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Life on Mars?
Mars once was much warmer and had a much thicker atmosphere that was probably mostly CO2, just as now.
If that is the case, why shouldn't life have started there just as it did here?
The problem at answering this question is that we simply know too little about how life originated on Earth, so we cannot really tell if it was possible on Mars.
One problem is that the time, when conditions were warm and wet on Mars might have been very short, maybe too short for life to be born.
We also think that the moon helped us. Thanks to the tidal effect, organic molecules from seas or oceans could have come to land where they could have reacted to more complicated molecules thanks to the extra heat of the sunlight in shallow water. If that is the case, Mars would be disadvantaged because of it's small moons and weak tidal effect.
Organic molecules could have come from space in form of comets, too, to help life to be born. If this is so, more comets might have crashed on Earth because of it's stronger gravitational field.
What concerns life on Mars right now, we don't know much either.
The surface is cold and dry, the atmosphere thin, the radiation high and to make things even worse, the soil is full of peroxides, which destroy living tissue. The Martian surface is as sterile an environment you'd like to have.
So life isn't probable on the surface, but it might exist underground, where water might exist in abundance, maybe even in liquid form.
Such organisms would probably only replicate slowly and live deep underground.
It was said that such organisms would be extinguished before we find them if we terraform Mars, because they'd be adapted to their environment and die in ours.
I respond that they'd probably live so deep underground that they'd never notice the surface has completely changed.
I also think that we shouldn't protect something we don't know of and maybe never will.
The finding of a Martian form of life would revolutionize our current view of the distribution of life in the galaxy.
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