NASA may have unknowingly found and killed alien life on Mars 50 years ago, scientist claims

Harry Baker / LIVESCI=NCE

 

A scientist recently claimed that NASA may have inadvertently discovered life on Mars almost 50 years ago and then accidentally killed it before realizing what it was. But other experts are split on whether the new claims are a far-fetched fantasy or an intriguing possible explanation for some puzzling past experiments.

 

After landing on the Red Planet in 1976, NASA’s Viking landers may have sampled tiny, dry-resistant life-forms hiding inside Martian rocks, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Technical University Berlin, suggested in a June 27 article for Big Think. 

 

If these extreme life-forms did and continue to exist, the experiments carried out by the landers may have killed them before they were identified, because the tests would have “overwhelmed these potential microbes,” Schulze-Makuch wrote. 

This is “a suggestion that some people surely will find provocative,” Schulze-Makuch said. But similar microbes do live on Earth and could hypothetically live on the Red Planet, so they…Read more and see video here.