"The apparently barren lifeless planet that is Mars nowadays might have harbored microscopic life at some point in the distant past..." by Andrei Dargalin via sputniknews If these microbes did exist on Mars, however, their unique "eating habits" likely played a major role in the Red Planet becoming much cooler than it supposedly was before. The apparently barren lifeless planet that is Mars nowadays might have harbored microscopic life at some point in the distant past, researchers from France postulate. However, if they did exist, they were likely responsible for Mars turning into the desolate wasteland, with the study's lead author Boris Sauterey, a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University, saying that life "might actually commonly cause its own demise", according to AP. During the course of their research, Sauterey and his team sought to use climate and terrain models to evaluate Mars' habitability about 4 billion years in the past when it supposedly had water. The