• Question: Could plants grow on other planets , if so what plants and what planet ?

    Asked by diddyman13 to Amelia, Izzy, Sarah on 19 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 19 Mar 2014:


      Awesome question! I think this is what a lot of people want to find out!

      So within the solar system I think Mars is the most likely planet to contain life, simply because some of the other planets such as Jupiter (which is mainly just a ball of hydrogen) don’t have a rocky surface where plants could grow.

      If there were plants on other plants in the past I think they’d probably be different to plants we see on earth just simply because they evolved separately! However if we were going to try and grow plants on Mars I’d probably pick plants which were good at growing in drought conditions because there is no liquid water there, so we’d have to solve that problem before trying to grow plants, so plants which are efficient at water use would be good!

      I’m by no means an expert though as I study plants on the earth 😛 It’s a pretty exciting concept and something that might get researched in the planned Mars mission in a few years time!

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 19 Mar 2014:


      Plants on earth evolved to live in our atmosphere and under our gravity. If you tried putting them on another planet they would probably not survive because the conditions will be too different. If there is a planet somewhere in the universe that matches us, maybe our plants could grow there.

      If we were to build a greenhouse on another planet with similar gravity and control the air and temperature, maybe we could get some of our plants growing.

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 19 Mar 2014:


      The plants on our earth are especially adapted only to live here under these exact conditions. Some plants can’t even survive if you take them to a new country let alone a new planet! This means that, unless we found a planet with the exact same conditions as earth, none of our earth plants would be able to survive. At the moment we don’t know of another planet with plants on, but people are still looking…

      If plants did grow on another planet they would likely be very different to out plants as the conditions would be so different. However, here on earth we do have bacteria called extremeophiles that can live in crazy places like inside volcanoes! Bacteria like this may be able to survive on other planets, and given millions of years they could evolve into plants!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 20 Mar 2014:


      Whilst not another planet, plants have been grown as experiments on space stations in zero gravity 😀

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