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...humans to the surface of Mars, even the 300,000 spores rule goes (almost literally) out of the window. There are billions of microbes living on your skin, and also on the skin of even the best-scrubbed Mars astronaut. As soon as an airlock is flushed, or a spacesuit that has been handled by a human touches the martian soil, some of these bugs will be out there, released...

...humans, favour a metabolism (life-supporting processes) centred around oxygen: we breathe in this molecule and use it to oxidise molecules such as glucose (a type of reduction-oxidation reaction, or ‘redox’ for short). Plants are capable of photosynthesis, which means using light as a source of energy. Even though you may be familiar with these types of metabolisms,...