TIL: We Could Give Mars Our "Cooties" | Today I Learned
Human beings are really dangerous to the surface of Mars. Let's say life did exist on the surface of Mars; would it be able to withstand the bacteria, the viruses, all of the bad things that we have on Earth, without having the protection? Because it's never seen it before, so we have to protect Mars against us. Not to freak you out or anything.
No, the other thing is we want to make sure that we don't bring our stuff there and then falsely say, "Ooh, there's life on the planet," when we actually brought it. So what's going on behind me in the clean room is they're actually building the hardware, the instrument that's going to go to space. The dirtiest thing in a clean room is the human beings. Our hair comes off, there’s flakes of skin, lots of bad stuff that looks like life to detection instruments.
That we might be able to fly. A long time ago, we thought we found life on the Moon, and when we actually investigated the bacteria that we saw growing, it actually happened because somebody sneezed on a lens of a camera. Almost every morning when we come into the clean room, we're wiping down the spacecraft. Every evening before we leave, we wipe down the spacecraft.
We actually bake it out in a vacuum to drive off a lot of the biological material, and the spacecraft has to have a certain number of spores, or we can't fly. We have to clean it again.
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You know, is there a chance we'll find life on the surface of Mars? The answer is actually yes, it's quite possible we will. Here on Earth, everywhere we find water, we find life. And now that we know that Mars was once a very liquid, wet place, it's most probable that we found. Now that's my opinion, and if we found that life, what I would really be ashamed to say is that we did something bad to it.
Can you imagine being able to say that life is not unique to Earth? We'll rewrite the history books. It'll be
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amazing if you have an entire planet to explore. Where do you go? We will learn something wherever we are. But what is the one site that will tell us the most about Mars?
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