Life on Mars: Could it still be there today? Or will there be in the future?

In the distant past, life may have existed on Mars. And it is possible that it is still there today. Or perhaps the ancient microbes exterminated themselves: they may have caused changes in the planet's climate that made Mars less suitable for life and eventually led to the extinction of these very microbes.

Was Mars habitable in the past? Will it ever be inhabited in the future? These questions worry many scientists today.

Microbes on Mars

A new climate modeling study suggests that simple microbes that fed on hydrogen and emitted methane may have lived on Mars about 3.7 billion years ago. Astrobiologist Boris Soterey of the Institute of Biology of the Higher Normal School (IBENS) in Paris, France, believes that back then Mars was not as cold and hostile as it is today. The temperature there was between minus 10 and 20 degrees Celsius, there was even liquid water in the form of rivers and oceans. And there were all the conditions for quite comfortable life for bacteria.

Around the same time primitive life forms appeared in the oceans of the Earth. But on our planet, the emergence and development of simple microbes created a favorable environment for the emergence of more complex life forms. On Mars, the opposite seems to have happened: methane, which was released by microbes after absorbing hydrogen, caused the planet to cool (minus 60 degrees Celsius and below), and microbes had to penetrate deeper and deeper into the planet's crust to survive.

Over time, Mars became so cold that even bacteria found it very difficult to survive on it. Perhaps they all died out back then, but we cannot rule out the possibility that they still exist somewhere deep inside the Martian crust. However, it is not yet possible to prove this.

Is life self-destructive?

It is possible that, in fact, life may not have the innate qualities of self-sustaining, as some biologists on Earth believe. Boris Soterey does not rule out that life in the Universe emerges randomly from time to time and dies out after a while as a result of its own life activity, its own interaction with the environment.

Humanity on Earth also seems to follow the path of self-destruction: most of the problems on our planet, including the greenhouse effect, which worsens and worsens every year, are the direct result of our life activity. Garik Israelian, a famous astrophysicist, the author and the main organizer of STARMUS festival, is sure that global warming, air pollution and other ecological problems can worsen conditions of life on Earth and make mankind think about moving to other planets very soon, in several tens of years.

Is Mars our hope for salvation?

And the first candidate for relocation will, of course, be Mars. It is not as hot as Mercury and Venus, but it is not too cold either: at least warming it up to acceptable temperatures is a solvable task - or will become solvable in a few decades.

But before the first human colonies can appear on Mars, a number of questions will have to be solved:

• How to synthesize oxygen on Mars?
• How to solve the water issue?
• How to adapt the human body to live on a planet with lower gravity?

When humanity figures out how to terraform Mars, at first a small laboratory will probably be installed on the planet, where scientists will live and work, and after several hundred years, if everything goes according to plan, the planet will heat up, it will be possible to get oxygen and water on it, full-fledged colonies may appear already.

And then there will be the most important question: how to make sure that humanity does not do to Mars what it is doing to the Earth?