We Found the Building Blocks of Life on Mars

A robot the size of a car drills into a rock that hasn't felt liquid water in three and a half billion years, drops the powder into an oven in its belly, and finds molecules that on Earth are made almost only by living things. For a moment, it looks like we finally have our answer. We don't — and the reason why is a fifty-year story. NASA's Curiosity rover has pulled more than twenty organic molecules from an ancient Martian lakebed, including one that looks like a chemical ancestor of DNA. But this isn't the first time Mars has shown us something that looks like life. From the Viking landers in the 1970s to a meteorite that reached the White House, the red planet keeps handing us signals that quicken the pulse and then dissolve under scrutiny. Standing over all of it is Carl Sagan and the rule he left us: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is the story of why we keep getting fooled, what Curiosity really found, and the one thing that could finally settle whether we were ever alone — if we can bring it home. . #Mars #Curiosity #CarlSagan #NASA #LifeOnMars #Astrobiology #Space #Astronomy #MarsSampleReturn #Viking