Sort of. Anaerobes with co2 fixing pathways could very conceivably live and grow on Mars. They would grow slowly, but still orders of magnitude faster than human timescales. There’s also significantly more radiation on mars, so you’ll accumulate more mutations quicker. Time was ill defined here, but you could easily pick up adaptive mutations in as little as hours for fast growing earth based bacteria (because they have a new generation literally every 20 minutes). This would obviously be slower on mars with anaerobes (probably) but the speed at which microbes accumulate adaptive mutations could reasonably be described as “not long” and not at all be in the realm of marvel.
No… we know mars regolith (not soil) is high in perchlorates, that’s hostile to anaerobes, radiation and zero moisture make the regolith a non starter. Is there’s ice? That’s great, but it isn’t liquid, and it’s not saturating the regolith.
*I’m just a nutter who did a bunch of stuffing after reading Andy wier’s , the martian, mars is horrifically hostile to life as we know it.
There are anaerobes that reduce perchlorates (dissimilatory perchlorate reduction). Lack of moisture is a problem, but there will be some supplied by this sweet potato or whatever we’ve deposited on the planet. If we deposited it somewhere where ice was, there probably exists a region of habitability for a long enough period to induce the potential for microbial adaptation in a certain time frame.
It is hostile to life, but microbes would absolutely have a much better chance of growing there than humans, especially spore formers that could endure cyclic periods of high radiation and lack of water, followed by a very brief almost sublimating thaw, followed by freezing temperatures. That’s just if we didn’t provide more seeding material or more hospitable subterranean environs.
There is a significant (not meaning magnitude, meaning statistically reasonably) non zero chance that microbes are actively already living on the planet, not necessarily introduced by us but very possibly. Microbes have extremophiles in their ranks. Life finds a way.
this isn’t marvel, mutations require iterations. Theres no ecosystem to support mutations of earth based biologicals
Sort of. Anaerobes with co2 fixing pathways could very conceivably live and grow on Mars. They would grow slowly, but still orders of magnitude faster than human timescales. There’s also significantly more radiation on mars, so you’ll accumulate more mutations quicker. Time was ill defined here, but you could easily pick up adaptive mutations in as little as hours for fast growing earth based bacteria (because they have a new generation literally every 20 minutes). This would obviously be slower on mars with anaerobes (probably) but the speed at which microbes accumulate adaptive mutations could reasonably be described as “not long” and not at all be in the realm of marvel.
No… we know mars regolith (not soil) is high in perchlorates, that’s hostile to anaerobes, radiation and zero moisture make the regolith a non starter. Is there’s ice? That’s great, but it isn’t liquid, and it’s not saturating the regolith.
*I’m just a nutter who did a bunch of stuffing after reading Andy wier’s , the martian, mars is horrifically hostile to life as we know it.
There are anaerobes that reduce perchlorates (dissimilatory perchlorate reduction). Lack of moisture is a problem, but there will be some supplied by this sweet potato or whatever we’ve deposited on the planet. If we deposited it somewhere where ice was, there probably exists a region of habitability for a long enough period to induce the potential for microbial adaptation in a certain time frame.
It is hostile to life, but microbes would absolutely have a much better chance of growing there than humans, especially spore formers that could endure cyclic periods of high radiation and lack of water, followed by a very brief almost sublimating thaw, followed by freezing temperatures. That’s just if we didn’t provide more seeding material or more hospitable subterranean environs.
There is a significant (not meaning magnitude, meaning statistically reasonably) non zero chance that microbes are actively already living on the planet, not necessarily introduced by us but very possibly. Microbes have extremophiles in their ranks. Life finds a way.