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It sounds like a pretty inhospitable place, but life exists in some pretty inhospitable places on the earth. Bacteria live in the steams of super heated water emerging from thermal vents on the ocean floor. A whole community exists around these thermal vents, all dependent on the non-photosynthetic energy conversion capabilities of the bacteria. In Antarctica, plants exist within rocks and survive temperatures as low as -100 degrees F during the long Antarctic winter night. Plants and animals exist on the tops of the tallest mountains, despite the thinness of the atmosphere and the cold temperatures. Further, the authors of The Urantia Book inform us that the Life Carriers can adapt life to exist even on a planet without an atmosphere. (563) There is little doubt that the Life Carriers could have implanted suitably adapted life on Mars, but did they? And if they did, what consequences would there be for us?
The scientific jury is still out on whether life existed on Mars. But if life existed there, and we agree with the origin of life described in The Urantia Book, then the Life Carriers placed it there. The question of whether or not life exists on Mars now cannot be answered until the next millennium. A sample of the Martian soil may be gathered and returned to Urantia as early as 2005, but there's no guarantee that a single sample from one location will contain the life we're looking for. I doubt that we'll be able to answer the existing life question until we can either send a sophisticated roving biological lab or mount a manned mission to Mars. The first option could probably be accomplished in a decade, but a manned mission may take several decades of preparation. So we are just going to have to wait--patiently, meanwhile using it as a character building exercise.
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