LIFE ON MARS
The NASA announcement on 28 September 2015 that water existed on Mars millions of years ago as salty oceans, and has been filmed flowing and sculpting the planet’s surface today, is one of the great scientific discoveries of the century. Flowing water is considered essential for life to flourish and vastly improves the prospect that it will have occurred on Mars – perhaps just as microorganisms that lived when the Red Planet was more hospitable or that even survive in hardy pockets today.
The revelation came on the same day that another red planet filled our skies amidst the prophecies of doom that such astronomical events often bring. But this celestial showpiece was the first of its kind in our age of mass communication and was snapped by millions on their mobile phones and posted on social media. That prelude to the news from Mars was simply a ‘blood Moon’ (see FT333:5) taking place while our satellite was at its closest possible distance and coinciding with a total lunar eclipse – a rare combination neatly appropriate for the historic revelations that followed.
Confirmation that water once existed as oceans on Mars and oozes from underground or sublimates today was no shock to anyone following the remarkable explorations of the Martian surface from orbit and the Curiosity laboratory that has been wandering the planet for several years. It has been sending back extraordinary ‘selfies’ as it probes the rock and soil and does spells of lengthy mountaineering. The geology of Mars has been unwrapped bit by bit and has pointed towards this day since what looked like flowing rivulets were filmed on mountain slopes in 2011.
That Mars had at least one salt-filled ocean, and quite possibly life within it, is of vast importance to our understanding of the Universe; it also increases our expectation that such worlds must be numerous if two formed independently in one small Solar System. There is also the bigger question of the Martian apocalypse that struck possible life inside that early ocean around 3.2 billion years ago, causing the water – then thousands of metres deep – to all but vanish or go underground, threatening the very existence of any organisms it spawned.
But, of course, for those interested in UFOs the questions go beyond such science. What does it mean for us to know that we may not be alone in this small corner of the Galaxy? Especially when we’re talking about distances that we have already bridged without any need for the science fiction concepts that we necessarily project onto aliens coming here from other solar systems.
The answer might not be what you were expecting, or that some were declaring within moments of the NASA announcement as vindication of everything from alien contact, government cover-ups, the fabled ‘face on Mars’ and pretty much every other simulacrum seen in photos from the surface of the Red Planet and interpreted on the net as levitating spoons or rabbit-like creatures.
These artefacts are all merely rock formations viewed in the harsher planetary light of Mars and via non-Earthly geological weathering processes within an alien atmosphere. This tricks the pattern-making centres of the brain into turning such formations into what we want them to be: so we see them as longed-for evidence that we are not alone in the Universe and hope that what is out there might arrive to enlighten us or save us from our human indiscretions like the Cosmic Cavalry.
Sadly not: any life on Mars today is constrained by the battering it takes from deadly Solar radiation, because billions of years ago Mars lost its protective magnetic shield – something which the Earth happily retains. Today’s Martian life will be no more