Life on Mars? It Remains a Tantalizing Topic for Scientific Study
What if we aren’t alone in the universe? People have been speculating about the possibility of alien life forms at least since Lucian’s A True Story, some 1,800 years ago. In modern times, much of that has centered on our near neighbor Mars.
Sometimes those life forms are dangerous, probably never more so than in the various versions of The War of the Worlds. Sometimes they’re more congenial, as in the ’60s sitcom My Favorite Martian. Either way, we can’t stop wondering, what if?
The fiction is fun, but it’s science that will answer the question more definitively. And the science has been getting closer to the mark since astronomer Percival Lowell theorized in 1890 that intelligent life built a series of canals on the red planet.
Nowadays we have landers and rovers on the Martian surface, and spacecraft making observations from orbit. We may even get boots on the...
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