A former NASA engineer who worked on the Viking missions makes a controversial claim that since the 1970s, the agency has known there is life on Mars.

Gilbert Levin , a former NASA engineer who dealt with the Viking missions , makes a debatable point: that since the 1970s, the organization has definitely realized that there is life on Mars.

In the article, Levin discovers that the two Viking ships, which arrived in totally different areas of the Red Planet, conducted a progression of tests to decide if life existed on the world. Furthermore, one of these tests, which relied on the assay used by the researcher Louis Pasteur to demonstrate the presence of organisms, returned a positive incentive to the presence of microorganisms. The acquired result would have been affirmed by the other Viking mission ship, which recreated the results by conducting a similar test in a district more than 6,500 km away from where the first ship landed.

Levin, who claims to have spent the last 43 years concentrating on the results of the mission, discovers that the entire group oversaw four tests that came back positive for life on Mars, all with data curves showing the presence of breath. in the soil of the planet, and that they were basically the same as the results tracked while investigating the presence of microorganisms in terrestrial soil, which, for Levin, demonstrated that the presence of tiny life had been found on Mars.

The question posed in the article is: in the event that the presence of life on Mars was proven at that time, why did the US government decide to hide this data for a long time?

However, the reality is not that. The consequences of Viking-led tests on the dirt on Mars during the 1970s were not hidden away as secret data, and over the past forty years a few researchers have investigated these results, but there is disagreement as to whether they really show the presence of life on the planet. Detractors of this statement accuse the tests of being vague, with results that are not confirmed throughout the exams and, therefore, uncertain.

Levin even agrees with these reactions, and it is in them that the most notable concern of the engineer is stored: the way in which the results obtained by the Viking missions were not complemented by different analyzes that could approve the discoveries made by the mission. What’s more, that puts NASA’s ongoing plans in a different light, as the organization would be willing to send space explorers to a planet where there is no certainty whether microbes exist, and that could put space explorers at superfluous risk. Assuming that if there is tiny life on Mars, it will take a ton of effort not to open them up to potential microorganisms out there on the world, but also to ensure that they don’t carry any of these microorganisms back to Earth.

So, Levin reasons, before sending space explorers to Mars, we want to focus on the aftermath of the Viking tests and contrast them with the most recent evidence that life could exist on Mars -, for example, the new revelations that, sooner or later in its development, the planet previously had a climate and enormous reservoirs of water, which is to the point of making numerous researchers confident that living organic entities did eventually exist on Mars.

Despite numerous hypotheses that life once existed on Mars and evidence to support these speculations, there is still no logical agreement that any planet other than Earth has harbored a living being. In any case, at the same time, one must take Levin’s warnings exceptionally seriously, since, assuming that there really are living microorganisms on the earth of Mars, sending space explorers there could be very risky, since it is absurd to expect to know how they are doing. to operate these microbes and microscopic organisms in the air of Earth assuming that these space travelers bring evidence of them here, and it would be essential to be sure if there is life on the Red Planet before sending the main people to investigate the Martian territory.