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Most folks that want to see Mars inhabited would be hoping for this type of outcome.
Science 9 October 2015:
Vol. 350 no. 6257 p. 167
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad0902
Marjorie A. Chan
The martian lake chronicles (click here)
Ray Bradbury's science-fictional archaeologist character, Hinkston, in The Martian Chronicles, thought: “Well, I think I'd rearrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road, and every lake, and even an ocean, I'd do so. Then by some vast crowd hypnosis I'd convince everyone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.” Hinkston may have his way without the need for hypnosis, because the latest discoveries on Mars geology, reported in this issue on page 10.1126/science.aac7575 by Grotzinger et al. (1), reveal records of lakes and other environments that remarkably resemble Earth. These findings provide “a good read” through the stratigraphic record of Mars, with tales of moving sand and pebble grains from ancient rivers to past lakes....
But, reality is very different. Don't expect the bacteria entered into Mar's climate to remain the same either. I saw the movie "Martian" (click here). NASA has lessons on where Matt Damon was left behind (click here) And while all this is a lot of fun, the habitats and vehicles are some very expensive items. Why doesn't NASA come up with a fictitious budget for "Martian" homeland. I would really like to see that.
October 11, 2015
By Nicola Twilley
...NASA had an answer for that one, too. (click here) “We know there’s life on Mars already because we sent it there,” John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a press conference on Monday. It is a Faustian condition of space exploration that we cannot search for life on alien planets without bringing along very small amounts of very small Earth life. This process is known as forward contamination, and minimizing, if not preventing, its occurrence is the responsibility of Cassie Conley, a plant biologist who has served as NASA’s planetary-protection officer since 2006. “It’s basic common sense,” Conley told me. “We have to be careful not to blind ourselves with Earth life, the same way you can’t see the stars when the sun is out.”
In an ideal universe, the crewless spacecraft that we send to Mars would be sterile. (Humans are, by definition, contaminants.) In reality, for both technical and economic reasons, they are not. Rather, they are cleaned up enough to satisfy the Committee on Space Research, the international body that sets the ground rules for extraterrestrial exploration. The relevant COSPAR standard was conceived back in the nineteen-fifties, and it relies on an estimate of how likely Earth organisms are to survive on Mars. But, given how little scientists knew about conditions on the red planet at the time, Conley said, it “was pretty much a case of sticking their fingers in the air and saying ‘Hmmm.’ ” Still, the discussions were contentious, and they dragged on for more than a decade. Eventually, the committee settled on what it considered an acceptable level of contamination risk: one in a thousand. In other words, humanity must limit itself to one chance in a thousand of seeding another planet with terrestrial life in the course of exploring it....
