Little Green Men Or Just Little Microscopic Organisms?

Term Paper Title	Little Green Men Or Just Little Microscopic Organisms?
# of Words	603
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.41

Little Green Men or Just Little Microscopic Organisms?

Little Green Men or Just Little Microscopic Organisms?

The question of life on Mars is a puzzle that has plagued many minds
throughout the world. Life on Mars, though, is a reality. When you think of
Martians, you think of little green men who are planning to invade Earth and
destroy all human life, right? Well, some do and some do not. Though believing
that there are little green men on Mars is just a fantasy, or is it? The kind
of life that may have lived there is the kind you would never consider of giving
the name "Martian" to. They are small organisms such as microbes or bacteria.
Proof of this was found in a meteorite containing the fossils of the
microscopic organisms intact. Two highly regarded chemistry professors from
Stanford, Claude Maechling and Richard Zare, dissected three meteorites that
were about 2 to 8 millimeters long and found trace elements of a big mumbo jumbo
word— polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. That pretty much means that there once
was a warmer climate and maybe even lakes or oceans. Life on Mars is now a real
idea.
The climate of Mars about 3.8 billion years ago was much similar to the
young Earth. Microbes and bacteria probably sprouted everywhere in the warm and
wet climate. Although now we only see a cold red planet, which was probably due
to a collision of an astroid that would have set back the evolution process of
Mars, causing it to be a harsh planet. A Viking spacecraft which landed on Mars
in 1976 found that the planet was bathed in ultraviolet radiation, "intense
enough so it would probably fry any microbe we know on this planet,"says Jack
Farmer, an Ames researcher who calls himself an "exopaleontologist"—a searcher
for fossils on other worlds. The redness of Mars is due to the chemic

Read the rest of the term paper