No but the nfl and mlb will be calling about that arm of yours.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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Bacteria can thrive in some amazing places: Deserts, Antarctica, volcanoes, underwater volcanic vents. Basically everywhere on earth, even the most extreme places. So for any one property of the Mars enviroment, there will be a bacteria that can survive it. I'm going to go out on a limb and say there is probably a bacteria that can survive somewhere on the surface of mars. If there isn't, then it probably won't take long to mutate, and evolve into something that can survive there. But the chances of that bacteria being in your potato are pretty slim. Earth top soil is completely different to wherever that potato will land on Mars.
If you want to send potatoes to mars without accidentally introducing bacteria, then yes, there is a risk. On the other hand, if you want to seed mars with viable bacteria, you would do better by being selective about which bacteria you send there, and sending a food source more appropriate than a single potato.
This is a balanced take. If anyone doubts, you should read up on the scrubbing/cleaning NASA has to do on their rovers before sending them to Mars.
You know how that bottle of alcohol-based sanitizer says it kills '99.9%' of all bacteria? Well 99.9% still leaves billions of the bastards behind. It's the same for the UV treatment they do. And the ionic plasma jet. And the 8 or 9 other steps they take. And they're really still not convinced every time they detect an organic on the surface of Mars we didn't bring it with us by accident, have them make it through the vacuum of space and the hard radiation for the 18 month trip, and just release a handful of still living super resistant bacteria onto the surface.
Well 99.9% still leaves billions of the bastards behind.
Love it.
i remember reading an article that said, in 1 g of agricultural soil, we find 10⁹ bacteria, while in 500 m depth below the surface (!) that reduces to a mere number of 10⁶ bacteria xD
Life is so resilient I'm more surprised when it doesn't survive somewhere. There's a geologically active sulfur deposit in Ethiopia with extremely harsh conditions. It was a sensation when scientists found bacteria in the water, but it later turned out the tests were contaminated and the place is actually, truly dead
then it probably won't take long to mutate
this isn't marvel, mutations require iterations. Theres no ecosystem to support mutations of earth based biologicals
Sort of. Anaerobes with co2 fixing pathways could very conceivably live and grow on Mars. They would grow slowly, but still orders of magnitude faster than human timescales. There’s also significantly more radiation on mars, so you’ll accumulate more mutations quicker. Time was ill defined here, but you could easily pick up adaptive mutations in as little as hours for fast growing earth based bacteria (because they have a new generation literally every 20 minutes). This would obviously be slower on mars with anaerobes (probably) but the speed at which microbes accumulate adaptive mutations could reasonably be described as “not long” and not at all be in the realm of marvel.
No.. we know mars regolith (not soil) is high in perchlorates, that's hostile to anaerobes, radiation and zero moisture make the regolith a non starter. Is there's ice? That's great, but it isn't liquid, and it's not saturating the regolith.
*I'm just a nutter who did a bunch of stuffing after reading Andy wier's , the martian, mars is horrifically hostile to life as we know it.
There are anaerobes that reduce perchlorates (dissimilatory perchlorate reduction). Lack of moisture is a problem, but there will be some supplied by this sweet potato or whatever we’ve deposited on the planet. If we deposited it somewhere where ice was, there probably exists a region of habitability for a long enough period to induce the potential for microbial adaptation in a certain time frame.
It is hostile to life, but microbes would absolutely have a much better chance of growing there than humans, especially spore formers that could endure cyclic periods of high radiation and lack of water, followed by a very brief almost sublimating thaw, followed by freezing temperatures. That’s just if we didn’t provide more seeding material or more hospitable subterranean environs.
There is a significant (not meaning magnitude, meaning statistically reasonably) non zero chance that microbes are actively already living on the planet, not necessarily introduced by us but very possibly. Microbes have extremophiles in their ranks. Life finds a way.
Nope.
At mid day the equator is around 80 F and -100F at midnight.
High of about 27°C and low of -73°C
(I'm practicing my USC to metric conversions, trying to catch up to the rest of the world)
Finally a temperature range in which Fahrenheit makes sense!
It's so intuitive!
/s
unlikely, most organisms need three things: water, a source of carbon, and a source of energy. on mars, all three can be provided but only with the help of technology. water can be extracted from the ground, where it is either frozen (permafrost is common north of 50°N) or bound in minerals (water of crystallization). So it can be technically extracted if you just excavate stuff from the ground and bake it in the furnace and collect the vapor fumes that develop, but i guess without that, it'd be tricky for organisms to get access to enough (liquid) water.
diagram depicting the minimum depth for permafrost to be thermodynamically stable on the surface of mars depending on latitude
source: Accessible Water on Mars (Donald Rapp, Skillstorm, Inc, Under contract with JPL)
i'd recommend reading the whole paper, it's pure gold. 129 pages of detailed and extensive overview over what we know about accessible water on mars.
here's the index:
Woahh!! Thanks for taking the time to put all this together!
eh i was reading about it just yesterday so i still had it fresh :)
Well, thanks anyways.
No. Watch The Martian, or read the book, and see how much work goes into making soil usable.
I think since the book was written, they've also discovered Martian soil is full of perchlorates, which would kill pretty much any life on Earth
I loved that book. Have you read project hail mary, btw?
I know potatoes themselves may not survive. But, I thought the micro organisms might.
A single potato? I don't think so.
A few billion potatos scattered all over the planet? Maybe.
Why is that? What's the difference
More chances of an unlikely event happening. Plus you now have shitloads of organic matter there.
Ok
Probably not. Harmful radiation and extreme temps would probably kill most thing but to quote the inimitable Dr. Ian Malcom: “life uoogh… life finds a way…”
So maybe we’d get some shitty mars potatoes to fight in a JRPG in the coming future.
Edit: I still think Venus is a much better candidate for possible extraterrestrial bases simply because it is about the same mass as earth and has an atmosphere and magnetosphere.
Float some fucking ballon villages in that bitch.
I think a lot of people forget in discussing mars as the end all be all of the first stepping stone forget that it’s a fourth the size of earth and (maybe even more inhospitable to life on the surface) than Venus could be in the clouds.
Also I am probably more informed than those rich assholes who stole all our wealth so maybe we just kill E. Coli Musk amd its cohorts and repurpose the entity of Musk’s unearned wealth into making this perfectly usable planet (Earth) sustainably usable.
end all be all of the first stepping stone
Personally, I don't think our future lies in any planetary gravity well at all. The larger the gravity well, the more difficult and expensive it is to escape from, and there's no particular resource available there that we can't get from the asteroid belt or the other moons in the system.
Our own moon gives us the low gravity and easy escape vectoring to get us to the asteroid belt. The asteroid blt gives us the resources to continue outwards to the Jovian and Saturnian moons and the zero gee necessary to easily construct ships/habitats of any size we want without worrying about escaping a gravity well.
Gravity is the hard part. Why would be spend billions to escape one gravity well just to sink ourselves down into another when an orbital habitat can be much better regulated to our needs.
No, but I've seen potatoes survive some wild stuff that made me have to think about it.
You can test at home. Put a potato in a deep freezer and see how the micro organisms do.
Well possible? Yes... probable no?
In addition to the issues regarding temperature and atmospheric pressure, one thing I haven’t seen mentioned in these comments is solar radiation.
Earth has a magnetic field that deflects the harmful solar radiation away. Mars does not. So assuming your microorganisms can survive the extreme temperatures and practically worthless atmosphere, they’d still have to contend with that.
That’s a problem for humans too. Any habitat we build on Mars needs to shield us from solar radiation. And even if we successfully terraformed the planet to have a breathable atmosphere and farmable soil, we’d still be in trouble being outside without protective clothing.
First, it would take a year or two until it arrives at Mars. It is very cold on the way. Then your potato would get smashed very good from falling down there.
If the micro organisms could survive that, who knows?