NASA May Have Found Evidence of Past Life on Mars

Scientists, science fiction writers and David Bowie alike have all wondered about the possibility of extraterrestrial life on the next planet over. But the question of life on Mars, or the lack thereof, is one where other obstacles have arisen, from the challenge of getting missions there to the technology required to explore the Red Planet’s history. The more missions that humanity sends there, though, the better the odds are of a major discovery — and we seem to be far closer to one now than ever before.

That, at least, is the biggest takeaway from a recent NASA announcement. In it, acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy called the discovery “the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars.”

A paper published this month in Nature goes into more detail about the discoveries made by the Mars rover Perseverance in and around Jezero Crater. Among the findings there were mineral deposits that echoed similar deposits which, as the authors note, “provide some of the earliest chemical evidence for life on Earth.” In other words, what the rover found are minerals which “are thought to represent potential biosignatures in the search for life on Mars.”

In a statement, Duffy hailed these findings as a potential breakthrough. “The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” he said.

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Evidence of organic life on Mars doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the only explanation for what Perseverance found. “Getting such a significant finding as a potential biosignature on Mars into a peer-reviewed publication is a crucial step in the scientific process because it ensures the rigor, validity and significance of our results,” said NASA scientist Katie Stack Morgan in a statement. “And while abiotic explanations for what we see at Bright Angel are less likely given the paper’s findings, we cannot rule them out.” But for now, these findings are a tantalizing glimpse of our solar system’s history.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…