Looks like there’s a lot of it.
used to work with a guy who would say “They’d Be Growing Tomatoes on Mars before that happens…” as a statement of improbability.
Turns out he may not be quite as outlandish as he thought if we get off our asses and start sending permanent colonists to Mars!
I think the Sahara desert has more water than that in it.
Just looked it up, the Sahara desert soil is about 4% on a really dry day.
Stupid ass Outer Space Treaty destroys any incentive to do that. One of the dumbest non-gun pieces of law/treaty ever written.
As a biologist, wouldn’t you like to check out any life they happened to find?
I’m a Macro Biologist, and specifically a macro Zoologist.
I could MAYBE get interested in cataloging macro-flora on an alien world, and I have certainly fantasized about being an explorer of an alien world filled with alien fauna.
But bacteria and viruses, and single-cell plants. Even those found on an alien planet and following different rules of life than terrestrial life does, would be interesting ONLY in the academic sense. I find micro organisms to be boring as hell!