Is There Life on Mars?

Natural Bridge Canyon, Death Valley National Park, CA
Canon PowerShot SX40 HS

It's not too hard to imagine this shot was taken by a Mars rover, is it?

This canyon has a lot of evidence of erosion by water, including chutes in the rocks carved out by waterfalls and of course the natural bridge that gives the canyon its name.  Hiking this canyon is like hiking back in time.  It's impossible to not try to imagine what it would have been like when water was more plentiful here.  It's also easy to imagine you're on another world entirely.

I was just reading about how some scientists now believe life started on Mars.  They're quite serious about this and it's not as crazy as it sounds.  The gist of it is that the Earth of 3.5 billion years ago or so, when life is suspected of having started, wasn't a place that would have been conducive to stringing together the right chemicals that would become the early historical stages of life.  The planet would have been covered completely in water after having been bombarded for millions of years by space debris, some of which came from Mars which itself was being bombarded.  Life probably started in a shallow pool, but a planet covered in ocean obviously can't have any pools.  Mars, on the other hand, had such things.  A meteorite or volcanic activity might have shot rocks from Mars into space (something that can happen on Mars because of its lower gravity) and those rocks might have had these early microorganisms as stowaways and one or more of these rocks might have found its way to Earth where it found the ocean and atmosphere was to its liking.  Mars would have been the place where the early complex processes of producing RNA would have occurred with natural selection driving everything once the microbes got to Earth.  That's the abbreviated I'm-not-an-expert-I-just-read-it-in-a-book version, anyway.

Science is cool.

Photo selection inspired by Geogypsy's Foto Friday Fun 109, photo #168.