"Little Green Men or Just Little Microscopic Organisms? - the question of Life on Mars"

Essay by KEV2MeElementary School, 1st gradeA+, December 1996

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Little Green Men or

Just Little Microscopic Organisms?

The question of life on Mars is a puzzle that has plagued many minds throughout the world. Life on Mars, though, is a reality. When you think of Martians, you think of little green men who are planning to invade Earth and destroy all human life, right? Well, some do and some do not. Though believing that there are little green men on Mars is just a fantasy, or is it? The kind of life that may have lived there is the kind you would never consider of giving the name "Martian" to. They are small organisms such as microbes or bacteria.

Proof of this was found in a meteorite containing the fossils of the microscopic organisms intact. Two highly regarded chemistry professors from Stanford, Claude Maechling and Richard Zare, dissected three meteorites that were about 2 to 8 millimeters long and found trace elements of a big mumbo jumbo word-- polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

That pretty much means that there once was a warmer climate and maybe even lakes or oceans. Life on Mars is now a real idea.

The climate of Mars about 3.8 billion years ago was much similar to the young Earth. Microbes and bacteria probably sprouted everywhere in the warm and wet climate. Although now we only see a cold red planet, which was probably due to a collision of an astroid that would have set back the evolution process of Mars, causing it to be a harsh planet. A Viking spacecraft which landed on Mars in 1976 found that the planet was bathed in ultraviolet radiation, "intense enough so it would probably fry any microbe we know on this planet,"says Jack Farmer, an Ames researcher who calls himself an "exopaleontologist"--a searcher for fossils on other worlds.