Generally speaking, to adapt to changes in their environment, species would gradually evolve abilities that benefited their survival through long generations of reproduction and natural selection.
From that perspective, the X-0172 bacterium's ability to release spores and pheromones that induced dormancy in its host seemed perfectly reasonable.
However...
When these two abilities, or rather, these two gene sequences, appeared together in the X-0172 bacterium's already limited nucleus, it raised some intriguing questions.
If Professor Liu had not brought it up, Lu Zhou would probably never have noticed.
It really was a little too coincidental.
It was almost as though...
This bacterium had existed from the moment it first emerged to help a certain species, or several species, survive prolonged periods of extreme climate.
Of course, both Professor Liu and Lu Zhou were merely speculating. There was no direct evidence that the bacterium's genome had been artificially edited or modified.
But if that conjecture were confirmed, it would mean that millions, tens of millions, or even more years ago, a civilization that had at least reached the eve of the space age had existed on that fiery red planet.
The implications for Earth Civilization would undoubtedly be enormous.
The questions Professor Liu had uncovered while studying the X-0172 bacterium's genome remained purely speculative. Without any reliable means of verification, Lu Zhou simply recorded them in his work notes for the time being.
Bold conjecture and careful verification had always been among the most important principles of scientific research. He would not dismiss Professor Liu's idea simply because it sounded far-fetched, but neither would he rashly release any related information before gathering enough evidence.
The "Crawler" all-terrain survey rover he had deployed on Mars was currently examining the geological environment around the New Virginia spacecraft. If a civilization that had at least