00:00Right now NASA is diligently looking for life on Mars, however one researcher is theorizing
00:09that back in the 70s, when the first landers arrived at the red planet, our quest to find
00:13living organisms may have killed the very life we were trying to discover.
00:18Astrobiologist Dirk Schultz-McCoo outlines that there were myriad experiments used by
00:21the two Viking landers.
00:22We have long known that one of them conducted on the Martian surface, which involved heating
00:26the samples, could have burned up organic compounds.
00:29Now he outlines that the other experiments could have destroyed organics as well, namely
00:33one that involved flushing soil samples with water and then testing for evidence of metabolism
00:38and photosynthesis.
00:39Schultz-McCoo says that when the Viking lander conducted these experiments, they got a positive
00:44result, but subsequent gas tests were negative.
00:46He now says that the experiment was likely problematic from its conception, as life on
00:50Mars would have likely had to adapt to drier and drier conditions.
00:54As the red planet dried up, writing in his critique of the methodology, now let's ask
00:58what would happen if you poured water over these dry adapted microbes?
01:01Might that overwhelm them?
01:03In technical terms we would say that we were hyper-hydrating them, but in simple terms
01:07it would be more like drowning them.
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