is not crazy in astrobiology circles these days to have the opinion that the life that now envelops the Earth began on Mars, and then a pilgrim microbe was brought here on a wandering asteroid. We now know that the sky is an endless conveyor belt with cosmic debris of shiffling riffraff from planet to planet, even from star to star, personified by Oumuamua, the wandering comet of the outside of our solar system who sailed briskly through the planets last winter. In the fullness of time, everything happens everywhere.
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We Could All Be Martians , then, which could explain the apparently endless appeal of the red planet. The dream of exile to return to what could have been Eden. Elon Musk said that he wanted to die there, but he has not arrived yet going there right away.
I grew up terrified and curious about the place, having seen the previews of "Invaders of Mars." The movie showed a boy of my age, seeing a flying saucer come down under a hill, after which the inhabitants, including his parents, were kidnapped and turned into robots. My parents never let me see the whole movie.
He was paying homage to a part of a mythology that dated back to the beginning of the century, Mars being the dying house of a dying civilization of super intelligent beings – little green men – hanging on by canals bringing water from the poles. These visions stem from a misunderstanding of the work of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who, in 1877, thought he saw long and thin lines that he called canali (canals in Italian) which lacerated the surface of Mars. Percival Lowell, a mundane and astronomer took the concept seriously and began mapping what he thought were cities and canals on the planet
All that good sci-fi melodrama went away when the images space show the real planet, crater and dust. ] So, here are some concrete facts. Mars is about half the Earth, so the gravity is lower there – only a third of what is on Earth and so you could jump higher, ie if you could take a breathing. The Martian atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide and there is very little anyway, the pressure is less than one percent of the air pressure here. Ground temperatures range from 86 degrees Fahrenheit to -190 below. One day there are 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds a long time and a year is 687 Earth days.
Mars is red because it is rusty. Martian dust is full of iron oxide
It is, as would say a tourist brochure, a land of dramatic contrasts, with the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympia Mons, 15 miles high, and the Longest Canyon, Valles Marineris, 2500
Of any this exploration, a new story has emerged, just as haunted.It is a planet once spattered by the oceans and dug by fast-flowing rivers, a world warmed for a long time by an atmosphere.But it s & # 39; Something has gone by and Mars has lost its sparkling waters and air
Now there are only bare shorelines, empty filaments of tributaries, silent rocks and occasional wet spots on them. flanks of the cliffs.if there was a life here, tells the story, she died or went into hiding
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 passes 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 inject salty plumes of water and maybe even germs into space .
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.
