NASA Mars rover landing seeks new alien life. Here's how that would change the world.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/nasa-mars-rover-landing-seeks-new-alien-life-here-s-ncna1258212

NASA Mars rover landing seeks new alien life. Here's how that would 
change the world.
The discovery of long-expired Martian bacteria would permanently change 
humanity’s view of its own importance.
Image: An illustration of NASA's Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars.
An illustration of NASA's Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars.NASA 
/ JPL-Caltech
Feb. 18, 2021, 1:31 AM PST
By Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute
NASA is reprising an old quest: a search for life on Mars.

The hunt for red planet residents began close to four decades ago, when 
the agency sent two spacecraft — the Viking landers — to Mars. Their 
task was to prove that the planet, while red, is not dead.

The hunt for red planet residents began close to four decades ago, when 
the agency sent two spacecraft — the Viking landers — to Mars.

The landers initially sent back data that seemed consistent with 
bacteria-like organisms in the soil. But with further analysis, early 
optimism soured. Was there life on Mars? NASA concluded: Probably not.

This wishy-washy answer was frustratingly ambiguous, especially for a $1 
billion experiment. So, NASA is now taking a different approach in its 
hunt for microbes. Unlike the Viking landers, the new Perseverance rover 
isn’t looking for chemical signs of metabolism. Instead, assuming it 
lands successfully on Thursday, Perseverance will trundle around Mars’ 
gaunt landscapes searching for sediments. These could contain clues to 
organisms that pitched and swirled in long-vanished seas.

The rationale is simple: If Mars ever had life, the dead will surely 
outnumber the living, and are therefore more likely to be found. The 
proposed landing site for Perseverance, Jezero Crater, looks like a 
former lake basin fed by a dried-out river, a happy hunting ground for a 
rover prowling for the desiccated remains of early inhabitants.


NASA launches rover to look for ancient life on Mars (Part 1)
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The samples cached by Perseverance will hopefully be collected and 
returned to Earth by a future mission, to be analyzed in terrestrial 
laboratories. There will be no “Eureka” moment for Perseverance; if 
Martians are found, they will be found on Earth.

But if it that happens, it will be more than an interesting science 
story. Just as the past is now divided into “before” and “after” the 
Copernican revolution, so too will discovering long-expired Martian 
bacteria permanently change humanity’s view of its own importance.

There is, however, one thing that could dampen the impact of finding 
(dead) life on Mars. If it turns out that Martian organisms were related 
to Earthly life — if both sport the same DNA biology — then the 
discovery may point to the way life can accidentally spread between 
worlds, hitchhiking on dirt clods kicked into space by meteor impacts. 
That would be interesting, yes. But far more portentous would be to 
discover that our solar system has had a “second genesis;” that life on 
Earth and Mars had different origins. That would imply that life is as 
commonplace in the cosmos.

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If so, it would be a near-certainty that in other places among the 
trillion planets of the Milky Way, life has evolved to a state of 
self-aware intelligence. Simply getting life started doesn’t guarantee 
this; there would surely be manifold worlds where life stalls out as 
pond scum. But that cannot be the case for every planet or moon that 
spawns biology. Intelligence has survival value.

So, finding Martian life should compel us to abandon the notion that we 
are privileged, that humans are the sole sentient inhabitants of the 
universe. Indeed, we would not only have a strong indicator of cosmic 
company but could infer that it is widespread. It would include beings 
that are far beyond our own technical level, given that the Sun and its 
planets are relative newcomers to the universe, billions of years 
younger than the average solar system.

Such a realization would be as consequential to our self-image as when 
we learned that we are not separate from the fauna of our world, but 
simply a part of it.

Suddenly, we would confront the likelihood that everything we accomplish 
has parallels in the actions of unseen others, and that what we find 
beautiful and worthwhile must have a billion other definitions 
elsewhere. Scientists, who find joy in being the first to know 
something, would realize that countless other beings have learned it 
too. We could be certain that there are vast libraries of knowledge that 
we cannot enter.

And what of religion? Theology has famously railed against earlier 
scientific discoveries that seemingly diminished our central position in 
the cosmos, from Galileo to Darwin. How would it react to learning that 
not only is our planet not unique, but neither are its most celebrated 
inhabitants?

A Survata poll from 2013 suggests the response might be more positive 
than we think. According to the poll’s respondents, up to one-third of 
the members of major western religions may already believe in 
extraterrestrial life. Even the Catholic Church, notorious for censuring 
Galileo, is accepting of at least the possible existence of sentient 
beings elsewhere in the universe. (Pope Francis has specifically 
expressed his willingness to baptize Martians.)

Perseverance could put us back on a road long traveled. In the 18th 
century, telescopes became powerful enough to discern the polar ice caps 
and surface markings on Mars. The red planet was the only world we knew 
where conditions might be similar to those on Earth. This likeness 
launched a durable belief in Martian life, and the Perseverance rover is 
the latest gambit by science to hunt it down, dead or alive.

But what may seem like a straightforward pursuit of a long-standing 
hypothesis would — if successful — have implications of great 
philosophical consequence. Protagoras wrote that man is the measure of 
all things. But thanks to some high-tech hardware lumbering across the 
dusty sands of a nearby world, that might soon cease to be true.