Your Favourite Martian.
Just a few minutes ago, the brilliant eggheads over at NASA announced that it does seem like they’ve discovered traces of organic compounds on Mars. This is amazing news, specifically because it does appear that they’re a result of, at the very least, conditions in the distant past that would have been fairly ideal to see some sort of life form.
The more amazing thing about it is that the tests that they’ve done come from five small scoops in fairly close proximity to each other, and in fairly close proximity to where they just happened to land. They’re being extremely cautious about getting too terribly excited about it, but that’s quite an exciting find. The odds that they’d be able to land in some random location on another planet and discover the building blocks of life, using a sand-castle shovel, are amazingly low. This essentially proves that the building blocks of life are far more common than we’ve ever realized. After all, earlier last week, they also discovered traces of organic compounds on Mercury. This is astonishing stuff.
But more importantly, this means that all of those Martian movies from the ’50’s and ’60’s might not be as far-fetched as we previously thought! Well… in a way.
What other old science fiction stereotypes are going to be proven accurate in the next few years?