Aqua Vitae
So apparently a couple billion years ago, it used to rain on Mars.
Given that the combo of water and atmosphere seems to be pretty handy in making things grow, I’m holding out hope that we’re gonna find something organic over there. It’d be entirely awesome (in the original sense of the word, not like socks and hot dogs) if we found little lifey bits elsewhere in our solar system. Now, I don’t think the discovery of such a thing means we’re all Martians or some such, as I think the theory of panspermia is fairly implausible. But it does spark the imagination a bit, doesn’t it?
Don’t bother with shiny civilizations or telepathic greys. Start simple. Just ponder the idea of long-dead forests on Mars, the evidence of which has long since been buried under billions of years of red dust. Just forests, eerie virgin forests with maybe a bug or two skittering about. Or perhaps a Martian riverscape, with clear water pouring over red rocks, dimly sparkling in the dull sunlight while two moons whizz by overhead. Imagine those bleak rocky landscapes in the NASA panoramas, and then stick some cacti on them. Really ponder it.
Nifty, huh?
I know, I know. It’s just rain. But if our planet is anything to compare by, rain matters an awful lot.
July 6, 2008 at 8:20 pm
It’s so gratifying to see that I taught you well. You are absolutely right, of course. NASA is not trying to find Martinians of the LGM variety. Begin with the basic requirement for life: liquid water. Which I absolutely believe will be found in your lifetime. Then look for organic compounds (a.k.a. the building blocks of life.) Then look for life – little, simple stuff. Like the microbes that make up 90% of the biomass on this planet, only we never think about them cuz they’re too little for us egocentric multicellular eukaryotes to care about. Did you know that life has been found in ice, in rocks, 1.6 miles under the earth’s surface, in nuclear reactors, in water so acidic it would kill you, in temperatures so high you’d only look tasty on a seafood buffet, and even alive on spacecraft returning from the Moon (yes, we took them with us, and they survived in the cold vacuum of space only to return and live happily ever after!). How cool is that???