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A little water makes for a huge discovery

4 min read

On a day when President Obama spoke at the United Nations, met for the first time in a good while with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, the Syrian refugee crisis continued unabated, Pope Francis arrived back at the Vatican, and Trevor Noah took over Jon Stewart’s seat on “The Daily Show,” probably the most important story on Monday revolved around water.

And not water that was flooding someone’s neighborhood, was unsafe to drink or was falling from the sky in torrents. In fact, it wasn’t about water specifically, but the evidence that it might have once been present in a dusty, forbidding, far-off outpost.

The fact that the dusty, forbidding, far-off outpost in question is the surface of Mars gives the story its colossal significance. The revelation from NASA Monday that the surface of Mars shows signs that water might have recently been present on its surface due to the presence of hydrated salts is a first step toward answering the question of whether life has ever existed on Mars, or if it still might be there today.

Of course, that life will not be in the form of advanced, thinking creatures that will rocket to Earth and attack us, as they did in H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” Nor will this Martian life even land in Washington, D.C., and ask to be taken to our leader. Whatever life is, or was, on Mars is almost certainly in microbial form. But, nevertheless, it would be life, the first evidence of it outside our own planet, and an indication that it could be developing elsewhere. And making that determination would perhaps be the most significant scientific story of the 21st century so far.

Maybe of any century, for that matter.

During a Monday news conference, James L. Green of the planetary science division of NASA said that the discovery was “tremendously exciting.”

“We haven’t been able to answer the question, ‘Does life exist beyond Earth?’ But following the water is a critical element of that. We now have, I think, great opportunities in the right locations on Mars to thoroughly investigate that.”

Coincidentally, the announcement was made the same week the movie “The Martian” is arriving in theaters. It’s about an astronaut, played by Matt Damon, who is left behind on a mission to the red planet. Some prognosticators suggested that the discovery of water on Mars could give future travelers from Earth the means to survive there. And though we should think toward one day journeying to Mars, the prospect of astronauts actually making it there still seems a long, long ways off. The costs of traversing space and setting up a base there would be astronomical. And the trip would be interminable – it wouldn’t be the three days it took the Apollo crews to reach the moon. Instead, it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of seven months to get to Mars. Imagine being cooped up in a spaceship for that duration, landing on a remote planet that cannot now sustain human life, and then spending months returning to Earth. And that’s the best-case scenario. Over the course of that many months, it’s not hard to imagine mechanical difficulties that would scuttle the whole mission and endanger the lives of astronauts.

But even if humanity doesn’t plant a flag there anytime soon, the fact that there is strong evidence that liquid water has recently been on the surface of Mars should make us appreciate the ingenuity of our scientists and make our own problems and differences here on Earth seem a little more trivial in comparison.

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