A new study makes the case that descendants of long-ago life forms may still be living on the Red Planet
Mars rovers, but rather on a computer model Sauterey developed with colleagues at the Institut de Biologie de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, and other institutions. The model starts with the assumption that, as dry riverbeds and ocean basins on Mars reveal, the planet was once awash in water. What’s more, as the—which landed on Mars in 2004 and went out of service in 2010 and 2019 respectively—originally discovered, Martian water was very high in salts.
All across Mars, even in some of its coldest regions, the presence of liquid water thus could have allowed the appearance of microbes similar to the earliest ones that emerged on Earth—ones which rely on a simple metabolism in which they consume two-atom hydrogen molecules and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and produce methane as waste.
Under the computer models, this could have led to a Martian deep freeze in which much of the planet was covered in ice. With the Red Planet turning into a white planet, Mars’ albedo—or its ability to reflect heat and light—would have risen, reducing the amount of sunlight that was absorbed by the surface, and creating a feedback loop that lowered temperatures even further.
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