Definitive evidence of past or present extraterrestrial life, including Martians, has been annoyingly elusive. Some researchers, however, are tackling the alien question from a different perspective: Could life as we know it survive the Red Planet’s environment as it exists today?

It turns out that some of Earth’s most tenacious microorganisms just might. In the latest of such experiments, researchers subjected the extremophile Haloferax volcanii to hellish, potential Mars-like conditions and found that the tough mother-hecker can still grow. These results bolster the idea that life can exist on our planetary neighbor and point scientists searching for cellular Martians in new directions.

Researchers have grown microbes under harsh Mars-like conditions before, such as high salt concentrations or low pressure. Sometimes, these microbes get subjected to multiple conditions at the same time, though typically for just hours or days.…