Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat do we know about life on Mars?
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Hey, Daniel, let's talk about life.
Yeah. One of the most interesting mysteries about life is how did it get started? I mean, how do you go from like a pile of rocks and water and all sorts of energy to things that actually live and turn into you know, people and hamsters.
Even more interesting is the question where did life.
Get Yeah, we don't even know whether life started on Earth. I mean, life could have started somewhere else in the universe and then landed here on Earth.
We could all be aliens.
That's right. This is the science fiction novel where the twist is that we are all the aliens. But it's a deep question not just how did life again, but where did it begin first? And it's not guaranteed that just because of this life on Earth now that it means that life started on Earth.
Hi, I'm Jorge and I'm Daniel, and this is our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain.
The universe, in which we take the whole universe find one interesting little nugget and try to explain it to you in a way that you could actually understand. No jargon, no hand waving, because it's a podcast, just actual understandable explanations.
We can press it down to thirty five minutes thirty minutes and then stick it in your.
Ear downloaded directly into your brain.
On the episode today, we're going to talk about is there or was there ever life on Mars?
I love this question, and because it's like Mars is the other laboratory for life. You know, we all know this life on Earth. There's a deep question about how did life start on Earth? And when did it start on Earth? And how do you start from like a pool of water with molecules in it and lightning and get to life? Right? But the other question is like does it happen elsewhere?
Right?
If you have similar conditions somewhere else nearby, like the next door planet, then you can ask like did it happen there as well?
Yeah? Are we the only planet in our Solar system or even the universe who has lives? Lives? Lives? Life?
Does Mars even have a life? It stays in on the weekends?
Right?
Mars turns out to be pretty dull, Pretty dull. Yeah, No, we're not interested in Mars's social life. We're interested in was there ever life on Mars? And is there life on Mars today? And it's a deep question because it will tell us a lot about how life starts and what the chances are for life to start. If you have the basic ingredients.
You mean, we could have neighbors right now looking at us.
There could be right now life on Mars. Yeah. Oops, I just spoiled the answer to the whole podcast. Spoiler alert. They're probably not looking at us, but there may very well be life on Mars today. Whether it came from Earth or whether it started on Mars, or whether life started on Mars and then came to Earth all open questions.
So this is a big question and it's pretty ingrained in our popular culture. You know, Martians, little green men, aliens from Mars, and so we wanted to know if you guys out there are new with the answer to this question whether there is life on Mars.
Yeah, So before you hear these answers, think to yourself, what do you know about life on Mars? What do you believe or what do you hope for life on Mars? I went out and I asked random people on the UC Irvine campus what they thought about this question.
Ah, I think it's possible, possible.
Yeah, could be if you know that water has been found.
Not like human beings, possibly, yes, what kind of life do you imagine, even like bacteria? Even?
Yes, I think it's possible. I believe like even if you've never seen it or discover.
It doesn't mean it doesn't mean like it doesn't exist.
Okay, yeah, all right, so most people say maybe, right.
Yeah, most people are pretty open to the idea. You know, they thought that probably is life on Mars. They know that there's water on Mars. So the takeaway here is that NASA has done an excellent job with their pr you know, they spend billions of dollars, they make these discoveries, and they educate the public about it. Right, everybody's heard about these discoveries they've made about discovering water on Mars.
Yeah. People are just captivated about this idea, right, Like they just have to say Mars or we're going to Mars, or there's water on Mars and people just kind of instantly pay attention.
Yeah, absolutely, because it's right there. You know, the idea of aliens being alive somewhere in the universe is fascinating, but it's kind of remote, you know, it's distant, like, yeah, okay, maybe there's life around Alpha Centauri or some other crazy galaxy. You can talk about that in the abstract, but there's so oh far away they will never get here. It doesn't really matter. But if there's life on Mars, I mean, Mars is a hop, skip and a jump away, right, it's a few months to get to Mars. So life on Mars we could actually go there and we could study it. They could come here. It's an amazing opportunity to learn about life. It's real, it's close by.
I mean you're assuming they haven't been here already.
That's right. It could be there are Martians among us. Maybe you're the Martian, right, maybe I'm a Martians. Maybe we're all Martians.
I am, Yeah, I am a Martian. I am totally just like Matt Damon in that movie. You know.
As a note about the Martian, I heard that a huge fraction of people who saw the movie the Martian thought it was a documentary. It thought it really happened, and they were pretty disappointed when they discovered what that science fiction.
Wow, that's amazing.
For all the people do know about Mars, you know that there's water on it, et cetera. They seem to have the impression that we have the capability to go there today, which certainly is not the case.
That's a big testament to that story and that movie is that everything was sort of based on reals signs, right, I mean, all of the technology about getting there and living there, it's all sort of available technology. That was kind of amazing.
You look like Matt Damon also. Actually I keep meaning to tell you that.
Yeah, or maybe Matt Damon is the Martian version of me.
That's right, Yeah, Matt Damon is the Martian Horrie hit Chib. I'm sure he tells that to everybody, right, Yeah, that's how he introduces himself.
I'm sure, yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's a fascination with Mars. I guess it's just kind of our next door neighbor, right, it's sort of the next planet over. That's not you know, boiling for being too close to the Sun. It's just like the next one over.
Yeah, And people have been looking at Mars for a while because it's so close and so you know, telescopes became more available, people started pointing them at Mars, and pretty early on they saw some interesting stuff, which led to crazy speculation. You know, people saw lines on Mars that corresponded to what they thought were canals, which they thought was evidence of like civilization. And that's pretty exciting, right, And I like to imagine what was it like to be those people. You're you know, you're looking at the neighbor bring planet for the first time. You could see anything, right, you could see like huge civilizations and airships and all sorts of crazy stuff, or you could see nothing but dust and rubble. I mean, that moment when you first get abited as scientific apple is a really exciting time. And so for them to look through those telescopes and see something that looks like civilization, that must have been pretty exciting.
Yeah. I mean, it's maybe something a lot of people don't know is that you can go out in that typical night and look out into the sky and see Mars like you can see the next planet over.
Yeah. Yeah, And not only can you see, you can see its color. Right, It's not just like a tiny dot in the sky. You could see it's reddish like you are seeing the surface of another planet. It's incredible.
Yeah, that's amazing. So I thought, before we would dig into this idea of life and Mars, I thought it'd be cool to just kind of talk a little bit about some facts about Mars. So I did some extensive research online.
Or does that mean you just looked at Wikipedia.
Yeah. Well, I thought it was cool that Mars is about only about half of the diameter of Earth. It's actually smaller than Earth. Yeah, like we are the bigger brother.
Yeah, it got a small scoop of planet stuff. Yeah, that makes it a lot smaller. And that has consequences because it means that the gravity on Mars is less. Right, you stand on surface of Mars. That's basically an instant diet right there.
Yeah, youel way less. You can jump, you can jump higher.
Yeah, you can stand on Mars and eat Mars bars and.
Still you can't eat twice as many. But it's not just because it's smaller. It's also less dense. Like it's a planet. It's half the size of the Earth, but the planet itself, like the rock, it's less dense.
Yeah, it's like fluffier.
Yeah, it's fluffier.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that must be connected, right, because the more stuff there is, the more gravity there is, the more it gets compressed. Like the interior of the Sun must be denser than the interior of Jupiter, which must be denser than the interior of the Earth. Right, So I think there must be a connection between the size of the planet and the density of the interior.
Oh right, Yeah, And another interesting fact I read was that Mars does have an atmosphere. You can go there and there's wind and there's an atmosphere around it, but it's only about one percent of the atmosphere we have here.
That's right. Yeah, Mars does not have much of an atmosphere, which is pretty important for supporting life.
Yeah, okay, And the last cool fact I read was that a day on Mars, like if you were standing on Mars a day free, would last one day and thirty seven minutes.
That's right. That sounded kind of amazing to me, because you know, the length of the day on a planet is just determined by how fast it spins, and you know, these planets could spin at any speed, and so the fact that it lasts just about an Earth day, yeah, it's spinning at just about the same speed. It's the Earth, right, And it turns out a lot of the planets are spinning at approximately the same speed.
We all sort of spun out at the same rate.
Yeah, but does that make you like want to go to Mars and imagine you'll get like an extra few minutes every day.
Well, not only would you weigh less, you would have some extra time in your hand every day. Imagine what you can do in an extra thirty seven minutes every day.
Yeah. The commute, the like nine month each way commute might be kind of killer, though, but no traffic, rightff. Sometimes I feel like I'm on the four or five for nine months anyway, So I fel like, might as well go to Mars, you know.
Cool. So that's our sister planet, and it's sort of the same size. It's very close by. We're blue, Mars is red, So there's sort of the interesting parallel that people think about, right.
Yeah. If you think about where life can exist in the universe, there are these little slices, you know of you have to be a certain distance from the Sun in order to not be broiled on the surface, right, But you can't be too far away because you can't be too cold. You have to have liquid water, and so there's these narrow regions around each star. They call it the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface, and Earth certainly in it, and Mars is right there. You know, there's not that much you know, in the Solar System, there aren't that many planets inhabitable zone, and so Mars is a great candidate.
Yeah. So it's sort of a it's warm and balmy, and it's not of extreme like some of these other planets, right, Like, if you go to Venus or Mercury or Jupiter, you would just die instantly.
What do you mean that's right. I wouldn't call Mars warm and balmbing unless you're in charge of the advertising for Martian vacations. It's definitely cold, Okay, Mars is sub freezing, right, Pack a jacket, folks, and don't bring your swimsuit because Mars is sub freezing. But on the scale of like you know, Pluto or Jupiter or whatever, it's definitely warm and bomby. So yeah, from that perspective, I think we're legally allowed to say that.
What I mean is that we can imagine ourselves being there and visiting and not dying. Instantly.
Absolutely, humans with appropriate life support could exist on the surface of Mars. What's fascinating is that the surface of Mars today is cold and sub freezing and very thin atmosphere. But it didn't used to be that way. In fact, Mars a long time ago used to be much more like Earth. It used to be, you know, it would be an excellent candidate for life billions of years ago.
Wow. Okay, let's hear more about that. But first let's take a quick break.
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So you're saying that at some point Mars was a lot different than it is now, Like it was more hospitable to life, Like it was actually sort of more closer to what Earth looks like.
Now, that's right, we think based on evidence we see on the surface of Mars. Now, you know, like the way the rocks look and the geological patterns, that Mars used to be much more like Earth, almost covered with oceans. Like there used to be huge amounts of liquid water on the surface of Mars. Estimates vary from between thirty to seventy five percent of the surface of Mars used to be covered in water, just like us, just like Earth. Right, So Mars would have been kind of a blue planet, not a red planet, billions of years ago. And in addition, it had a rich atmosphere, much more than it does today. And the atmosphere is key because an atmosphere is like a blanket for a planet. I mean, you know that emitting gases into our atmosphere is what's causing global warming. Well, if you don't have any atmosphere at all, you can't keep any heat near the surface. So you need some sort of atmosphere just to trap the sunlight, you know, to accumulate some heat and to prevent yourself from being basically as cold as outer space. Wow, so Mars a long time ago had a pretty robust atmosphere, which meant the surface temperature was enough for liquid water, for example.
So that's a big difference. It just had this thin layer of gas and that sort of protect it acts like a shields, like a bubble that lets you have liquid water on the surface.
Yeah, and it protects you against a lot of stuff. Not only does it keep you warm, but it prevents impacts from asteroids and meteors and stuff like that, because when they hit the Earth, it's sort of like an elfant hitting a water bed or something. It creates a big splash in the atmosphere instead of getting all the way down to the ground.
Right, and it probably hurts too.
Yeah, I think elephants like jumping on water days you're talking about. But no, atmospheres are very important for sustaining life. I mean, life needs to breathe right, and also for keeping the temperature warm enough and for protecting yourself against impact from rocks from space.
So marts, you used to have these huge oceans and sort of a nanimous uraches like we do, probably clouds, you know, beaches. So that's why we think that maybe there could have been life.
That's right, as far as we know from a biological point of view, Right, what does it take to make life? Well, it takes basic organic molecules, and those exist on Mars today, so we're sure that they existed a long time ago. It takes liquid water, right, it takes an energy source, meaning the Sun, and we don't really know what else it takes. I mean, you can't have too many toxins, you can't be blasted by radiation. But we don't really know. The deep question about in biology right now is if you have all that stuff and you let it sort of smooth around for millions of years or billions of years, how often do you get life? You know, is it one in a trillion, or is it every other time? Or is it ninety nine percent of planets that have that condition eventually get microbia life. We just don't know the answer.
It's like somebody makes the same ingredients we had here on Earth, and the question is did little micros pop up in the middle of it?
That's right, and you know, my instinct is that it must have. And one piece of evidence we have is that on Earth it seems like life started pretty soon after those conditions formed. You know, once we had an atmosphere and liquid water and the temperatures about right. It didn't take very long for life to start. So that suggests that it's not like a one in a bazill chance and millions of years. It suggests that, you know, it's likely to happen. Yeah, think about all the molecules in an ocean, right, all the organic molecules bumping against each other. You might think it's so improbable for it to bump into each other and form RNA and that something that would happen to be self replicating and build from there. Yeah, it's improbable, but you got ten to the you know, huge number of atoms bumping against each other for millions of years. That's a lot of tries. Right. If it's like, you know, monkeys on the typewriter banging away, eventually one of them is going to produce Hamlet.
Yeah, it's a good picture of a creator for the universe. Get a bunch of monkeys banging molecules around. Oh look, I made DNA.
The creator sometimes does seem like a like an idiot monkey. Yeah, I agree. Welcome to blasphemy by Jorgean and Daniel.
So that's kind of why we think that maybe there could have been life, because it looked just like the Earth. It had the right conditions, but then all of that went away at some point, because the Mars we see now looks like a big old desert.
Yeah, that's why we think that Mars was a great laboratory for answering this question. Right, If life existed on Mars billions of years ago, when the conditions were great, that tells you a lot about the chances for life to start. If life didn't exist on Mars billions of years ago, that tells you a lot about the chances for life to start. Right. But as we alluded earlier in the podcast, we don't actually know if life started on Mars or life started on Earth. Right, it could have started in either place. I mean, we'd talk about that before we talk about the great disaster of from Mars.
You mean, like, so Mars used to look like Earth. Maybe life started there and somehow made it over here exactly.
And so you might be thinking, hold on a second, how could microbia life like, build a spaceship, launch it and come over to Earth.
That's ridiculous, right, Why is that ridiculous?
Well, I don't know. Bacteria don't seem to build technology or develop spaceships or launch themselves into space very often. I mean that we're aware of bacteria are secretly exploring the universe.
We don't know little tiny rocket ships.
Yeah, but actually it happens, and it happens sort of accidentally. The way it happens is that you could have like a piece of life, you know, a little bit of bacteria on a rock, and that rock could get knocked into space by the impact of an asteroid. So you know, rock number one, come from space, blast onto the planet, a huge explosion. Stuff flies everywhere. Some of that stuff flies into outer space. Right. You can knock a rock off the surface of a planet if you hit it hard enough.
And it would just go out into space, float around the Solar System and land in our planet.
Yeah. And not all of them, of course, would land on our planet. Most of them would just float in space forever. But occasionally some of them would. And we know that this happens, Like, for a fact, we have rocks that we found on Earth that we are sure came from Mars. So we know that this is a thing.
Wait, how do we know they're from Mars? Do they have little like a made in Mars?
But it's the return postmark of course, so complicated. No, we can look at it the chemistry of it and the geology of it, and they're just totally different from Earth rocks, and there's completely consistent with what we think Mars rocks look like. And you know, we've sent robots to Mars, we've studied them, so we know something about Martian geology, and these rocks just could not have formed on Earth and they're totally consistent with rocks forming on Mars. So we have in our labs rocks from Mars right Like, we haven't been there, but we already have pieces of it.
Wow. So it's possible that maybe, you know, there was a little microbe who went to sleep at night in this little rock or her rock home. Something happened and the next day he or she woke up on Earth.
Yeah that's right, probably the next thousands of years. But you know, and microbes can live a long time, and they can just sort of go to sleep, and a lot of them can survive crazy things. I mean, there are microbes living on the outside of the International Space Station right now. It's almost impossible to eradicate all life from anything. I mean, you zap it with radiation. You'll find a few microbes that are radiation hard. You heat them up. You'll find some microbes that really like it hot, you dry them out. You'll find microbes that can live in dry environments. It's crazy.
So someone could have survived the impact of an asteroid thrown into space, surviving the cold and vacuum, survived the entry into Earth, and then come out and be like, hey, this is my new house.
That's right. That thing has a great backstory. Let me tell you. There was a moment about what is it now, twenty years ago when NASA thought they actually had discovered evidence of life from a Martian rock, right, like a rock that came from Mars with evidence of life in it. This was a pretty exciting moment. It was nineteen ninety six. People freaked out, yeah, because NASA went and gave a press release and said, we have this rock. We're pretty sure it came from Mars, and when we cut it open, we found these things in it that we think could only be explained by life. There were these tiny little shapes that looked like bacteria. They were much smaller than Earth bacteria, but you know, you could imagine maybe this is what life looks like on Mars, and so they were pretty excited about it.
But then what happened They discovered that it was not actually microw tracks.
Yeah.
Well, the scientists who suggested it, they still believed that it was evidence for life, and to them it was the most compelling story. But you know, in science, a pretty big claim requires pretty big evidence, right, And so other people dug into it, and they came up with explanations for how you could form those shapes using non organic processes, you know, just geological processes. Crystal formation could give you this, and like this kind of geology could give you that, and so.
The rock could just naturally have these formations.
Yeah, they found plausible ways to make the same thing without having to have microbial life.
Wow.
Yeah, which is a bit of a bummer.
It's a bummer that were not Martians.
Well, it's a bummer to not have discovered life on Mars. I mean, that would be an incredible moment, right to know that there was life on another planet. But of course it still wouldn't answer the question. Right, even if you found a rock with life from Mars on it, you still wouldn't know did life come to Earth from Mars? Because then you've established that is a transport mechanism or did it start on Earth and then go to Mars and then come back, right, It wouldn't answer that question.
Yeah, but there's still also just the possibility. I mean, they've proven that you can make these formations some other ways, but that doesn't mean that necessarily that those were not made by microbes.
Right. It could be that we're looking at evidence of life on Mars. We just can't prove it, right, that's the problem, is it. And before you're going to accept that, you really got to have pretty solid evidence. You've got to have something which is unique to life. Right, And so before you're going to believe that there really is life or was life on Mars, I think you got to really see it. You got to get there, You got to get some in your hands. You got to like, you know, play with it, see it move. You got to really be convinced.
Check its papers, make sure it came from birth certificate, you know, social security number exactly.
So we think there might have been life on Mars a long long time ago, right, and Mars you still look really different.
Yeah, it was more fertile, it was more sort of a o to have lives.
That's right. Yeah, it was. It was a happy place to be, but not anymore. And the thing that happened is that Mars lost its atmosphere.
Something happened that made it all sort of proof away.
Yeah.
The atmosphere, the thing that would keep the surface warm and have to have liquid water and provide the nutrients that life would need. That atmosphere got blown away by the solar wind. See, on Earth, we have an atmosphere, and our atmosphere is protected from the solar wind. The solar wind is this is like a huge flow of radiation from the Sun. The thing that protects us from the solar wind is our magnetic field. Right. Mostly the solar wind is charged particles being shot at us from the Sun. But charge particles get bent in a magnetic field, so our magnetic field mostly deflects them, and some of them spiral down. And that's what you see in the northern lights, right, is all these charge particles hitting the atmosphere.
It's like the Sun is shooting a giant death ray at us. We have some sort of force field basically, right, we have like a special force field that deflects it.
Yeah. Literally, the sun is the death right. It's fully operational and it's blasting us all the time. And if we didn't have the magnetic field, then yeah, we'd be in trouble because it would slowly eat away at our atmosphere.
Would just strip it away, which yeah, blast alled our oxygen and air, and we'd be totally exposed to those rays.
Exactly, and then the temperature on Earth would plummet and all of that stuff. And that's what happened to Mars. We don't know why, just like we don't have a great understanding of why Earth has a magnetic field and why it flips, and you know, we should do a podcast on that another time. But Mars, we think had a magnetic field, which is why it had an atmosphere, and then it lost it. And it might have been that it just cooled down and whatever was happening inside Mars, the you know gyro magnetism that that created the magnetic field inside Mars just sort of stopped and it lost its magnetic field, which means it lost its shield from the death star, which means it lost its atmosphere dot dot dot.
And then it got blasted by the death ray from the Sun and it is what it is today, which is pretty barren and inhospitable, right.
Yeah, and so it has an atmosphere today like you were saying, but it's really thin, right. There's hardly any gas surrounding Mars, so there's not enough to keep the surface warm. Right, So if you go to Mars today, you wouldn't recognize it from billions of years ago. You know, if if life started on Mars and came to Earth and then wanted to go home, it would be like, this is not the Mars. I know, what have you done?
Who turned off the magnetic field?
No, it's totally it's a post apocalyptic healthscape I'm compared to what it used to look like.
But there could still be life there now, right, That's right.
We have not ruled out the possibility that there could still be somehow life surviving on the surface, because, as we said earlier, life finds a way to survive. You know, once you have a planet that's just covered in gazillions of microbes, they have a huge diversity, and even in enormous cataclysm, it's almost impossible to wipe them out completely. Some of them will survive. And so even though Mars lost, it's magnetic field. It may mean that there's no more life on the surface, right, because no more liquid water on the surface, But there could still be life on Mars. Right. What does life need? It needs water, it needs nutrients, it needs you know, not a whole lot of toxins. It needs protection from radiation, right.
Some sort of a heat source, right, A little bit.
Of warmth, Yeah, a little bit of warmth, but you know, not too much, just enough to have your water be liquid basically, and you know, a huge caveat Somebody out there is probably thinking, hold on a circuit. They're just talking about earth like life, right, life like live, like it exists on Earth. Whoever, you are out there driving in your car thinking that we're totally crazy, You're right. We're talking about earth like life because that's the only life we know, and there's a possibility that life could exist in completely different forms, you know, that doesn't require liquid water and operates on geological time scales and frozen water. But you know, we're gonna have to put that aside because it's so alien we can't even really explore it or consider it or discover it. Right, So for now, let's just think about earth like life.
Yeah, Well, let's talk about what we know about Mars and what we can see today. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Okay, Daniel, So what do we know about Mars today? Like, what can we see that might lead us to believe there are microbes or maybe little green men hiding under the surface that we can't see.
Oh, I wish there were little green men hiding onto the surface of Mars. That would be amazing, right, what a discovery that would be.
Well, I know there's robots on the surface of Mars.
There are a few robots driving around Mars, but those are Earth robots. There are I love these cartoons that show like little green men hiding behind rocks to avoid the cameras from the rovers.
Right, you know there's camera shy.
Yeah exactly. But you know, we have more than just robots driving on the surface. We also have satellites orbiting Mars and imaging surface and comparing the picture today to yesterday. And so we're looking, Yeah, we're looking if anything moved on the surface of Mars, and we would notice, you know, it would not be hard to spot some sort of activity.
So we don't see any movement or structures built by any civilizations or it just looks like a big red rock.
Yeah. What we see are structures that look like you know, waterflow canals and geological formations, and so there is some activity on Mars, but none of it seems to be like due to life. Absolutely, so there's no large macroscopic life on Mars, which is a bummer, you know, because that would have been awesome and you know, maybe Martian scientists could have talked into the secrets of the universe. But that's not in the cards, right.
That we can see, Right, that's kind of key. On the surface, there aren't any that we can see.
But it's hard to imagine though, like a technological civilization living under the surface of Mars and having no presence on the surface. I mean, imagine that was you right, you have a civilization on the surface of Mars. It's thriving, it's exciting. You know, life is good. You have you know, fun plans on the weekend. All of a sudden, you lose your magnetic feel. The atmosphere starts stripping away, the temperature is plummeting. You decide to go underground. Right still, you're gonna want to have something on the surface to collect, like solar power or something. Right, You're gonna leave some evidence on the surface to the fact that you used to be there.
But we see nothing, just natural rock.
Yeah, it's a fun concept for somebody's science fiction novel that there could be today technological civilizations on the inside of Mars. But I'd put it on a pretty low probability. But there is the possibility that microbia life could have survived underground, So.
There could be inside of the rock, inside of the dirt in Mars, there could be little little green microbes.
Yeah. And the reason that we think that's the real possibility is that NASA has discovered water on Mars. Liquid water, so not on the surface, because on the surface is so cold that if you like, if you spat, it would freeze in a crystal before it hit the ground, right, right, or evaporate right or evaporate probably is probably more more realistic. But under the ground it's warmer and it's protected from you know, all sorts of radiation, et cetera, et cetera. And they found evidence of a lake, huge lake of liquid water underground. But it's like a mile underground. It's not like just under the surface, it's deep, deep underground.
How did they see it? How did they know it's there?
Yeah, they can see it by studying, by using radar, I think. So they have ground penetrating radar and all sorts of clever stuff to see what's under the rock.
So there could be like martian dolphins swimming around in there in these caves.
It'd be pretty dark. I don't know how dolphins would survive and what they would eat. I think much more likely is that there's martian microbes. Right whatever, however, life started billions of years ago, could have survived on Mars in term in these lakes that are underground because there's liquid water. The ground itself protects them from the radiation of the sun, right the death rays, and so as long as they can find some nutrients. And you know, my wife, she's a biochemist. She's always telling me that microbes can eat anything, right, So there's no situation in which microbes can't find something to extract energy from.
Right, it's the opposite of children. They won't eat anything exactly.
That's why I keep telling it. We should have had microbes for kids easier to feed.
If only I know, I know.
And there's also other exciting information, like we actually have some clues that suggests that there's life on Mars, not just the possibility. Oh there's water, so there further could be there are other things you can do look for life on Mars, which is to look for biomarkers. Like if life exists, then it has to have some sort of metabolism. Right, there's like a process there. You know, it's eating something, it's pooping something like their breath. Yeah, they're poop, yeah, exactly. And so what we've done is we've looked at the atmosphere of Mars and we've seen methane in the atmosphere. Methane is not long lived, and so if you see in the atmosphere, it means it was produced fairly recently.
And what do you mean it's not long lived, Like it goes away and it disappears.
It breaks down. Yeah, it's not stable. It breaks down in the atmosphere under under sunlight interaction with other things in the ammal So.
We see these sort of clouds methane appear and then they break down. So something it must be making this methane.
Yeah, and there's some explanations just you know that don't involve life, like volcanic activity or whatever whatever. But the interesting thing is that the methane produced on Mars varies with the seasons, and so like you know, it is more in one season and less in another season. Like you know, it's a lot more in the summer and less in the winter. And that suggests it's very suggestive of some sort of biological process, right, as these things like asleep during the winter and then wake up in the summer and eat and fart a lot because me and that's the methane is right.
You'd be there and be like, hmmm, it's farting season.
Somehow. In this podcast we always end up coming back to farts. We should have called this for podcast farts in science.
Yeah, but our farts in marscall marks.
They're called partians. So that's pretty tantalizing evidence, right, That sells there's something going on that produces methane on a seasonal scale, and it could just be volcanic activity that's triggered by the Sun.
There are some It could be Mars itself it's farting. It could be like the planet is farting, like releasing.
We are smelling Mars's butthole exactly. That could be the scenario.
I think he went too farther. I think they might have to edit that one out.
Well.
I like this idea that you brought up the other day, which is that you know, we're sending these robots to Mars, and you know, we try to clean in them and clean them and disinfect them. But it could be that we're accidentally sending life to Mars with these robots.
Yeah, almost certainly actually, because it's almost impossible to completely clean something. Right, you build on Earth, it's going to be covered in Earth microbes. I mean they develop like special sprays to disinfect this stuff, like soup or kill everything sprays, and they sprayed on these satellites and then they discover, oh, there's a kind of bug on these satellites that eats that spray. It's like Yung young young, give me more, right, And so it's and you can shoot it with radiation. You can do everything you like. It's almost impossible, which means that when we send something to Mars these rovers, we are sending life to Mars. So is there life on Mars? Well, almost certainly an Earth microbe was sent there. Yes, did it survive, could it reproduce? Has it like tainted Mars? Is it going to colonize Mars? And by the time we get over there, it's going to be covered in Earth microbes? I don't think so, but you know we It sort of muddles the question. And it's actually zones on Mars where you're not allowed to send probes because they're trying to keep it free from contamination.
Wow. So that's a huge twist. I mean, the answer to the question is there life on Mars? You would think it would be no, but the answer is yes, and we put it there.
I don't know that we can say confidently that there are microbes on the surface of those rovers, but I wouldn't bet against it, you know, I wouldn't bet against So.
Let me get to say this is a total possibility. Life started on Mars a long time ago, came to Earth through some freak asteroid accident, evolved into us. We build robots and work at chips and then put life back on Mars after there was this apocalypse there.
Yeah, and maybe that was their whole plan. They saw this apocalypse coming and they're like, let's write it a rock to Earth and then come back in a billion years, you know, return to Mars. That's the title of the sci fi novel we're writing.
Ooo.
Yeah, And I just think it's a fascinating question. And if we could find microbes on Mars, I mean, say we send people over there, or we get a sample of it, we dig down a mile deep and get a sample and bring it back, then we could start to answer some really interesting questions just by studying that life, right, Like, is it RNA and DNA based the way our life is? Is it similar? If it was totally different, completely biochemically different. Wow, that would be fascinating because would mean there's different ways to build life. If it's the same, that means either there's only one way to build life and it happened in parallel in different places, or it started in one place and went to the other. And man, there's so many amazing threads that you could unravel if we just had a sample of that lake from underground on Mars.
Well, and the answer in all these cases would be mind blowing. Right, we're either super unique if we're either Martians or there is a totally different way to make life.
Yeah, and the facts are there right like right now, there could be microbes wiggling around on Mars. And you know, it's not that hard to get there. We have the technology, we just lacked sort of the political will. You know, it's amazing to me these moments when you have the technology and all you need to do is get the money, and you could just buy the answers to deep secrets about the universe. Right, it cost a few billion bucks or whatever, but we could do it. If Congress and the President decided this is important, let's do it, they could do it. So we have the opportunity we could buy this knowledge. We just aren't all right.
Well, tonight, if you go out there and look at the night sky, you know, look up in an app of where Mars is right now, if you can look at it at night, so you can go out there, grab a Mars bars, eat it and look up at that red planet and smell its farts.
Yeah, or turn around and send some farts to Mars. Maybe maybe that's the way they communicate farts space.
On that note, if you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danieljorge dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy and just are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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