Our planet is very rich in liquid water, which is one of the reasons that explain scientifically why the existence of life is possible here. Over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in water – 71 percent, to be more precise. Water even exists in the air as water vapor, in glaciers, and even in the bodies of each and every one of us. In the case of adult men, 60% of their bodies consist of water.
You got the point already: water is literally everywhere on Earth. But astronomers are pretty sure that when it comes to each one of the Solar System’s planets, you may not even find a single drop of water on all those cosmic bodies combined. But it doesn’t necessarily have to have always been that way. Perhaps another planet not far from Earth was once teeming with rivers and lakes where extraterrestrial fellows were going for a swim. Ring any bell?
Mars was once teeming with water, just as Earth
A new study involving computational modeling that Forbes tells us about and which appears in Science Advances confirms the idea that Mars was once dominated by entire deep oceans of liquid water, similar to how it happens on Earth in the present. There’s still no indication of any little green men with pointy ears and big black eyes taking swimming lessons on the Red Planet or of any kind of life existing there, but astronomers still don’t give up hope.
The research in question also brings an explanation for how it was possible for Mars to become a water world. Astronomers suspect that icy asteroids have carried huge amounts of water to Mars during the first 100 million years of the planet’s evolution. The idea is certainly not new, and scientists have also been blaming icy asteroids for the existence of water on our own planet as well.
If the new study is telling the truth, the entire Red Planet was once covered by oceans of water. The depths of those oceans are also thought to have reached up to one kilometer. By comparison with our planet, that depth is not so impressive, considering that the deepest waters from Earth reach about 11 kilometers over at the Challenger Deep from the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench.
A statement of a scientist writes, as Forbes quotes:
The plates [on Earth] constantly move and are recycled back and destroyed into the interior of our planet,
In contrast, Mars does not have plate tectonics such that planet’s surface preserves a record of the earliest history of the planet.
Since Mars was once teeming with liquid water, that’s already a reason strong enough to suspect even more than alien life existed as well on the Red Planet at some point in its long history. When astronomers search for habitable planets in space, one of the first aspects they are curious about is if those cosmic bodies are placed in the so-called “Goldilocks Zone” of their solar systems. That area means that the planets are not too far from their host star and neither too close for liquid water to exist. Once astronomers realize that a planet is in the Goldilocks Zone, it means that it already matches an important demand to qualify as a habitable cosmic object since it could have liquid water.
But a planet being habitable doesn’t automatically mean that alien life indeed exists there. It only means that there are some chances for alien life to be present, which is not the same.
NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars in early 2021, and it still has the mission to find clues of alien life forms that might have existed on the planet in the distant past.
