He suggested looking for her under the frozen ground
Planetary scientist Alfred McEven, an employee of the University of Arizona and the American aerospace agency NASA, said that primitive life forms may well live on Mars. As the scientist suggests, bacteria, like those found in the Antarctic lakes of the Earth, could survive for billions of years in the depths of frozen Martian soil. At the same time, the microorganisms of Mars, according to the researcher, have the same origin as those of the earth.
The specialist suggests that at a time when meteorite bombardments "chipped off" fragments of the Earth and Mars, the two planets almost certainly had to "infect" each other with life, if it originated on one of them. In the future, conditions for the evolution of organisms turned out to be more favorable on Earth, which is why life on it flourished. However, this does not necessarily mean that she disappeared from Mars, the scientist says. The descendants of microorganisms that survived the journey from Earth to Mars (unless, of course, to allow an even more daring scenario that it was on Mars that life originated initially, and then came to Earth) could survive in the conditions that exist on the Red Planet today, continues to develop his thought scientist. Moreover, if terrestrial and hypothetical Martian life are related, it is logical to assumethat the microorganisms of the Red Planet will in many ways resemble those on Earth, the researcher continues
According to some media reports, Alfred McEwen shared his theory during the Starmus Science Festival in the Canary Islands.
Although the opinion of a planetary scientist is based on many assumptions, the very assumption of the existence of life on Mars sometimes sounds from the lips of various specialists. For example, NASA astronaut Tom Jones, who now works in the research department of the American aerospace agency, does not exclude this. Unlike the deliberately implausible reports of gorillas or dinosaurs on the Red Planet, the assumption that bacteria can live on it cannot be called pseudoscientific, although at the moment planetary scientists have a lot of arguments in favor of the opposite. Some, more cautious, experts are inclined to consider the activity of bacteria as an explanation of this or that phenomenon on Mars in the last place, even if such an assumption seems legitimate. For example,this is how experts reacted to the recent discovery on Mars of traces of manganese oxides, the main "source" of which on Earth, directly or indirectly, is precisely the activity of microorganisms.
Dmitry Istrov