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A Redistricting “Arms Race”— What You Should Know

Life on Mars?

By Emily W

NASA scientists may have discovered evidence for life on Mars in a groundbreaking discovery announced on September 10th. In a press release, it was shared that the Mars rover Perseverance, launched during the first Trump presidency, collected a sample that could preserve evidence of ancient microbial life. 

Mankind has long wondered whether there is life beyond our world. One of the disciples of Epicurus (341–270 BCE), wrote in 50 BCE in the book “De rerum natura” (“On the Nature of Things”) that because there must be infinitely other worlds, there must be other life. This line of reasoning has led people to believe that there must be alien life, or at least ponder the possibility of it, for centuries.

But Mars is notable for the speculations surrounding it, particularly in popular culture. Novels and stories such as The War of the Worlds (1898) and A Princess of Mars (1912) are early examples of science fiction about the planet. In 1910, Thomas Edison created a silent film entitled "A Trip to Mars." While these fictionalizations may not be accurate to the kind of life scientists believe is or was once on Mars, they were popular for their humanoid aliens and extraterrestrial adventures.

The history of scientific discoveries about Mars and the public's reaction to them is at times complicated. Canals on the planet were described in 1877 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, which spurred some of that late 19th/early 20th Mars fervor that would continue for the coming century. Actually, he described "canali," which more closely translates to channels, but the mistake made people picture constructed pathways for water rather than naturally occurring ones. Later, it would be discovered that the "canali" Schiaparelli saw were merely an optical illusion to begin with. Despite these errors, scientists still pursued knowledge of the landscape and potential life of Mars. 

Since the canal "discovery," search for water on Mars has been almost synonymous with the search for life on the planet. In the 1920s through the midcentury, many scientists believed that polar ice caps were present on the planet, melting in the martian summer. But technological improvements leading to close-up photographs led many to question this conception, with a 1969 Time magazine article reporting, "Contemporary scientists have been far less convinced that Mars has water...They believe that the caps consist not of snow or ice but largely of frozen carbon dioxide, the principal constituent of the atmosphere of Mars.” In 1976, Carl Sagan (host of "Cosmos") helped design and manage Viking 1 and Viking 2, which touched down on Mars and transmitted photos and data. From that data, it was concluded from experiments adding nutrients that while they were consumed, it was a non-biological reaction.

The search has continued in the decades since. In 2017, NASA reported that "new findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars." At the time, astronaut and then-associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate John Grunsfeld stated, "“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected...This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.”

Perhaps the newfound supposed ancient microbial life discovered by NASA scientists will be the first confirmed life on the planet that humans have thought populated with humanoid life, then barren.