Is There Life On Mars?
Last Thursday evening millions of us around Planet Earth sat and watched with bated breath as NASA landed their latest technological marvel on the surface of Mars. There has been a rover on the surface of Mars since before I was born, so to me seeing images of the surface of the Red Planet has almost become normal; but it’s watching moments like this that I remember quite how extraordinary the achievement is. Simply put, the images we have since seen from Perseverance are breathtaking. Those sights have never been seen by any humans before us, no rover has ever been into the Jezero crater and now we have HD photos, videos and sound recordings of it visible to all. There is a profoundness to looking at those pictures, seeing the detail in the rocks and the cool blue of the sun. This is another planet. A planet steeped in myth and mystery. A small orange dot in our night sky. And we have a plucky little rover giving us a window into it.
Perseverance is on a mission to analyse the geology of Mars to a new level of detail. Landing in the Jezero crater, after satellite imagery identified that it was likely an ancient lakebed of liquid water. This rover isn’t alone though, it is accompanied by Ingenuity, a small helicopter/drone which is aiming to be the first ever flight on another world. However, the most exciting mission of Perseverance to many of us is its focus on astrobiology — looking for signs of life, past or present. It will be drilling into the rocks, analysing the samples and — for some of the most interesting — packing them up and leaving them on the surface to potentially be collected and returned to Earth in a future mission. Just writing those sentences gives me a childish giddiness, the type I used to get watching Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox shows growing up. Martians, little green men and grey aliens have become ubiquitous icons of the Sci-Fi genre for decades. Now we’re really looking for them — though I highly doubt we’ll find any humanoid lifeforms on Mars. The point of this exercise isn’t to find some subsurface colony of hyper-intelligent little creatures. The purpose is to unearth (or unmars I suppose) the history of the Red Planet, to learn what it used to be like when it had liquid water and discover whether that liquid water gave way to microscopic life — the type that all life on Earth originates from, back in the primordial soup around hydrothermal vents in our own oceans. We have plenty more challenges to face here at home of course but, space is a frontier of opportunity, challenge and fascination that our human desire to question and explore just can’t resist. I even considered studying Astrophysics at university and many kids dream of being astronauts. It’s missions like these that inspire all of us to dream of what’s up there.
Perseverance however made me ponder another question: What would we do if we discovered life? There would of course be the inevitable deniers, the cultists claiming to have been abducted and the conspiracists claiming that government bodies are already aliens in disguise, but what about our view of ourselves?
Humanity has long held an ego of our own specialness. Before astronomers managed to understand our solar system the general belief of most civilisations was that everything revolved around the Earth. Then there is our depiction of aliens — they tend to have two arms, two legs, large brains and large eyes — all the features of ourselves that we consider to be what makes us special, our intelligence and our ability to understand or “see”. The reality is that most likely if we were to discover intelligent life elsewhere it would bear barely any resemblance to ourselves.
One of my favourite paradoxes is the Fermi paradox. Simply put it asks: If our universe is so expansive and life is so common, where are all the aliens? It’s an interesting conundrum. Our understanding of the origins of life comes purely from Earth, which already limits our research as we have only one piece of data to analyse. Yet it seems almost certain that the conditions that gave rise to Earth’s life are repeated millions of times across our galaxy, let alone the enormity of the observable universe. So where are all the aliens? Why isn’t the sky teeming with life? Teeming with the relics of ancient civilisations? Obviously we don’t know, hence why it’s a paradox but, if Perseverance were to find evidence of life on Mars it purely adds more evidence to the idea that aliens should be everywhere. We’d then have 2 separate (maybe, I know some theorise life could’ve landed on earth from a meteor) instances of life developing in the same solar system! Then add on the potential that many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn seem to have subsurface liquid oceans on worlds such as Europa, Titan, Enceladus and Ganymede and we have a case for even more life in our solar system.
So, I return to my question: How would the discovery of life change our view of ourselves?
Suddenly we’d be able to gaze up at the night sky and really be able to believe that each of those specks of light could be hiding life, and with the vast number of potential candidates, surely at least one could be intelligent enough to be gazing back wondering the same question. It would begin to lower the egotistical nature of our species — something that could also go a long way in helping us realise the importance of all the other life we share our home with. Suddenly we’re not so special and as Carl Sagan famously said, we’re simply “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. It could help us stop our infighting — not because there could be a Thanos up there but because we’re all Terrans, Earthlings or Solborn like every other species on Earth. We are one planet. One live planet in an endless abyss of other live planets.
Alright, I might have got a bit profound there, let’s bring it back down to Earth (pun fully intended). Perseverance is an astonishing achievement of human ingenuity and engineering. It is the next stepping stone paving the way for landing a human on another planet. Thinking about space is such a freeing and terrifying hobby of mine, it inspires with the endless possibilities and makes me feel pointless in the vastness of space. If life were found it would provoke some radical changes in many view points; It would provide greater scientific understanding of our own origins and reason to further study other worlds. Yet it would also raise ethical questions of how to treat extraterrestrial microbes and bring new questions to many religious beliefs due to the change of focus on humans and Earth which would overtime no doubt affect our cultures. It would be a milestone, one that I firmly believe will happen at some point, whether in our own solar system or beyond.
