Alex Knapp, Forbes Staff
I write about the future of science, technology, and culture.
A new study by a research team at the Imperial College in London has confirmed what has been the most probable result since the Viking lander first visited Mars – it’s far too dry to be inhabited. In fact, based on the team’s three year study of results from NASA’s Phoenix mission to Mars, it appears that the Red Planet is in the middle of a drought – that’s lasted over 600 miliion years.
What’s more, even though there is ice on the surface of Mars, and that we know that Mars was warmer at one point in its history, the soil evidence indicates that when there was water on the Martian surface, it was only there for about 5,000 years. That means it’s relatively unlikely that life had a chance to evolve on the surface.
“We found that even though there is an abundance of ice, Mars has been experiencing a super-drought that may well have lasted hundreds of millions of years,” explained lead researcher Dr. Tom Pike in a press release. “We think the Mars we know today contrasts sharply with its earlier history, which had warmer and wetter periods and which may have been more suited to life. Future NASA and ESA missions that are planned for Mars will have to dig deeper to search for evidence of life, which may still be taking refuge underground.”
This doesn’t mean that hopes of finding life on Mars are dead, though. After all, it’s clear from the presence of gypsum on Mars that water has flowed there, both on the surface and most likely underground, too. If water is flowing underground on Mars, then there is a large portion of Mars that’s potentially habitable, as was explained in a study published in the journal Astrobiology last year.
If there’s life on Mars, and that life still exists today, all the available evidence points to that life existing underground. I wouldn’t count it out, either. Life on Earth exists under incredibly extreme conditions. It’s not hard to imagine that there are at least microbes of some sort living on Mars. But I imagine that it will be quite a few decades before we find out for certain.