"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." - Matthew McConaughey, Interstellar

Login or signup to continue reading

We've been staring at the dirt for so long - at the cracked earth of our heating planet, at the churned mud and concrete dust on battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza, at the bloodied streets of the US amid its bitter cultural war - that it was easy to miss the news that makes us look up.

But there it was - NASA last week announced that its robotic rover, the aptly named Perseverance, had uncovered the strongest evidence yet of ancient life on Mars. Not proof. But leopard-like spots on a rock in Jezero Crater, similar to chemical compounds produced by microscopic life here on Earth, contained enough possibility to lift our gaze to the sky and wonder.

If life once flickered on Mars - even fleetingly before the planet's magnetic field shut down hundreds of millions of years ago, robbing it of its atmosphere - it also changes the story we tell about ourselves. It suggests life is not the rare accident we've always assumed, but something the universe can't help but create.

If it happened there, and here, why not elsewhere? The implications are profound - not just for traditional religions and creation myths around the world, but also for our view that everything revolves around us. That we are unique.

If Mars once hosted life, it couldn't hang on when the planet surrendered its atmosphere and water. On Earth, life has flourished, despite climatic changes and mass extinction events. Doesn't that make our responsibility heavier now that we are exhausting the fragile systems that have allowed us to evolve?

We now live in a world where awe and wonder are often regarded as an indulgence. But if questions like these don't make you pause and reflect, you've been staring at the ground for far too long.

The scientists who announced the recent discovery in Jezero Crater - once a river-fed lake before it evaporated - are proceeding cautiously. Several claims in recent years about the possibility of extraterrestrial life have turned out to be nothing more than minerals mimicking life, or data wrongly interpreted.

The only way of truly knowing is to retrieve the rocks and study them on Earth. But that now seems doubtful because of one man whose imagination and capacity for awe is........

© The Examiner