Mars Discovery Means “Galaxy Could Be Teeming With Life,” Scholar Says

NASA’s Perseverance robot, depicted here landing on the Martian dunes, used its cutting-edge cameras to image what could be the first evidence of life ever detected on Mars, opening the possibility that the Milky Way “could be teeming with life.” (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Xinhua) (Xinhua/NASA/JPL-Caltech via Getty Images)

Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

NASA’s discovery of potential evidence of ancient life on Mars increases the chances that planets across the galaxy could host rich biospheres, says one of the world’s leading scholars on the habitable star systems now being mapped around the Milky Way.

After NASA’s Perseverance Mars robot, equipped with an array of cutting-edge cameras and spectrometers, uncovered fossil-like traces on a sample of mudstone, the agency’s acting administrator trumpeted the find.

While a team of scientists unraveled the tantalizing hint of microbial activity back when the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater hosted an animated web of waterways, for the British journal Nature, interim NASA head Sean Duffy hailed the advance in uncovering possible imprints of Mars’ mysterious past.

“This finding by Perseverance,” Duffy said, “is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars.”

If the finding of microorganisms on Mars—whether DNA-based or not—is confirmed, that would mark an incredible leap for the sphere of science, one that would ricochet across civilization and into the future, says Pete Worden, an eminent American astrophysicist who has headed a series of leading-edge searches for hyper-tech alien societies across the galaxy.

If proven, Dr. Worden told me in an interview, “The existence of life on Mars and its character becomes one of the most important science discoveries of all time.”

Worden is one of the key players worldwide in conducting searches for signs of life, or biosignatures, across the thousands of exoplanets discovered so far, and in the quest to detect radio or laser communications sent out by techno-civilizations across this section of the cosmos.

As chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and executive director of its Breakthrough Initiatives, Worden has co-led a torrent of pathbreaking studies aimed at seeking sophisticated messages transmitted from solar systems at the center of the galaxy, where stars are clustered closer together, and therefore the possibility of interstellar treks, or even multi-stellar civilizations, is greater.

Founded by the billionaire space philanthropist Yuri Milner, together with cosmologist Stephen Hawking and Pete Worden, the $100-million Breakthrough Listen project is deploying next-generation technologies to scan the skies for “evidence of technological civilizations in the universe.”

These seekers of fellow spacefaring societies across the heavens say they aim to tap a rush of advances in space-based and terrestrial telescopes, and in computing power and next-generation imaging systems, “to survey targets including one million nearby stars, the entire galactic plane and 100 nearby galaxies at a wide range of radio and optical frequency bands.”

A physicist-turned-angel-investor in nascent internet titans, Milner says in a manifesto outlining the central goals of the Breakthrough Foundation that all of humanity should join a pacific global quest to explore and understand the universe, all while seeking out stargazers and spacecraft designers across the cosmos who might be rushing to create a galactic civilization.

Humanity’s first push to foster an inter-planetary future, Milner predicts, will begin with colonizing the Red Planet, but adds: “Mars must be a stepping stone to more distant destinations.”

Dr. Worden has co-authored a cascade of studies on terraforming Mars, in part by bioengineering an archipelago of experimental Martian Edens, shielded inside crystalline geodesic domes, that could host human colonies and expanding botanical and zoological gardens genetically adapted to thrive on Mars.

After NASA unveiled its fascinating findings of possible life that emerged on Mars when its dunes spread out alongside rivers that channeled into lakes formed inside massive impact craters, I asked Dr. Worden whether, if the working hypothesis of primitive life on Mars is confirmed, that would represent one of the most world-changing revelations in the history of human civilization, on a level with Copernicus toppling the Greek astronomer Ptolemy’s model of the Earth as the center of the cosmos.

If the Earth loses its position as the sole Eden in the endless starry skies, could that also mean there might be life across billions of planets in the Milky Way or trillions of planets across the universe?

“There are two possibilities for life,” Dr. Worden says in a fascinating sketch he sent to me on the alternative potential origins of life on Mars, and on Earth.

“The first is that it arises in chemical processes on or near planetary surfaces. If we find life on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system that’s truly different (chemically even structurally) that would mean life may be everywhere.”

“Conversely,” he adds, “life (on Earth or Mars), could have arisen elsewhere and been transported via meteorites.”

“This is called panspermia.”

“A variant is ‘Directed Panspermia’ where the life was deliberately planted.”

“If life is similar, especially if Mars and Earth life show a common ancestor that may mean life originated on the Earth (or Mars) and traveled between planets.”

“A variant is that the galaxy is infected with life and life on Earth or Mars came from an interstellar source, (including a deliberate intelligent one),” Worden says.

“This is most interesting as its would indicate at least our galaxy could be teeming with life.”

“There are several reasons to prefer this answer.”

No matter which theory on the fountainhead of life in this solar system ultimately turns out to be the correct one, he adds, solid scientific proof that life had once taken hold on Mars, and might still survive across scattered refugia, would be one of the greatest breakthroughs ever made by humanity in modeling the universe, and would provide powerful boosters to the global quest to foster a spacefaring civilization.

Already an academic star in the sphere of astrophysics and in the search for advanced alien civilizations, Pete Worden also gained screen fame with his part in the HBO’s sensational new documentary Wild Wild Space.

The show, now being streamed by HBO Max, skips across a montage of independent space players like the future co-founders of Planet Labs, who tested their first prototypes of miniaturized imaging satellites while enlisted in Worden’s brigades of young freethinking space scientists and inventors when he headed the NASA Ames Research Center.

Worden transformed the NASA outpost, located in the wild west tech capital of Silicon Valley, into a futuristic skunkworks of radical spaceflight experiments.

Just as he reshaped NASA Ames into the central node in a globe-spanning network connecting space visionaries and NewSpace rocket designers, at the Breakthrough Foundation he has crafted a worldwide web of exchanges with the top scientists seeking out interstellar cultures and astronomers that might be beaming laser-borne messages across the Milky Way.

Across a decade-long series of Breakthrough Discuss assemblies, which have skipped from the campus of Stanford University in California to the University of Oxford in the UK, Worden has invited leading lights to brainstorm on new ideas and innovations to push forward this celestial quest.

Meanwhile, Dr. Worden elaborated on his conception, “Life in the Universe,” in a follow-up missive via electronic mail:

“It is now widely accepted that life emerged on Earth over four billion years ago,” he says.

“Remarkably, life appears to have begun within a few hundred million years after the planet cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of liquid water — a necessary condition for all known Earth-based life.”

“We know a great deal about the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) — the hypothetical root organism from which all current life on Earth descends.”

“LUCA already possessed a sophisticated molecular toolkit, including the DNA-to-RNA-to-protein translation machinery.”

“But beyond LUCA, our knowledge fades into speculation.”

“Most biologists hypothesize that LUCA was preceded by an RNA World, in which early life was based solely on RNA — a molecule that can store genetic information and catalyze chemical reactions.”

“DNA, the more stable information-storage molecule, likely evolved later,” Worden says.

“Although the RNA World hypothesis is widely discussed, direct evidence is lacking, and current examples of RNA-based organisms are limited to certain viruses.”

“As Nobel Laureate Gary Ruvkun observed:

“LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all life on Earth, already had the full suite of DNA-to-RNA-to-protein machinery, including the ribosome, tRNAs, polymerases.”

“That’s an incredibly complex system. It seems unlikely that all that evolved on Earth in the few hundred million years between planetary cooling and the appearance of the first cells.”

“That leads to the speculation that life may have come here from elsewhere — panspermia.”

“If life did originate elsewhere,” Dr. Worden says, “one plausible source could be Mars.”

“We know that large asteroid impacts can eject rocks from Mars, some of which eventually land on Earth.”

“However, since Mars did not cool significantly earlier than Earth, it’s unlikely that life had a substantial head start there.”

“A more compelling possibility,” Worden adds, “is interstellar panspermia.”

“The solar system occasionally receives visitors from interstellar space — such as the object ‘Oumuamua detected in 2017.”

“It’s conceivable that microbial life could survive in shielded environments within such objects over long cosmic timescales.”

“If we accept this possibility, then life could have originated in environments much older than Earth — potentially 10 to 12 billion years ago, on planets orbiting stars long since extinguished.”

“One provocative analysis supporting this idea was published by Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon in 2013: (Sharov, A.A., & Gordon, R. (2013). Life Before Earth. arXiv:1304.3381).”

“Their study proposed a method for estimating the age of life by extrapolating backward from current genetic complexity:”

• “Genetic complexity was measured as the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides in genomes.”
• “When plotted on a logarithmic scale versus time, the increase in complexity shows a linear trend.”
• “Extrapolating this trend back to an organism with just one base pair suggests life originated ~9.7 billion years ago.”
• “Since Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, this would imply life predated our planet.”
• “While controversial,” Dr. Worden says, “this model offers a quantitative argument for a much older, possibly galactic origin of life.”

“An even more speculative — but technically feasible — idea is directed panspermia, the deliberate seeding of life by an intelligent civilization.”

“In a recent paper, we explored how this could be achieved using technologies only slightly more advanced than ours: (McKay, C.P., Davies, P.C.W., & Worden, S.P. (2022). Directed Panspermia Using Interstellar Comets. Astrobiology, 22(12), 1443–1451. DOI: 10.1089/ast.2021.0188)

“This directed panspermia concept was proposed by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, and Leslie Orgel: (Crick, F.H.C., & Orgel, L.E. (1973). ‘Directed Panspermia’. Icarus, 19(3), 341–346. DOI: 10.1016/0019-1035(73)90110-3)

How to Test These Ideas

“The key to resolving whether life began on Earth or elsewhere lies in discovering life beyond Earth and comparing its genetic and biochemical characteristics with those of terrestrial life, especially LUCA.”

“For example,” Worden adds:

• “If we discover life on Mars, Europa, or even in the clouds of Venus, and it shares the same ribosomal machinery or genetic code as Earth life, this would strongly suggest a common origin — possibly via interstellar panspermia.”
• “If we instead find radically different biochemistry (e.g. non-water solvents like sulfuric acid or ammonia, or different nucleic acids), this would suggest that life arises independently in diverse environments — making the universe truly teeming with diverse life forms.”