Did NASA Just Find Life On Mars?
NASA’s Curiosity has seen something groundbreaking.
For millennia we have stared up at the Red Planet and dreamed of life flourishing on its tarnished surface. We have spent billions of dollars understanding this alluring planet and whether life has ever blossomed there. We have even found some tantalising clues like dried-up oceans, river beds and even methane emission from possible subterranean microbes. But, NASA’s Curiosity rover has just found possibly the strongest evidence for life on Mars yet. Has our search for E.T come to an end? Has NASA found evidence for life on Mars?
On the surface, what Curiosity found doesn’t seem all the exciting — a fine dust covering of carbon molecules on the Martian surface. After all, the vast majority of Mars’ atmosphere is carbon dioxide, so there is plenty of carbon to go around. However, this dust has the telltale signs of life. This carbon appears to be biogenic. In other words, it came from a living thing.
Biogenic carbon can be identified by the ratio of two isotopes, carbon 12 (which has 12 neutrons) and carbon 13 (which has 13 neutrons). Luckily for us Mars was made of the same interstellar dust cloud that Earth was made of. This means both planets have the same initial ratios of 12 to 13. But we living things have a preference. We use far more carbon 12…
