Today, Mars is a deserted land. It was a dusty, rough desert filled with volcanoes. There is no clear life on its surface. But for decades, scientists have gone to find evidence of a lost Mars star, a star that looks more like Earth than a hotell.
Vox newspaper quoted NASA an economist-in-chief, Lindsay Hays, as saying: You can see evidence of life on Mars 4 billion years ago. You will see things that look like the ruins of a large river basin, seeing evidence of lakes in the past. That makes the imagination develop. There may be clouds in the atmosphere. The star's surface of the red planet may already be very beautiful. The exploration ship missions to Mars including landing ships, orbs and autonomous robots have added additional ground evidence that this waterful past is likely to happen on the Red planet.
And that is the most interesting thing for an astronomer like Hays: Where there is water, there can be life. She said that one of the common characteristics of life is water. There is life without light, life exists without oxygen. But no life exists without water. If there was water on the surface of ancient Mars, there might be life in that water area.
The Mars rover Perseverance - NASA's latest rover - landed on the red planet in 2021 and is currently exploring an ancient dry river basin. Hope is some of the microorganisms that once lived and died billions of years ago that are preserved in its sedimentary layers.
Perseverance is searching for rock models to bring back to Earth for precision research purposes; they will become the first Martian rock models to return to Earth by a scientific mission.
What would happen if evidence of past life on Mars were confirmed? Finding life on Mars could help us understand how life originated in the universe.
The reason Im interested in finding life on Mars is to explore the correlation with life on Earth, Hays explained.
Any two people are related to each other and to the same ancestors if looking back long enough in their family tree. But this is true in all life. There is a common advance civilization involving humans with starches, starches with frogs, frogs with insects, insects with fungal spores. All life on Earth is related to each other, through a final universal common ancestor (or LUCA). Named LUCA by scientists, the last common ancestor of the universe is believed to be a single-celled animal with DNA that plays a role as the foundation for all forms of life.
For Ms. Hays, that relationship raises a big question: When we know that all life on this planet seems to be related, what will life on another planet be like?
Although not guaranteed, Perseverance could find evidence of past life on Mars where scientists could determine whether it has a common ancestor with life on Earth.
All life on Earth has certain similarities such as using DNA/RNA to store information and most of the amino acids are similar in their proteins, according to Hays. If life on Mars has these similarities in common, it may be related to life on Earth.
If life on Earth and Mars has a common ancestor, that would mean life could start on one of the planets and then somehow be transported to another (perhaps by meteorite). Maybe life did not start on Earth but instead on Mars or even somewhere else in space.
But if life on Mars seems very different from life on Earth, it could mean life is such a basic process of the universe that you can have two different events that create life in the same solar System, Hays said. That means life may be more common in the universe than what we suspect.
But the reality is still: Mars is an extremely important place in the solar System to answer these questions.
