The New York Times reports that scientists claim to be less than one year away from finding a habitable planet. It seems unlikely that the search on Mars will yield any living organisms. Scientists say it is more probable to find life beyond Mars, but it won’t be complex species similar to humans. Instead, they are more likely to discover single cell microbes. I like this:
Some scientists deplore the emphasis on [finding alien life forms that are] animals like us, saying it is hopelessly parochial and unimaginative — the scientific equivalent of the drunk searching for his car keys under a street light because that’s where the light is.
“Animals are overgrown microbes,” said Paul Falkowski, a biophysicist and biologist from Rutgers. “We are here to ferry microbes across the planet. Plants and animals are an afterthought of microbes.” So, we should hardly be disappointed if we find our neighbors are microbes. After all, on Earth, microbes were the whole story for almost four billion years, paleontologists say, and now inhabit our intestines as well as every doorknob.
Image credit: Image of Mars taken in 2004. NASA; JPL; Cornell University; Michael Benson via the New York Times.