The Martian Torture Chamber

That would certainly make terra forming a bit easier should they ever decide to pollute Mars with Earth seed. Simply lob a couple lichen filled canisters from space and wait a few thousand years.

^ But then we might never be certain about the existence of native Martians.

^At some point preservation won't be a primary concern. At some point real estate will be more important than a few martian amoebas or lichen. I'm not saying we should start shooting today by any means. I just think we'll have to come to the realization of a very real fact. We'll outgrow our planet some day and need life on other extraterrestrial bodies to sustain our growth. No matter where we go in the universe, we'll be polluting and possibly killing off a native species. It's all a matter of what's more important to you, a martian wooly bear or human existence. I don't think the image of man finding habitable planets is a very real one. I think we'll have to make them our own to a more real degree than was envisioned in scifi.

No doubt they will eventually throw in the hardiest of them all the water bear, tardigrade.

"Tardigrades are polyextremophiles and are able to survive in extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal. Some can survive temperatures of -273°C, close to absolute zero, temperatures as high as 151 °C (303 °F), 1,000 times more radiation than other animals such as humans, more than a century without water, and even the vacuum of space. In September 2007, tardigrades were taken into low Earth orbit on the FOTON-M3 mission and for 10 days were exposed to the vacuum of space. After they were returned to Earth, it was discovered that many of them survived and laid eggs that hatched normally, making these the only animals shown to be able to survive the vacuum of space."

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

Or how about the nematode, they survive the Columbia Space Shuttle reentry disaster.

I'm not even sure it would take thousands of years to terriform via biology.

1) Like kudzu in the south or rabbits in Australia, when there are no natural preditors, life expands exponentially. L lichen that spreads 2' a year will in its hundereth year cover square miles of planet.

2) Man is involved. Consider the speed of natural selection against the speed of creating a new dog breed.

3) Explore-tation. Mars is a pretty blank slate. That CO2 atmosphere is ripe for exploiting. Anything that likes the cold and metabolizies CO2 is going to thrive that level to an equilibrium, brining things ever closer to a balance with each organism.

4) Life = heat. Heat = speed. Enough said.

So, shoot away. We know life on Mars, if there, is small and of litle consequence. Putting life on Mars, however, is not just good for man, but good for LIFE. Earth is a big rock away from lifelessness. Seeding other planets might not make them habitable for man before his extinction, but still allows LIFE to do what LIFE does, grow and breed, in a James Lovelock kind of way.

Just a thought, if there were martian lichens why havn't they populated the planet as demonstrated Oakspar's point #1. If it somehow lacked speed, etc, natural selection would have weeded them out while the fast growing ones survived.....

counclusion: No life on mars