s preliminary experiments on the Purple Planet might have been fatally flawed, warranting a renewed quest to unlock Mars’ deepest secrets and techniques.
In 1976, the Viking I and Viking II landers made historical past by changing into the primary American spacecraft to the touch down on the Martian floor. The Soviet Union’s Mars 3 technically beat the Viking duo, having carried out a mushy touchdown on the purple planet 5 years prior. Nonetheless, the Soviet house probe suffered a catastrophic failure 110 seconds after touchdown, relaying solely a single indistinguishable grey picture earlier than going completely silent.
The first goal of the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions was to acquire high-resolution photographs of the Martian floor, characterize the construction and composition of the ambiance and floor, and, most crucially, seek for indicators of alien life.
To realize these formidable targets, every Viking spacecraft consisted of each an orbiter and a lander. Whereas the orbiter surveyed the planet from above, the lander performed varied experiments on the Martian soil. Amongst these have been organic checks designed to detect microbial life by searching for indicators of metabolism, photosynthesis, and respiration.
The Viking missions have been monumental in offering scientists with the primary high-resolution photographs of the Martian floor and in-depth evaluation of Mars’s meteorological, atmospheric, and floor compositions.
The Viking landers have been geared up with a number of devices to conduct experiments to detect extraterrestrial life, together with microbial life. These have been the primary ever life detection experiments carried out on an alien planet, producing combined, if not controversial, outcomes.
Two of the Viking mission checks, the Labelled Launch Experiment and the Pyrolytic Launch Experiments, confirmed proof of microbial metabolism and natural synthesis, indicating constructive indicators for the existence of alien life.
A 3rd experiment utilizing a Gasoline Chromatograph-Mass Spectrometer (GCMS) additionally detected hint chlorinated organics within the Martian soil, providing one other important biosignature for alien life. Nonetheless, scientists ultimately got here to dismiss the constructive outcomes from the GCMS, concluding the compounds resulted from contamination from Earth-based cleansing brokers.
The shortcoming to conclusively detect natural compounds led NASA to formally conclude that no proof of extraterrestrial life had been found on the Martian floor.
However, almost 50 years later, some consultants argue that Viking did, in actual fact, discover proof of alien life, and the very detection experiments inadvertently killed it.
Writer and astrobiologist at Technical College Berlin, Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, has turn out to be a outstanding voice in saying that the methods used within the Viking missions to Mars might have hindered the seek for life. He means that by introducing Earth-like situations in experiments, scientists might have missed the proof or, worse but, unintentionally exterminated Martian microbes tailored to the planet’s dry local weather.
Lots of Viking’s life-detection experiments concerned making use of water to Martian soil samples. As Dr. Schulze-Makuch put it in a current article for Massive Suppose, “Since Earth is a water planet, it appeared cheap that including water would possibly coax life to indicate itself within the extraordinarily dry Martian setting.”
The issue with this, argues Dr. Schulze-Makuch, is that by including water to soil samples, these experiments might have successfully drowned microbial life that had tailored to outlive within the barren Martian local weather.
“What would occur when you poured water over these dry-adapted microbes?” Dr. Schulze-Makuch questioned. “May that overwhelm them? In technical phrases, we might say that we have been hyperhydrating them, however in easy phrases, it might be extra like drowning them.”
“It could be as if an alien spaceship have been to seek out you wandering half-dead within the desert, and your would-be saviors determine, ‘People want water. Let’s put the human in the midst of the ocean to reserve it!’”
The “drowning Martian microbes concept” might clarify the puzzling and contradictory outcomes throughout the Viking life-detection experiments. The preliminary checks have been primarily constructive for all times, whereas follow-ups failed to provide the identical outcomes as a result of the experiments successfully killed any microscopic alien life.
Following Viking’s preliminary landings, subsequent explorations have confirmed that indigenous chlorinated natural compounds do exist on Mars. Whether or not these compounds stem from organic processes or abiotic chemical reactions stays unclear. However, these outcomes recommend that the preliminary detections of chlorinated natural compounds made by Viking weren’t from contamination by Earthly cleansing merchandise.
Since it’s broadly believed that the precept of convergent evolution applies on a cosmic scale, scientists say that any life types nonetheless current on Mars would have tailored to the planet’s harsh situations.
Nonetheless, in our early makes an attempt to seek out life on Mars, scientists might have missed these organisms tailored to excessive situations, also referred to as extremophiles, on account of our Earth-centric bias in understanding life.
“Contemplating the flexibility of terrestrial extremophiles to adapt to harsh arid environments, it might appear that, if life have been ever current on Mars, it might have tailored and developed as Mars remodeled to chilly situations the place water was scarce,” researchers wrote in a 2016 examine analyzing the potential for extant life missed within the Viking missions, printed in Astrobiology. “Life might, due to this fact, nonetheless exist, if solely in a cryptobiotic state.”
In the end, whereas the Viking missions have been groundbreaking, rising viewpoints recommend we might have missed important findings on account of our Earth-based assumptions.
Subsequently, as preparations for future Mars missions acquire momentum, a rethinking of technique might assist us keep away from previous missteps and make sure life on the Purple Planet as soon as and for all.
“As I’ve argued earlier than, we’d like a brand new mission to Mars devoted primarily to life detection to check this speculation and others,” Dr. Schulze-Makuch argues. “I can not look ahead to such a mission to get underway.”
Tim McMillan is a retired legislation enforcement government, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing sometimes focuses on protection, nationwide safety, the Intelligence Neighborhood and subjects associated to psychology. You’ll be able to comply with Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim may be reached by electronic mail: tim@thedebrief.org or by means of encrypted electronic mail: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
