What do martians like

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Amy's more than just unearthly cute though — over the course of Futurama's seven seasons, Amy earned her Ph. D in Applied Physics from Mars University. And hey, if Weir and Scott want to identify him as a Martian as the film's title indicates, who the hell are we to argue. The green, four-armed Thark are much more in line with what later sci-fi Martians would look like with four arms, green skin, and monstrous forms. The chattering, blood-curdling Martians of Topps' Mars Attacks! And hey, if you ever find yourself face to face with some of these little green men, just call up Slim Whitman's "Indian Love Call" on Spotify and they'll all be toast.

There are surprisingly few Martian superheroes in comic books — probably because when J'Onn J'Onzz arrived on Earth in , the so-called Martian Manhunter cast a definitive shadow over the idea of a caped crimefighter from the red planet.

Complex life is delicate and rare. But most life is simple, abundant, and incredibly strong. Setting out to kill all the bugs that would tag along on a space mission is, it turns out, a pretty elaborate and costly proposition in itself. Day to day, her work involves calculating the odds that any given piece of equipment might encounter alien life very low on a waterless body like our own moon; higher for spacecraft nearing Europa and dialing in a regimen of cooking, sterilizing, and scouring in order to eradicate invasive Earth bugs accordingly.

The most Conley can do is make sure there are no more than 0. That was the standard applied to the Viking mission in To find out what it looks like to eradicate all those bugs, I take a trip to the Goddard Space Flight Center and find myself dressed from head to toe in a bunny suit inside a gleaming white clean room. To even enter the room I wrestle with a series of hoods, boots, gloves, and garments using an intricate choreography designed to prevent any contact with unclean surfaces.

A special hood constantly blows air and particles away from his work surface. Above it, mounted in the ceiling, is a device that emits microbe-killing ultraviolet-C light. Every day, a technician cleans the room with an alternating protocol of isopropyl alcohol and diluted hydrogen peroxide to outflank microbes that grow resistant to one or the other , and then NASA microbiologist Erin Lalime swabs for microbial cultures and tests for levels of contamination.

Once the mass spectrometer is assembled, it will get cooked for 60 hours at degrees Celsius. And then, of course, it gets cast into space. But some microbes will still make it through. To help me contemplate how this is even possible, Lalime describes how the strands of DNA inside a bacterial spore exposed to extreme conditions will huddle together into a small ball surrounded by a thick shell of protein.

Dormant spores have been revived after thousands of years in airless isolation. Her work has made her an unpopular figure at times. To many engineers, geologists, and Mars enthusiasts, the whole project of planetary protection simply represents an expensive set of precautions taken in the name of extremely low-probability events. But Conley is undeterred.

History, she says, is littered with stories of human carelessness and environmental devastation, born not from malice but from cognitive limitation, a failure to contend with the murkiness of unknown unknowns. I never thought about whether nematodes could survive a shuttle crash. NASA had deliberately sent it to Gale Crater, thought to be among the least likely places to harbor life, because the rover was largely built for geological research. When Curiosity left Earth in , it was subjected to milder decontamination controls: It was allowed organisms per square meter.

Now, trundling around a possibly somewhat damp Gale Crater millions of miles away, Curiosity was very likely infested with tens of thousands of hardy Earth microbes that had survived the violent blastoff and months-long journey through the harsh vacuum of space. All they needed to reanimate and reproduce was the right combination of food, water, and heat. At the meeting that eventually got called, Ashwin Vasavada, lead scientist in charge of Curiosity, said he was skeptical that the newly discovered streaks—the ones from UFO Sightings Daily—were actually water.

His own research suggested that conditions in Gale Crater do occasionally produce briny surface water, but that these particular streaks were probably just tiny avalanches.

Vasavada knew he had gotten off fairly easy. The mission he was referring to is called Mars , which will land another robot rover much like Curiosity. The new rover will be designed to search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars and—even more ambitiously—to collect soil samples that can be retrieved by another spacecraft and sent back to Earth.