Only by truly walking out of the earth can we feel the insignificance of the earth in the vast universe.
If the universe is compared to the human body, then the earth is at best just an white blood cell , so people can't help but have questions, are there no other life in the universe?
In fact, alien life may not be far away from us.
Antarctic is under ice, with very little geological activity and human damage. Therefore, Antarctic is like a time capsule, preserving the past history of the earth. If a meteorite falls in Antarctica, it can be retained in the ice for tens of millions of years. Scientists found an "worm" from Mars in the ice layer of Antarctica. Martian life seems to be one step closer to us.
Antarctic has been uninhabited all year round, and only a few scientists are studying the geological environment here to understand the history of the earth and the impact of climate change. In 1984, researchers from the American Meteorite Search Organization discovered a strange green rock on the ice layer when they investigated Mount Alendra. looked particularly dazzling against the background of the blue ice layer.
NASA numbered this rock as ALH84001, it looks so old that it doesn't seem to belong to this world. It weighs 2.27 kilograms. In order to explore the origin of the rock, researchers extracted its components, hoping to analyze some results. data shows that the rock is likely to be from Mars , but due to the inadequate technology at the time, after reaching this conclusion, the rock was sealed for decades.
It was not until the 1990s that this meteorite was restarted by another research team. They were surprised to find that the fragment of was formed in the turbulent Noah's Age 4 billion years ago. About 17 million years ago, a huge meteorite impact threw it into space and landed on the Antarctic of Earth 13,000 years ago.
Researchers firmly believe that this meteorite can take us to understand the history of Mars, so they split the rocks and found something truly surprising inside. There is a worm-like object inside the meteorite. Scientists boldly proposed that is a fossil remains on Mars.
These worm-like objects look very similar to the bacteria on Earth, but are much smaller than bacteria. But when researchers continued to scan them, found that they were magnetic crystals, consists of iron oxide and iron sulfide. On Earth, these substances are usually produced by magnetothermal bacteria.
Abiotic methods can also produce these minerals, but this usually requires extreme conditions in the laboratory, such as specific pH values and high temperatures, which are difficult to form naturally on Mars, so their larger potential is from bacteria on Mars.
In addition, scientists have also discovered some orange particles composed of carbonate . Rocks containing carbonate are usually formed in water. For example, the shells and bones of marine organisms have accumulated into fossils. The carbonate in this meteorite is dissolved in liquid water and , which flows into cracks and deposits in the meteorite.
Mars now does not have surface water , and the average temperature is around -60℃. Obviously, in the era when meteorites were formed, Mars was not what it is now.
A recent paper about this meteorite was published in the " Science " magazine, which once again confirmed this view. This paper particularly emphasized that the organic molecules found on meteorites are formed by slowly interacting with each other after groundwater is filtered out from cracked rocks.
When you mention "organic" , maybe everyone will associate it with life.
In fact, this is not the case. organic molecules are usually composed of carbon and hydrogen or oxysulfur nitrogen. They can be formed biologically or produced in a non-biological natural ways. For example, in snake-patterned, igneous rock , which is rich in iron or magnesium, will interact with liquid water to produce hydrogen . In carbonization, acidic water containing dissolved carbon dioxide will interact with rocks to produce carbonates.
So when we find some special substances, cannot determine that they come from biological reaction processes. Until now, there is still debate about the origin of organic matter in this meteorite, and we cannot judge whether there was life on Mars by just one meteorite.
The best way is to return the sample to the mission, brings the matter from Mars back to Earth.
Previously, Curiosity launched by NASA's , Insight still operates on the Mars surface. In 2020, NASA's Perseverance and my country's Zhurong also successfully landed on Mars HTML . In addition, UAE's Hope has also entered Mars orbit and is currently conducting monitoring and research on Mars climate.
These Mars rovers and orbital vehicles form a relatively three-dimensional monitoring network on Mars, allowing us to conduct in-depth research on the topography, atmospheric composition and past history of Mars. They send back key data and have found clues that can support the existence of Mars' life. For example, Curiosity once discovered borates with a history of 3.8 billion years in the crater.
borate plays an important role in the production of ribonucleic acids (RNA), and RNA is an important part of life, which shows that life has potential growth conditions here and may survive on ancient Mars.
Even if the characteristics we see on Mars do not come from life, is still very likely to exist in the universe.
