STANFORD, Calif. -- With the prospects for finding life at Mars looking up, proponents of elaborate human settlements there are ready to defend themselves against charges of contaminating what's possibly already thriving there.
And so-called terraforming advocates already have some scientists on their side, offering up data and theories that can be used to bolster the case for transforming the Red Planet into an Earth II.
Tantalizing images returned in the past 18 months from robotic probes have shown Mars to be an astounding planet. Liquid water may have been active in recent geologic times, suggesting that past and even present life on Mars is a decent bet.
Some say the job of finding life that subsists off those possible water pools at Mars can and should be done remotely by robots who won't leave behind contaminating life traces, like Earthly bacteria and other tissues that continuously slough off humans and everything we touch.
able --> But advocates from the Mars Society, an organization dedicated to exploring and settling Mars, contend that only human explorers have the skills and smarts to determine if and how life has carved out an ecological niche on that now dry, desert-like planet.
The technologies are near at hand, proponents believe, to shape the first human mission to Mars with a modest price tag of between $20 billion to $30 billion. Not a bad down payment, they add, for opening up a new branch of civilization and humanity becoming a two-planet species.
And there is no need to worry about mix-ups between Earth natives and Martian life, they say.
Native life
A lead voice in the humans-to-Mars movement is Mars Society President Robert Zubrin. The Mars Society held its fourth international convention here, Aug. 23-26, calling for the next milestone in space exploration -- a humans to Mars program.
It is extremely unlikely that any extant or past life at Mars has a separate origin from Earth, Zubrin says. In his scenario, comets and asteroids hitting early Earth and smacking into a much wetter and warmer Mars blasted off biologically-rich chunks of material. That common event would have led to each world seeding the other -- assuming that the two planets were not inseminated from outside, he said.
"Whichever planet had bacteria first would rapidly have inseminated the other," Zubrin told SPACE.com. "Were they the first life there or did they have to compete with native forms? If we find no life on Mars, the argument doesnt exist."
If terrestrial bacteria on Mars is found, Zubrin said, then it is silly to argue that this life on Earth has some special importance.
Next page: Of mammoths and Martians
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