Imagine the frenzy if we even found the tip of some kind of plant/fungus organism growth. It would be potentially the biggest discovery in human history.
If you plot the hopes for life on Mars through the modern era, it really starts to look like a "god of the gaps" situation. Apparent artificial canals dug and maintained by an advanced civilization give way to mere vegetation covering the surface, which gives way to microbial life, which gives way to fossils of extinct life buried somewhere under the soil... Each time life on Mars isn't found, believers posit that it might still be in some yet smaller crack we haven't looked in yet.
In $FAVORITE_COUNTRY, they dig and find even older: "we're the best!"
In $OTHER_COUNTRY the dig and find nothing: "we must have been the first to invent Wi-Fi!"
:-P
So I imagine, if there was evidence for life on Mars, before the habitability went sideways, then it would likely be many feet deeper than we ever dug.
I'm not holding my breathe, because the likelihood is pretty small, as all this happened 3.6 billion years ago, but if we did find undisputable evidence of civilization, it would be game changing.
I simply hope it isn't Prothean ruins and a map to the nearest Mass Relay, cause what comes next is a bad time.
It’s highly likely you’re right and I acknowledge that, but it’s not an absolutely certainty that it would have taken as much time for life and possibly civilization on other planets as it did here on Earth
They could have had a more rapid development cycle for whatever reason. We simply don’t know definitively
That is equivalent to driving from SF to San Jose and recording what you see out the window if your car.
Good question. I would like to spend $10B searching, which amounts to a one time cost of about $30/American.
Historically, investments in NASA have a very good return, since building cutting edge aerospace tends to directly percolate into the economy. Not to mention the technological advancement it will likely spur.
> While life “follows the water” in the desert, it is scattered and its distribution follows the subtle reaches of the fog or that of invisible aquifers, which are dictated by complex geographical and topographical parameters. It can be abundant in a localized patch (millimeters to a few hundreds of meters in size) and then disappear for many kilometers. It can be present on one wall of a small gully and absent from the opposite wall only ten centimeters away. Keys to finding microscopic life are critical at all scales. They are found at the megascale (regional geology, morphology, topography, and climatology); at the mesoscale (a slope, a rock, a type of soil, a specific size of sediment); and at the microscale (a crack in a rock, pore and joint spaces, grain translucence). The success of finding life while exploring the desert on foot depends on integrating all of this information, a task which robotic exploration needs to achieve as well.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...