TIL: Life Could Exist on Mars Thanks to Methane | Today I Learned

[Music] Anywhere on Earth that we find liquid water and other sources of nutrients and energy, we find [Music] life. So, we're studying bubbles of methane that are coming out of the Earth's crust in the deep sea. This is a very interesting source of energy for microbes at the bottom of the [Music] ocean. On the sea floor, you see some bubbling coming up, so that's the methane gas.

You see microbes that are living right at the edge of what is energetically possible, and these are the ones eating [Music] methane. On Mars, we found methane. About 2 or 3 billion years ago, there was liquid water over parts of the planet. We know that if there were also methane around, the microbes we're seeing at the sea floor here on Earth could have survived on Mars.

Even finding microbes would be an enormous discovery. Any type of life outside of Earth would really fundamentally change our sense of what's possible in the universe and what it means to be living here on [Music] Earth. If you were to use energy as quickly as a hummingbird, you'd have to eat a fridge full of food or about 300 hamburgers every day in order to survive.