What the Perseverance Rover ’ s New Discovery Tells Us About the Chance of Ancient Life on Mars

It’s one of our great cosmic misfortunes that we entirely missed Mars’ golden age. About 3.5 billion years ago—during the first billion or so years of the solar system’s existence—the Red Planet was a blue planet, awash in ocean, seas, and rivers the way Earth is today. Ancient sedimentary basins, deltas and riverbeds are all that is left of Mars’ watery past—which ended when the planet’s magnetic field shut down, allowing the solar wind to claw the atmosphere away and the water to sputter into space. But a lot could have happened in those first one billion years—including the emergence of life. On Earth, life got started well before the planet’s billionth birthday, leading many exobiologists—scientists who study the possibility of extraterrestrial life—to believe that anywhere there is liquid water and the proper chemistry, biology can quickly take hold. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “Life on Earth got started very quickly,” astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) once told me. “That’s like walking into a casino in Vegas, pulling the handle and winning the jackpot. You say, ‘Well, either I’m very, very lucky or this is not a difficult bet.’” The Perseverance rover first landed on Mars in February 2021. And this week, as NASA reports, the rover collected new evidence that that bet may have paid ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news