[imagesource:pexels]

It turns out, the Moon is hardly a dead husk, void of any life.

In fact, if everything goes according to plan for the astronauts who are scheduled to touch down on the surface of the Moon as soon as late 2025, they may not be the only organisms in town.

Ahead of NASAs plan to land the Artemis III mission on the lunar surface, a NASA scientist has shared a shocking revelation, that life on the Moon could already exist, and it could all be thanks to humans.

Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recently presented research at a workshop about the 13 locations near the south pole of the Moon, providing a few potential landing sites for its upcoming Artemis III mission, per Space.com. He’s spent a long time looking beyond our solar system for signs of alien life and only recently began working with a team that has been looking for life much closer to home:

“One of the most striking things our team has found is that, given recent research on the ranges in which certain microbial life can survive, there may be potentially habitable niches for such life in relatively protected areas on some airless bodies,” Saxena said.

The Moon may have a harsh environment and no atmosphere, which should make it hard for life to survive there, but there is a chance that microbial life is hiding somewhere.

As The_Byte notes, the more intriguing part of Saxena and his team’s theory is that the microbial life might possibly have been brought to the moon by humans:

Friedrich Niche said microbial life could be harbored by the lunar south pole’s permanently shadowed craters. In particular, Saxena wonders whether life forms that originated on Earth may have survived the journey there.

“We view humans as the most likely vector [of microbes] given the extensive data that we have about our history of exploration and the impact record as a second, albeit less influential, early terrestrial source,” NASA Goddard organic geochemist Heather Graham told Space.com.

While it is a far stretch to think that microbes could survive the trip on a meteor to the moon, it isn’t so far-fetched to believe that humans left microbes on the Moon the last time we were there. Besides potentially being carried on an astronaut’s boot, a failed lunar lander did once splatter a bunch of hardy tardigrades on the Moon’s surface in 2019 – so you know, Saxena and his team are onto something.

All in all, if there is life on the Moon, it is most likely from Earth, in which case, it is less exciting but still has some interesting implications.

[source:thebyte]