In a fairly phenomenal achievement, NASA recently managed to put some machines onto another planet. That doesn’t happen all that often and it really is remarkable. Take a look at this video and you will see, probably for the first time in your life, video footage of the surface of another planet.

Now that Perseverance is on Mars it will ‘search for signs of ancient microbial life, which will advance NASA’s quest to explore the past habitability of Mars. The rover has a drill to collect core samples of Martian rock and soil, then store them in sealed tubes for pickup by a future mission that would ferry them back to Earth for detailed analysis. Perseverance will also test technologies to help pave the way for future human exploration of Mars.'((https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/overview/))

And if you want three reasons why we should go to Mars (the science, the challenge & the future) you should watch this passionate explanation by Dr Robert Zubrin.

The basic theory is, is that Mars was once similar to earth in that, it had, we think, water on the planet for over a billion years. That is plenty long enough for organic life to have emerged, and if life is, as some think, a natural development of chemistry, then there should be, on Mars, evidence of these now-extinct forms of life. Martian fossils are probably in the wild dreams of some scientists right now.

It’s worth saying though that theories about the natural chemical emergence of life are not remotely what you might call, settled science.

“At least 3.7 billion years ago, a few simple molecules worked together to create something new. Then a few more. And, somehow, these snowballing combinations eventually produced the first very basic living organisms that would evolve and branch out to become all life on Earth. We don’t know the order it happened in; heck, we don’t even know when or where it happened.”¹

If fossils are found that will lend great weight to the idea that life, given the right conditions, is a general phenomenon and greatly boost the hopes of all those searching for evidence of life on other planets.

Alternatively, if no evidence is found on a planet, we’re pretty sure had water on its surface for a billion years then that gives weight to the idea that life involves some element of chance and we could be alone in the universe. No one yet seems to be considering the possibility of created life and given that the universe is impossibly big a lack of evidence on Mars will dent some optimism but it won’t stop anyone looking. Nor should it.

But surface fossils are not the only things scientists are looking for. There is still, apparently, water under the surface, so if we can drill down and collect some of that water and analyse it – there might be signs of microbial life in the water and it would be interesting to know if it has the same chemistry as life on earth. That would tell us whether life works in just one way or could be formed in a variety of ways.

I still think that all forms of life are much rarer than people seem to think but it’s possible that I may have to change my mind.

Related Reading

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• If Planet Nine exists, why has no one seen it?
• A Photographer Spent 12 Years Making This Milky Way Pic. It Will Crush Your Tiny Heart
• Astronomers Find an Astonishing ‘Super-Earth’ That’s Nearly as Old as The Universe
• What the Heavens Declared to a Young Astronomer

1. A New Chemical ‘Tree of The Origins of Life’ Reveals Our Possible Molecular Evolution [↩]