Last week was difficult. The terrible news felt like an avalanche. I had the same sense of despair as many others. Yet there in the midst of it all, was one news item that on any other day would would have risen to the front pages and stayed there.
We may have found evidence of life on Mars.
In its way, that discovery actually has bearing for us all as we deal personally with these difficult times.
The science behind the news is remarkable. The Perseverance rover, a mobile science lab that’s been driving around Mars for years, detected two kinds of minerals, both of which on Earth are associated with biochemistry. The first is called Viviante and it’s produced in wet environments with lots of decaying organic stuff. The second mineral is called Greigite and it’s associated with microbes that use sulfur in their various chemical shenanigans. Perseverance found both at a site in Jezero Crater which was once the bottom of a large lake (yeah, billions of years ago Mars was a “blue” watery world).
Finding these minerals, so closely associated with life, in the exact kind of place where you’d expect life … well… that adds up to exciting evidence for life.
It's not conclusive evidence. No one is making that claim. It is what we in the biz call a potential biosignature and a really good one. This is a big step in determining if life is a fluke that only happened once on Earth or if it is an easy miracle that the Universe creates all the time.
So why is this news relevant in the face of all the horrible news last week? First, it’s a reminder of what human beings can do when they work together. What sets us apart from all the other animals on the planet is our ability to imagine a dream and then work together to make that dream real. It took thousands of people all with the same dream to get Perseverance to Mars and then send back a record of that distant planet’s billion-year-old past. When we see the worst in humans, like we did last week, we can also remember what’s best in us.
Finally, the possibility that Mars once had life can remind us that the Universe has many, many stories in it. Ours is just one. From that we can, perhaps, take comfort in knowing that we are part of something much larger and grander than this small and particular moment of history.
— Adam Frank 🚀
