A Scientist Claims We Found Life on Mars 50 Years Ago but NASA Killed It

MPI. Getty Images.

We should've known this. Should've seen it coming. For the generations of humans imagining what our species' first contact with life outside our world would be like, logic and experience should have told us that this is how it would go:

Source - NASA may have discovered alien life on Mars 50 years ago when it first put its two Viking landers on the Red Planet, but the agency may have also accidentally killed it.

The claims were made by Dirk Schulze-Makuch from the Technical University Berlin, who believes an experiment carried out in the 1970s that added water to the soil drowned any life lurking in the Martian landscape.

The test, known as the Viking Labeled Release experiment, initially returned positive for metabolism, but a related investigation found no trace of organic material.

Schulze-Makuch believes the water containing a nutrient solution in the soil may have been too much liquid 'and [any life] died off after a while.'

While the theories may sound outlandish to some, this is the case for microbes living inside salt rocks in the Atacama, which has a similar landscape to Mars, that do not need rain to survive - and too much water would eradicate them.

This actually makes perfect sense. No flying saucer landing on the White House lawn to announce their presence. No Vulcans showing up in friendship because their sensors indicated we'd invented Warp Drive and knew we'd be ready for space adventures. No linguistics expert Amy Adams sent to try and interpret their cyphers into our language. No sneaking into our world with body snatchers or They Live-style hiding in plain sight. 

Not even something really dramatic, like blasting all our top tourist attractions into gravel with giant lasers from above. 

Nope. It was us doing all the destruction. Like the (to borrow Joe Rogan's term) territorial monkeys that we are. 

What Prof. Dirk Schulze-Makuch is hypothesizing here is exactly how we've been dealing with new species of unknown origin since we crawled out of the primordial ooze. Stepping into their world and kicking things over like 1-year-olds still trying to learn how to walk. It's how we're built at the genetic level. We're either eating them, taking the things they eat to make stuff with it, or tearing it all up to make room so we can do activities. Or just because we can. 

It's so us to try an experiment using the material that is most natural to us without thinking about what it'll do to them. Only to find out a half century later the Sci-Fi reference that is the most apt is Signs. The organisms Viking found reacted to water the way the big, nasty greys in that M. Night Shyamalan mindfuck did. And this time it was NASA swinging away instead of Merrill. 

So great. We finally make contact and it turns out we're the bad guys, flying in, landing on planet that doesn't belong to us, and wiping them all out in an extinction level event. But not because we're after all their resources or to make slaves out of them. Just because we're stupid and clumsy. So hello, universe. We're Earth people. Nice to meet you. This is pretty much everything you need to know about us.