{"id":107159,"date":"2020-05-16T18:43:25","date_gmt":"2020-05-17T01:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/life-on-mars-will-we-find-it-will-we-colonize-the-red-planet"},"modified":"2020-05-16T18:43:25","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T01:43:25","slug":"life-on-mars-will-we-find-it-will-we-colonize-the-red-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/life-on-mars-will-we-find-it-will-we-colonize-the-red-planet","title":{"rendered":"Life on Mars? Will we find it? Will we colonize the Red Planet?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ja0euppwnGc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Will we ever live on Mars?<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Since the dawn of the Space Age, the planet Mars has been the focus of two ambitious projects. One is the search for life forms native to the planet; the other is human colonization.<\/p>\n<p>For decades, Mars colonization advocates have been promising potential settlers that the time for leaving Earth is nearing. In fact, in terms of producing the actual space hardware\u2014the capability to transport large numbers of passengers into space and the engines and life support to ferry them safely to Mars\u2014we\u2019re not much closer to a Mars colony than we were in 1972, when the last <em>Apollo<\/em> lunar mission returned to Earth, so don\u2019t sell your house on Earth just yet. On the other hand, we\u2019ve had one mind-blowing discovery after another about Mars as a result of unmanned exploration conducted over the last decades by NASA.<\/p>\n<p>The evidence that the planet is home to microscopic lifeforms\u2014something akin to Earth\u2019s bacteria\u2014has been accumulating slowly, but consistently. While few astrobiologists are ready say that, yes, there\u2019s life there, until we have a photo of microorganisms swimming in the microscope field, that moment is really approaching. And we\u2019ll probably get to it long before the first astronaut boots cast their prints into the Martian surface dust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Will we ever live on Mars? Since the dawn of the Space Age, the planet Mars has been the focus of two ambitious projects. One is the search for life forms native to the planet; the other is human colonization. For decades, Mars colonization advocates have been promising potential settlers that the time for leaving [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":554,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,15,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-habitats","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/554"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}