On February 18, NASA’s Perseverance Rover will parachute through thin Mars air, marking a new era in red planet exploration. Landing on the Jezero Crater, located in the direction of the Martian equator, will not be an easy feat. According to NASA, only about 40 percent of the missions sent to Mars have been successful. If it does, the way we think about life beyond the concept can change drastically. That’s why scientists believe that Jezero, a 28-mile-wide impact pit that used to be a lake, is an ideal place to look for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.
Once it lands, the diligent Martian will collect and store samples of rock and soil, which will eventually return to Earth. This is known as the “sample-return mission”, an extremely rare type of space exploration mission due to its cost. (Indeed, no other planetary sample return mission has ever come.) And a decade after Martin returned to Earth, scientists will decide to study the material to find out if there was ancient life on Mars.
Yet some scientists believe that these specimens could answer an even bigger question: Did life on Earth originate on Mars?
The idea that life began on Mars before migrating to Earth may seem like some distant scientific field, however, many famous scientists take the theory seriously. Here is also a name for the general idea of life starting somewhere else in space before migrating: Penspermia. It is a hypothesis that life exists elsewhere in the universe, and is distributed by asteroids and other space debris.
Clearly, the idea of life on Earth originating on Mars is not a dominant theory in the scientific community, but it seems to be catching on. And scientists like Gary Roukoun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, say it’s “clearly, in a way.” Makes noise.
Evidence begins with how young people revolve around space debris in the solar system. Indeed, we have evidence of the exchange of rocks from Mars to Earth. An estimated 159 – Martian meteorites have been found in Antarctica and around the world, according to the International Meteorological Association.
You can assign them to Mars based on the inclusion of gases such as “similar calculations of gases shown by a Viking spacecraft that exist in the Martian atmosphere,” Ruvkun said. In other words, the small air bubbles in these rocks reveal that they were artificial in the air of Mars. “So, there is an exchange between Mars and Earth – maybe more often moving from Mars to Earth because it goes ‘downhill’, going to Mars is ‘on the hill’, ‘speaking by gravity.’
But Ruvakun, whose field of expertise is genomics, is a time of cellular life in which he believes that life on Earth has come from somewhere else – Mars or maybe Mars is like any other planet.
Ruvaku notes that our genomes reveal the history of life, and provide clues about ancestors that predate us millions or even billions of years ago. “In our genomes, you can kind of see history, right?” He said. “RNA is the world that predicted the DNA world and it is very well supported by all kinds of current biology; therefore, we know the steps that evolution has taken to get where we are now.”
Thanks to advances in genomics, the understanding of LUCA (the last universal common incest) – meaning the organism from which all life on Earth evolved – has progressed greatly. By studying the genetics of all living things on Earth, scientists have a very good understanding of what the lone cell ancestor of every living thing (on Earth) looked like. They also know the timeline: all modern life forms evolve from a single-celled organism that lived about 3..9 billion years ago, just 200 million years after the first appearance of liquid water. In the grand scheme of the universe, it is not long.
And the last universal common ancestor was quite complex until the creations went. That leaves two possibilities, Ruvakun says. “Either the evolution to the full-on modern genome is really that simple, or the reason you see it so quickly is because we just ‘caught’ life, it didn’t start here.” He goes on to say, “I like the idea that we just caught it and that’s why it’s so fast, but I’m an outsider.”
If that’s the case, Eric Asfag is a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, he’s also an outlaw. “What do we know about the oldest rocks on Earth – including chemical evidence of carbon isotopes, traced back to about 4 billion years ago – tell us that life began” as soon as it became possible to be on Earth. “
If that’s the case, it makes an interesting example. “Let’s just say that whenever a planet cools down or where liquid water can start coming in, you expect life to grow.” “But just looking at our own solar system, which planet is likely to be the first? Almost Mars.”
This is because, Asfag said, Mars was formed before Earth. At the beginning of Mars’ history, when Mars was cold, Mars would have had a “hospitable” atmosphere before Earth.
“If life were to start anywhere, it could start earlier on Mars,” Asaf ugay said. “We don’t know what the need is – you know, if it needs something special like the existence of the moon or something specific to the earth – but just in terms of where the liquid water was, it’s been Mars.”
An interesting and convincing piece of evidence relates to how the material moved between the two neighboring planets. Indeed, the further you go back in time, the bigger the collision of rocks between Mars and Earth, Espeg said. Events of this effect could be huge “mountain-sized blocks of Mars” launched into space. Such large asteroids can serve as a home for fearless microorganisms.
“When you collide back with a planet, a small part of that mountain range is going to survive like debris on the surface.” “It took a while for the modeling to show that you can survive beyond what we call ‘ballistic panaspermia’ – shooting on one planet, knocking out bits, and ending up on another planet, but it’s possible, We think it happens, and the path goes from Mars to Earth, which is higher from Earth to Mars. “
Asfag added that surviving a voyage would not be a problem given the mass of vehicle for microorganisms – nor would it survive on a new, hospitable planet.
“Any form of early life will be resistant to what is happening at the end of the formation of the planet,” he said. “Any organism that exists is used for the horrific bombardment of effects, apart from this, from planet to planet.”
In other words, early microbial life would be better with a harsh environment and long periods of inactivity.
One of the Martian rocks found on Earth, AHH0000001, “could not have been warmer than degrees 0 degrees Celsius and could have survived,” Harvard professor Avi Loeb told Salon by email.
All three scientists believe that diligence will be able to add credibility to the theory of panspermia.
“If you go to Mars and find the remnants of life, which we hope to do with Perseverance Rover and these other Martian adventures, I personally wonder, if they are not associated with terrestrial life, I would be amazed.”
“The Mars sample is expected to be one of the first scientists to find DNA when it finally returns,” Roukoun said.
He said, “Landing something from Mars is a serious problem.
But an understanding of what this means for humans, and who we are and where we came from
“In that case, we would all be Martians,” Loeb said. He joked that “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” The self-help book would probably be more appropriate than we know.
Or maybe, as Ruvakun believes, we are from a different solar system, and life just spreads across the universe.
“The idea for me is that it all started on Earth, and that each solar system has its own little evolution of life, and it’s all independent – it just seems kind of dumb,” Ravakun said. “It’s much clearer to say, ‘No, it’s spreading, it’s spreading all over the universe, and we’ve got it, too. It didn’t start here.’ “And this moment during the epidemic – this is a great moment to move the idea forward. Maybe people will eventually believe it. “
