There's a good chance NASA has been unsuccessful at keeping Mars completely 100% sterile, but honestly who cares? Yeah, I know there's an international treaty NASA has to follow, but why? You'd think if there were by chance archaea deep in Martian ice from some panspermia event billions of years ago, they would evolve a vastly different genome and maybe even be RNA-based. On top of that, won't all this effort be in vain the moment a commercial trip to Mars happens (which may be a couple decades off, but that's nothing on the timeline that milestone is a part of). And, on the small off-chance we might be able to permanently settle there, won't we want to build a biome, at least in our little hexagonal huts? The microbiome would be a really good place to start.
Submitted November 27, 2018 at 11:11PM by QuasiLuminous https://ift.tt/2Aty7Zz
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