Psychrophiles in Space?
Psychrophiles may provide answers to the relevant question we have about how and where we should search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. It is because psychrophiles are an analog for microbial life forms that may be encountered in ice or permafrost of Mars or Europa. NASA has employed advanced techniques for isolating, culturing, and analyzing psychrophiles to learn more about these little creatures. The intact ice on Mars may contain ancient DNA or even frozen or viable microbes. We know that there is a possiblity of life on Mars because we have found microbes in our polar ice caps. Once the polar ice caps are warmed, many psychrophiles are viable even though they have been kept at
temperatures way below freezing for over five hundred thousand years. If life evolved on Mars it may have done so earlier than life on Earth, because Mars cooled
earlier to a temperature that could support a biosphere. This means that Mars would have gotten cold and become like Antarctic dry valleys which are the best model on Earth of what the environment would have been like on Mars. The abundant water that would have been available on Mars would have receded into ice covered lakes like those that exist today in the Antarctic dry valleys. It is conceivable that organisms were alive in the rocks like those in Antarctic rocks which harbor algaea, fungi, bacteria and cyanobacteria. Viable bacterial cells are also found in interstellar clouds appearing in dark patches against the background of the Milky Way, that collapse to form stars, comets, and planets.
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