As space agencies continue searching for extraterrestrial life in the distant nooks of the universe, an expert has sensationally claimed that NASA might have accidentally killed aliens that could have been thriving on Mars.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch from Germany's Technische Universität Berlin said that NASA's Viking landers, which used a method of finding life using water could have killed microbes on Mars, if there were any.
Microbes on Mars?
Viking was one of NASA's earliest landers which landed on the Red Planet. The landers touched down on Mars as part of the Viking mission in 1976, and the space agency used them to detect life by mixing water and nutrients into soil samples.
NASA made this move, as scientists believe that alien life requires water and nutrients to survive on the Red Planet.
However, Schulze-Makuch believes that NASA's move was wrong, as water may have been too much for the microbes that might have been thriving in the hyperarid Martian conditions.
"In hyperarid environments, life can obtain water through salts that draw moisture from the atmosphere. These salts, then, should be a focus of searches for life on Mars," he said in his commentary on Journal Nature.
According to the expert, NASA's experiments might have accidentally killed Martian life as it applied too much water.
Alien Debate Continues
Meanwhile, several conspiracy theorists strongly believe that alien existence in the universe is true, and some of them even presume that advanced extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth for hundreds of thousands of years.
According to these conspiracy theorists, the wide spread sightings of unidentified flying objects in various parts of the world could be visible signs of alien presence.
They also claim that top world leaders are aware of alien existence, but they are intentionally covering up facts about extraterrestrials fearing public panic.
