Scientists had been hoping to find alien life on Mars for a lot of time, but they could witness a totally different turn of events. If little green men don’t exist on the Red Planet, that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for them to live beneath the surface.
No life forms had been detected above or beneath the Martian surface, but there’s no use losing hope just yet. A new study made by the astrophysicist Dimitra Atri from the Center for Space Science at NYU Abu Dhabi claims that conditions below the surface of the Red Planet could potentially support life.
The subsurface has traces of water
As Atri claims, humanity could catalyze organic activity below the surface of Mars with energy provided by the steady bombardment of penetrating galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). The scientist declared:
It is exciting to contemplate that life could survive in such a harsh environment, as few as two meters below the surface of Mars,
When the Rosalind Franklin rover on board the ExoMars mission (ESA and Roscosmos), equipped with a subsurface drill, is launched in 2022, it will be well-suited to detect extant microbial life and hopefully provide some important insights.
Besides Mars, few other cosmic objects could theoretically sustain any life forms. We can also count on Enceladus, Europa, and Titan. Two of them are moons of Saturn (Enceladus and Titan), while Europa revolves around Jupiter.
Hopefully, we’ll get rid of all doubts as soon as humanity lays foot on Mars. This is supposed to happen if the upcoming Artemis mission of NASA will successfully return humans to the Moon. The next step is to send a man and a woman to Mars, and that will only be the beginning of a much larger project of terraforming the Red Planet in the far future.
