The most Martian place on Earth | Armando Azua-Bustos

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2017

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

How can you study Mars without a spaceship? Head to the most Martian place on Earth -- the Atacama Desert in Chile. Astrobiologist Armando Azua-Bustos grew up in this vast, arid landscape and now studies the rare life forms that have adapted to survive there, some in areas with no reported rainfall for the past 400 years. Explore the possibility of finding life elsewhere in the universe without leaving the planet with this quick, funny talk.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features astrobiologist Armando Azua Bustos, recorded live at TED 2017.
0:09.3	This is a picture of a sunset in Mars, taken by NASA's Curiosity rover in 2013. Mars is a vertical planet, flooded with high levels of UV radiation and extremely dry.
0:22.6	In fact, Mars is considered to be too dry for life as we know it.
0:27.6	I'm an astrobiologist. I try to understand the origin of life on Earth
0:31.6	and the possibilities of finding life elsewhere in the universe.
0:35.6	People sometimes ask me,
0:37.7	how can you be an astrobiologist if you don't have your own spaceship?
0:42.4	Well, what I do is that I study life in those environments on Earth
0:46.5	that most closely resemble other interesting places in the universe.
0:51.0	All life on Earth require water.
0:53.5	So in my case, I focus in the intimate relationship between water and life
0:57.1	in order to understand we could find life in a planet as dry as Mars.
1:03.2	But since I do not have the $2.5 billion to send my own robot to Mars,
1:09.2	I studied the most merchant place on Earth, the Atacama Desert.
1:13.7	Located in northern Chile, it is the oldest and driest desert on Earth.
1:18.9	To give you an idea on how dry it is, consider here in Vancouver rains over 1,000 millimeters
1:24.7	of rain every year.
1:26.8	In the Atacama, there are places with no reported rains
1:30.3	in the last 400 years.
1:33.3	How do I know this?
1:35.3	Well, because I was born and raised in the Takama.
1:40.3	So I had a unique advantage when I started studying this desert.
	...

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