Are Martians as hostile as those in Tim Burton’s 1996 movie “Mars Attacks?”
Is the red planet as desolate a no man’s land as the one facing Matt Damon’s Mark Watney, the stranded astronaut, in Ridley Scott’s latest release, “The Martian”?
Or is a Martian colonization plan by Elon Musk of “Space X” not as much pure hot air as it sounded?
Whichever, and knowing such conjecture is premature, we cannot but feel greatly excited that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has confirmed the existence of water on the fourth planet from the sun (the Earth is third), a prerequisite to the formation of life forms, most likely microorganisms.
The NASA confirmation came from images taken by a high-resolution camera onboard the NASA orbiter. Interestingly enough, these photos captured dark streaks, 100 meters or so long and several meters wide, which NASA said are left by large amounts of water that flow and get frozen by the change of seasons. Some scientists compare these watermarks with those made when a slab of concrete is dampened.
The latest discovery is one step further from the data sent by the Curiosity rover that landed on Gale Crater after a nearly two-year journey in August 2013. The data was a soil analysis that indicated about 2 percent of moisture was contained in it.
It also raises more questions and, with them, new possibilities. First, where does the water come from, since Mars’ atmosphere has only 2 percent of the density of the Earth and is composed of 95.3 percent carbon dioxide and 2.7 percent nitrogen?
Such an extremely low density certainly means no standing water exists because water evaporates as it forms. The Martian atmospheric composition compares with Earth’s 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen.
So where would two water-making elements, hydrogen and oxygen, come from? If oxygen forms in the chemical reactions triggered by powerful oxidizing salts that are contained in the Martian water, then what about hydrogen?
We know of the 2010 discovery of three anoxic life forms that do not rely on oxygen to breathe. Is it true that “life on Mars,” or the period when all environmental preconditions were in place for life as we know it to exist, has already passed? Would Musk’s crew only find relics and remains of life that preexist the humans’ visit?
All these questions will take time to answer but it is worth following because they can indicate where the human species came from and where we will go, the two ultimate questions for which we have tried without great success to find answers.
Furthermore, the Martian exploration is about a choice between accepting our inherent case of loneliness and an attempt to defy the pull of gravity and find life in or beyond our solar system. The latter usually prevails as shown by the latest finding.