Mars is freezing, rusty and haunted. We can not stop looking at it.

From all this exploration, a new story emerged as haunted – a planet once spattered by the oceans and dug by fast-flowing rivers, a world long warmed by an atmosphere, but something happened. and Mars lost its sparkling waters and air

Now there are only bare shorelines, empty filaments of tributaries, silent rocks and occasional wet spots on the flanks of the cliffs .. S & # 39; 39, there was a life here, tells the story, she died or went into hiding. [19659008] Instead of little green men, we are looking for microbes, that is, O.K. with me. I feel lonely and maybe the microbes will be what pbades for the cosmic company.

The Vikings, who landed on Mars in 1976, were famous for seeking life in Martian soil. And scientists are still arguing over whether any of the four experiments actually had a positive outcome.

The newly discovered underground lake, though it is confirmed by other observations, is only the latest in this parade of signs of hope that we could have neighbors somewhere.

Lately, a lot of solar system excitation where many of Jupiter's moons, Saturn and the other gaseous giants were found to be oceanic worlds hiding under ice shells. Some of them, like Europe's Jupiter and Saturn's Enceladus, seem to spill into the space of salty plumes of water and maybe even microbes.

NASA is planning a probe for Europa and many astrobiologists have pushed for a ride through Enceladus sprays or for a mission to send drones to explore Titan's methane lakes, the largest moon of Saturn. No one really knows what extraterrestrial life would look like or what she would need Like Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who has spent her entire life searching for the right thing. AND, like to say, we only know one example of life in the universe. It is the complex and complex network of organisms based on DNA on Earth.

"We are looking for No. 2", she said

We still do not know how or why life began on Earth or how widespread it is in the universe. This is an article of faith among astronomers and astrobiologists full of hope that, under good conditions, life will find a way.

In the next 50 years, we will probably know if Darwin's test tube produced another result in our own neck of the cosmos, in our own solar system. Mars missions have been running every two years for decades now.

We will not know for sure about Mars until someone walks and does exercises on it. I thought I would never live to see humans on the moon, but it was before SpaceX started doing things with rockets – coming back and landing in tail – that I had only seen in the old sci-fi movies.

We might not find monoliths or an extraterrestrial iPhone wandering around. We could only find dead microbes, or fossil prints of them. But even that would be exciting, to know that nature had already tried before.

But if they are alive – whatever that may mean – then a kind of spiritual and intellectual calculation will be upon us. Depending on the wild or familiar nature of these extraterrestrial creatures, we may have to decide whether our allegiance is to DNA-based organisms, or something even broader.

And we may have to decide whether microbes, or potential whole biospheres, have rights. If we decide to engage in the ultimate imperialist project, we could try to make Mars habitable for humans by heating the planet to melt the ice caps and release carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas – and the red soil. The result would be a thick atmosphere that would keep things hot and humid, causing intentional climate change.