The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the driest spots on Earth. Sometimes, you can't see any life at all.
智利的阿塔卡马沙漠是地球上最干旱的地方之一。有时，你根本看不到任何生命。

"As I was a kid those drives were very boring…because there was nothing to see."
“因为我还是个孩子，那些驱动器非常无聊......因为没什么好看的。”

Armando Azua-Bustos was born and raised in Atacama. He’s now an astrobiologist at the Spanish National Research Council's (CSIC) Center for Astrobiology.�
Armando Azua-Bustos在阿塔卡马出生并长大。他现在是西班牙国家研究委员会（CSIC）天体生物学中心的天体生物学家。

But he says, with closer inspection, life can be found. "There is life around, but you have to take a microscope to see microorganisms in those driest places in the Atacama."�

“周围有生命，但你必须用显微镜观察阿塔卡马最干燥地区的微生物。”

Then in 2015, and again in 2017, freak storms from the Pacific flooded the Atacama. Ten times the usual amount of rain fell, turning some of the driest parts of the desert into lagoons.

然后在2015年，再次在2017年，来自太平洋的怪异风暴淹没了阿塔卡马。通常的降雨量下降十倍，将沙漠中一些最干燥的部分变成了泻湖。

But the desert's hardy microbial life didn't exactly burst into bloom. "I start looking at the microscope and I couldn't see anything! That was surprising. I was expecting to see a zoo of little things moving all around. But I couldn't see anything."

“我开始看着显微镜，看不到任何东西！这真是令人惊讶。我期待看到一个动物园里的小东西四处移动。但我看不到任何东西。”

In fact, after sampling three of the newly submerged areas, his team found only a quarter of the microscopic species they'd previously isolated in the desert region—perhaps, he says, because the water killed the rest, through a process called 'osmotic shock.' "The cell doesn't have the mechanisms to get all the water that is going into the cell to get it out, so they start inflating like a small balloon until they burst out."

实际上，在对三个新淹没区域进行采样后，他的团队发现他们之前在沙漠地区分离出的微观物种中只有四分之一 - 或许，他说，因为水通过一个叫做“渗透”的过程杀死了其余部分。休克。' “细胞没有机制让所有进入细胞的水都被排出体外，所以它们就像一个小气球一样开始膨胀，直到它们爆发出去。”

The results are in the journal Scientific Reports. [A. Azua-Bustos et al, Unprecedented rains decimate surface microbial communities in the hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert]

结果发表在科学报告期刊上。 [一个。 Azua-Bustos等人，前所未有的降雨使阿塔卡马沙漠超辐射核心的表层微生物群落减少

The microbial massacre should serve as a cautionary tale, he says, as we search for similar dry-adapted lifeforms on Mars. Because several of the life-detecting experiments performed by the Viking landers involved—you guessed it—adding water. And it would be tragic if we killed the first extraterrestrial life we found.

他说，当我们在火星上寻找类似的干燥适应生命形态时，微生物大屠杀应该成为一个警示故事。因为Viking着陆器所进行的一些生命探测实验 - 你猜对了 - 加水。如果我们杀死了我们发现的第一个外星生命，那将是悲惨的。

—Christopher Intagliata�

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]