Could there actually be life on the moon?

Most people don’t really believe in the existence of moon aliens. And, while little green humanoid creatures probably aren’t roaming around the moon, that doesn’t mean there’s no life up there at all.

"One of the most striking things our team has found is that, given recent research on the ranges in which certain microbial life can survive, there may be potentially habitable niches for such life in relatively protected areas on some airless bodies," Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, recently told Space.com.

When NASA’s Artemis 3 astronauts land on the moon (hopefully by 2025), they’ll be doing more fieldwork to see if it’s habitable for any kind of life. The mission will go to the moon’s Polar Exploration Zone at its south pole, where NASA has figured out 13 possible landing sites.

New research suggests that when humans visited the moon between 1969 and 1972, the microbes that had tagged along on the trip with them from Earth might’ve ended up surviving on the lunar surface. We’re talking about germs and bacteria, essentially. If these small organisms managed to survive, then maybe the moon could sustain at least some forms of life. Specifically, the lunar south pole could have the conditions necessary to keep something alive. We know that there’s ice inside the craters there, and parts of the area never get exposed to any of the sun’s harmful radiation.

"Importantly, recent research on the survivability of microbes exposed to conditions like those on parts of the lunar surface indicate surprising resilience of numerous microorganisms to such conditions," Saxena wrote in recent work. Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly which types of organisms might survive on the moon.

Even if there aren’t microbes still up there from earlier lunar missions, as humans continue to make trips to the moon, we could soon start to see colonies of microbes survive and thrive on the moon.