Why Mars Is Uninhabited – The Germ Theory

The Mars It may have contained abundant microorganisms that lived under its surface for billions of years.

but this Unleashed ancient germs A – Reversing Earth – Climate change that led to the Martian ice age and rendered the planet uninhabitable, causing the eventual destruction of microorganisms. This is an evaluation of the new French scientific modeling study.

What does the study say about Mars?

The study estimates that about 3.7 billion years ago, by the time Earth’s first microscopic life forms appeared in its oceans (eventually leading to the larger and more complex organisms that followed), Mars may have had very few simple microbes that fed on hydrogen and expelled methane.

The interaction of the lithosphere and the atmosphere of Mars with methane-generating microbes, according to computer model simulations, was – unlike Earth, where the environment gradually became More and more welcome life- bad ending.

The researchers, led by astrobiologist Boris Sutret, of the Institut Biology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, who published the related publication in the journal Nature Astronomy, estimate that While on Earth, methane from similar microbes slowly warmed the planet, and on Mars it cooled. Forcing microorganisms to penetrate deeper and deeper into the earth’s interior in order to survive.

“At that time, Mars was relatively humid and warm, with temperatures between -10 and 20 degrees Celsius. It had liquid water, rivers and lakes Perhaps the oceans on its surface. But its atmosphere will be very different from that of the Earth. It was just as dense, but richer in carbon dioxide and hydrogen, both of which act as powerful heating gases.”

Because Mars was farther from the Sun than Earth, and thus already inherently cooler, it needed microbial greenhouse gases to maintain temperatures suitable for the growth of life. But when those ancient methane-generating microbes began devouring atmospheric hydrogen and mass-produced methane, they eventually slowed the global warming effect, rather than speeding it up as expected.

According to Souteri, “In ancient Mars hydrogen was a very strong warming gas due to the reaction with carbon dioxide, something we don’t see in Earth’s atmosphere, and it’s not as rich in carbon dioxide as Mars. So basically microbes have replaced a stronger climate change gas, hydrogen, with another one. Less powerful, methane, which eventually lowered the temperature.”

As the neighboring planet cooled, more and more of its liquid water turned into ice and its surface temperatures dropped below -60 degrees Celsius, pushing the microbes deeper and deeper below the surface, where there was more heat.

According to the model, within a few hundred million years, microbes were forced to live at depths of more than one kilometer.

The researchers estimate that in only three regions, which may have remained warmer, microbes may have survived for a long time near the surface: in Jezero crater (where they are today operated by NASA’s Persevering Rover), in the Hellas plain in the southern hemisphere of Mars and in another plain.

An important question to answer is whether ancient microbes still lived in the subsurface of Mars. Satellites have detected traces of methane in the current thin atmosphere of the planet, but so far it is impossible to determine whether this methane is of biological or geochemical origin.

Sutter pointed out that if the results of his model are correct, this shows that life can appear randomly in the universe but also can destroy itself by interacting with the environment, through a vicious circle. As he said, the components of life are everywhere in the universe. Therefore, it is possible that life occurs regularly in the universe. But the inability to maintain hospitable conditions on the surface of the planet leads to its disappearance very quickly.

Our experience shows that even a very primitive biosphere can have a completely self-destructive effect.