Is life really similar on all planets, researchers wonder.
In photographs from Mars, taken by rovers, we saw a real, just like on Earth, a shell. The photos themselves were taken back in 2014, but the strange object was only now noticed by bloggers. In the photo - the slope of a small hill, and into this slope is "built" something that strikingly resembles the earthly "houses for snails." In general, if you do not know that this is happening on Mars, you might think that somewhere in the terrestrial desert they found another fossil.
The shell is most similar to ammonites. Such shells are found all over the world, including many in the Moscow region. To find ammonite in the vicinity of Moscow, one must go down into a more or less deep ravine and see if there is a characteristic bluish clay there. Found clay - count ammonite in your pocket. In May of this year, the author of these lines found a whole bunch even within Moscow, in a park. In a word, on Earth - a fossil is not rare. But on Mars?
On Earth, ammonites lived in the seas, they did not tolerate fresh water. They hunted for everything - in this they resemble modern squids. They died out along with dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Today, it is almost certain that the great extinction that killed the ammonites along with the dinosaurs caused a colossal asteroid. He fell to Earth, and something like a nuclear explosion happened. For decades, if not centuries, dust clouds covered the Sun. It got pretty cold. And the ammonites loved warmth. By the way, the warmth never fully returned. With the fall of the asteroid and the great extinction, the modern, relatively cold, geological era called the Cenozoic began. There is an original hypothesis why this is so. Dinosaurs were huge creatures, and they also left huge traces of life, in tons. All this wealth saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide,here it was warm, the natural greenhouse effect worked. It sounds incredible, but scientists have recently become more and more convinced of how much the Earth's climate depends on the biosphere.
This is how Gale crater looked in ancient times, where bloggers found the "ammonite".
And what happened on Mars at that time? No one is surprised anymore when he sees the beds of dried up rivers in the photographs from the Red Planet. So once rivers flowed, lakes and seas splashed, the sky was blue and it was quite warm. Once it seemed to us that Mars is very different from Earth, but now the further, the more similarity. The rovers explored clay deposits - they are no different from the terrestrial ones. They even found something like silt, and silt is, in fact, life. Few doubt that only caution keeps scientists from officially announcing that life on Mars was at least ancient. But all this feast of biology on Mars was a long time ago, about 3.5 billion years ago. When dinosaurs on Earth warmed the atmosphere with their dung, Mars was already empty. Why this is so - we do not know very well. Far from the sun, a little coldthe planet itself is smaller, it holds the air worse. Or maybe the asteroid also fell.
If the Martian ammonite is not just another optical illusion, this leads to a striking fact: life on different planets is similar to each other. When aliens with arms, legs and heads are shown in a science fiction film, someone will certainly snort: “This cannot be! Man appeared from a purely terrestrial monkey, aliens will certainly be different. And here is your lie. It seems that biological evolution follows certain patterns, and we will not meet some completely incomprehensible monsters on other planets.
NASA astrobiologist David De Marais says, yes, Martian organisms are likely similar to those on Earth. But the fact is that Mars and Earth are quite similar. These are the terrestrial planets, and life here and there is built on the basis of carbon and water. However, it cannot be built on anything else, creatures that breathe with something else are fantastic, he is convinced. However, many argue with him.
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There is a lot of controversy: what to say, we don't even know for sure whether American devices found life in the late 1970s or not! Then the only biological experiment so far was carried out. The device scooped up the Martian soil and looked, what is released from it, whether the bacteria "breathe". At first everyone saw that yes, the soil breathes! Then the soil was sterilized (right on Mars), but it continued to "breathe". From what they concluded - this is not life, but chemical reactions. We were in a hurry and missed life, say Yuk Jung of the California Institute of Technology and Ping Chen of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In their recent article, they ask themselves the question: what was the point then to sterilize the soil if the hard radiation of the Sun (Mars is not protected from it) sterilizes the surface even better. Obviously, bacteria on Mars have learned to live with it. Are there really few organisms on Earth that exist in "impossible" conditions, without oxygen, in sulfuric acid, in the depths of faults at the bottom of the oceans? Or do you want a Martian living creature to wave at you, then you will believe, says Mark Sims, a member of the ExoMars team, ironically in one of the publications.
Well, probably only a few years separate us from the moment when scientists will get the indisputable facts: life on Mars was and is. Ammonites appeared on the Red Planet in an amazing way, like on Earth. But here and there they died out.
EVGENY ARSYUKHIN