Creatures Who Don't need oxygen?

Question

When scientists forcefully answer that life cannot exit on Mars, due it's conditions, I think they aren't thinking clearly.

What makes them say tht beings cannot live there. Jyust because we can't doesnt mean other cannot! I mean, so it may be at certain times extremely cold/hot, but could evolution and adaption solve tht(tht might take a while, tho) And also, they always point out tht no one can breathe because of the lack of oxygen.C'mon! What if the anatomy of such a creature could handle the air of Mars!?! nuff said, your thoughts???

sea creatures dont breathe water they extract oxygen from gills

what if creatures dont need to breathe?
and u cant say tht impossible

Answer 1

The first life forms on the planet earth didn't use oxygen; in fact oxygen was a waste gas of most plants. Many animals evolved that could use this waste gas, but there are still anerobic (without oxygen) microbes. We just haven't seen anything more advanced than microbes for anaerobic life forms.

The problem is that most life we are familiar with are carbon based and that requires a reducing liquid that will be a liquid at a certain temperature level like water. That also requires hydrogen to be used and chemically burned to make fuel. That creates products of oxygen and carbon. All animal life above microbes seems to use oxygen in some form, but the most important factor is liquid water. You can have life forms in sulfuric hot vents of gas at the bottom of the ocean or in caves filled with acidic air too thick to breathe, or in the hot springs of Yellowstone geysers. We have found life in Antarctica, just under the surface, anywhere where there is water.

That is why NASA concentrates on the search for water, not the search for oxygen. The problem is that water and oxygen are closely related (water is H20 after all). Mars has almost no free water, any water that does exist is either trapped under the frozen carbon dioxide of the North Pole Ice Cap or deep underground. If life exists on Mars then it would have to be near that water.

The most exciting outlook for alien life is Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. The moon appears to be covered with a sheet of ice. That sheet could be up to 3 kilometers thick, but it would still have plenty of room underneath for a liquid ocean that is kept warm by the core of the planet and the forces of gravity on the moon from Jupiter. The chances of life there are pretty good and missions to explore it are already in the planning stage.

One option is to use a system to melt the ice cap and release a probe that would operate just like a deep sea unmanned probe. Another method would be to set a lander down on a crack and hope that some sort of life is brought to the surface when the ice sheet cracks and liquid water is exposed to the surface. The tides of Jupiter insure that Europa will always have a cracked ice sheet.

One great experiment of the past was to create a test chamber with methane and other chemicals that were present on the early earth. As lightning was added to the chamber it created some simple amino acids which are the fundamental keys to life as we know it. Comets contain a lot of these same chemicals ice, rock and any sorts of other elements and chemicals. An experiment was done to see if the simple amino acids could survive the collision of a comet. Not only did they survive, but the reaction created more complex proteins and other simple substances of life. So it is suspected that comets may be the original source for life on earth. That means comets could have seeded any planet in the solar system. However, of all the planets and moons beyond the Earth Eruopa seems to have the best chance for harboring life as we know it.

Answer 2

While some scientists may claim that life can't exist on Mars, most astronomers and planetary scientists prefer to say that life hasn't been found yet on Mars, and that water (essential for life as WE KNOW IT) hasn't been found definitively on Mars yet.
You're right in your comments about temperature and adaptation. And most scientists agree with you.

The challenge is how would we recognize life that developed in a completely different environment than the water/oxygen one we are familiar with. To be sure, there are creatures right here on Earth that can survive in water close to the boiling point, in environments completely without oxygen, etc. But it appears (at least on Earth) that almost every form of life (and certainly the more complex multi-celled organisms) require water at least at some point in their lifecycles.

So NASA's mantra is to "follow the water", at least as the first step in searching for life on other worlds. In the meantime, scientists in botany and biology are researching the possible forms life could take if it developed in other environments such as an environment with liquid methane instead of liquid water, or ammonia instead of oxygen, or silicon instead of carbon.

Its a matter of first steps - look for something we could recognize if we saw it, then look for the more exotic.

Answer 3

No one has ever said it is impossible for life to exist without oxygen. There are bunches of species of bacteria that can only live WITHOUT oxygen on earth... It is water that is the key.

Life is chemistry so life on Mars would need some kind of chemistry to live. There hardly is any usable chemicals on Mars. The atmosphere is nearly a vaccum. There is no nitrogen. There is no liquid water, which is an incredibly solvent and medium for chemistry. In the absence of water there needs to be another medium/solvent for life on Mars. There is no trace of such a substance either. And life transform its surroundings. It changes the local chemistry, spews out gasses and other methabolic byproducts. There is no trace of any such processes on Mars either.

If there is life on Mars it could only exist underground where there might be some hotspot of geothermal energy (as sunlight is unavailable as an energysource) where there can be some pressure and liquid water. But we have no proof of such geothermal hotspots either.

Answer 4

There are two problems with this. Firstly, the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars is about 1 percent of what it would be on Earth. Any complex organism would have trouble taking in enough gas to breathe. Secondly, the atmosphere of Mars is 95 percent carbon dioxide. About the best you could hope for would be bacteria of some sort.

Answer 5

sea creatures don't need oxygen to survive, just water.. which is also something mars lacks as well...