TED 2017
Armando Azua-Bustos : The most Martian place on Earth (transcript)
Summary
This is an amazing idea.
The speaker is an astrobiologist.
His research is to study life at the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Mars is a very cold and extremely dry planet and to study Mars is to study a place on Earth which closely resembles the environment in Mars.
It's not costly because you don't need to send your own robot to Mars to study.
He also thinks that it leads to understanding the origin of life on Earth and the possibilities of finding life elsewhere in the universe.
He was born and raised in the Atacama thus he hit upon the idea.
All life on Earth requires water, but we don't know that if there is water on Mars because it's extremely dry.
However, he has found out on how life has adapted to live with no water at all. A new type of microalgae uses ocean mist as a source of water. It's 0.1 percent which what a regular plant need.
In the Atacama Desert, there are places with no reported rains in the last 400 years though there is a cave facing the Pacific Ocean and there has been a new type of microalgae.
So, there is a possibility that some microalgae might live in the desiccated state on Mars.
He's excited about this study.
Words in this story
at all / not one bit, generally not
microalgae / seaweed, micro
desiccated / dried, dry
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