Suppose in the future a team of astronauts land on Mars and discover living sing
ID: 405 • Letter: S
Question
Suppose in the future a team of astronauts land on Mars and discover living single cell organisms in the soil at the equatorial region of the planet. How would these scientists determine if this Martian life form was unique to Mars? What would be the implications if the Martian life is very similar to Earth biology?
Suppose in the future a team of astronauts land on Mars and discover living single cell organisms in the soil at the equatorial region of the planet. How would these scientists determine if this Martian life form was unique to Mars? What would be the implications if the Martian life is very similar to Earth biology?Explanation / Answer
a) The presence of the single celled organism on Mars would indicate that there is some resource that is allowing it to drive its cellular respiration. This could be that there is O2 in the soil, or perhaps some inorganic molecule such as Fe (this is the usual case for many organisms). To see if these life forms are unique to Mars only, expose them to the components of Earth's atmosphere (primarily O2 because this is what life forms on Earth utilize for their cellular respiration and energy production (i.e. ETC drives ATP synthase which produces ATP).. To see if these unicellular organisms are unique to Mars, expose them to O2 and see if they surivive. If they do not, they are in fact unique to Mars, but if they do survive in an aerobic environment, they are not.
If they did respond (grow, synthesize proteins, etc) in response to oxygen, then the implication would be that on Mars, we could sustain life. In theory, we could move organisms, perhaps even ourselves to Mars and they could survive just as they would on Earth.
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