Did NASA’s Viking ‘kill life’ on Mars? Expert says, ‘It was so much like Earth…’

NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft was launched in 1975 to explore the possibility of life on Mars. However, one scientist believes that it may have damaged the same possibility, in the course of exploration.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technische Universität in Germany’s Berlin, claimed that the Viking may indeed have discovered life on Mars, but the water-based nature of its life-detection experiments might have unintentionally killed it.
“We are water-filled bags, but too much water is a bad thing, and I think that’s what happened with the Viking life-detection experiments,” said Schulze-Makuch in an interview with Space.com.
The scientist elaborated that NASA should rethink its longstanding “follow the water” strategy for finding life beyond Earth. Instead, he proposes a “follow the salts” approach.
Schulze-Makuch’s argument that NASA must follow a different approach to prove the existence of life on Mars comes from his experience of working in the Atacama Desert, where the environment is very similar to the one found in the red planet.
He added that the scientific concept behind the “follow the salts” approach is that salts and organisms, with the help of the salts, can pull water directly from the atmosphere.
Schulze-Makuch also cited a phenomenon known as hysteresis, where, as water is drawn out, the system resists crystallisation. This delay allows water to remain trapped in the salt for longer than expected. This is significant because it increases the water activity at a microscopic level, making it more accessible to microbes, which is essential for supporting life.
“Of course, I can’t say there’s definitely an organism on Mars exploiting these effects. But Mars, almost 4 billion years ago, was so much like Earth, with abundant water. As it became drier, moving toward its current desert state, these are the kinds of adaptations I’d expect any remaining life to develop.”
The analogy Schulze-Makuch uses is to illustrate the idea that life doesn’t always thrive when exposed to too much water too quickly, even though organisms like humans are made mostly of water.
“There was one study done in the Atacama Desert where there was torrential rain and it flooded a huge area. Afterwards, the scientists found that 70-80% of the indigenous bacteria died because they couldn’t handle that much water so suddenly. This really fits into the same picture,” said Schulze-Makuch while elaborating on the matter.
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