A renowned international team of researchers led by Benton Clark from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, recently looked into one of the key questions in astrobiology—whether life is likely to have arisen on Mars. Their analysis, published in the journal Life, is the most comprehensive assessment of that question I’ve seen to date, and is based not only on current thinking about how life originates, but also on the latest results from the Mars rover investigations.
Their conclusion: The chances that life arose on Mars are at least as high as they were on Earth, because the requirements—as we currently understand them—were all there, including liquid water, organic compounds, essential elements and minerals, and access to energy sources.
The authors give several reasons why the chances of life starting up on the Red Planet might actually have been higher than on Earth: (1) Mars should have received a higher influx of organic material from impacting asteroids and comets; (2) Sulfur, an important element for biology, is more common on Mars; (3) Mars had a head-start for the origin of life, because Earth was hit by a large impactor that created the Moon just 20 to 100 million years after our planet formed, which certainly sterilized the surface; (4) Mars experienced many wet-dry and freeze-thaw cycles, which are critical for concentrating organic compounds. In fact, these cycles were likely more common on the Red Planet early in its history. While 95 percent of Earth’s land was submerged under oceans, only five percent of Mars was, meaning that Mars would have had three times more land area despite its smaller size.
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