Did Life Originate on Mars then Earth?

Growing up I never really liked reading. Most kids nowadays refused to read unless they are directed to do so for school. Even then, I went through all four years of high school never reading a book cover to cover. All the assignments that required me to get the answers from reading, I just looked up online. What a time to be alive, right? Now, I love reading, I love writing. There are so many materials out there that can teach you about different topics. Books, magazines, and we haven't even touched the surface of online information. Not all information online is bad, there is a lot of great articles out there that can teach you. The other day while grocery shopping, I stopped by the magazine section. I picked up Popular Science: Mars Edition. I purchased the magazine because there were a number of articles, I wanted to read that taught me about our next-door neighbor, Mars. I found a great article titled Your Ancestors Might Have Been Martians written by Charlie Wood. Is it really possible that life may not have originated on Earth? The answer in my opinion is yes, it is statistically possible that life originated on the red planet.

Currently the Perseverance rover is drilling into rocks on Mars and is considered NASA's most advanced life hunting laboratory. Why even send that type of equipment to Mars if you do not think it's possible life could have originated there on Mars? The rover will not directly tell us if life once existed on Mars, but you better believe top scientists are watching the data closely looking for signs of current or past life. Christopher Carr who is a planetary scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology says in this article I read, "A number of things that have come to light recently strongly support at least the plausibility of an origin of life on Mars and its potential transfer to Earth". You see, to figure out where life really originated you need to reconstruct the family tree of terrestrial organisms. That's a hard task to do but according to article author Charlie Wood, fossil and DNA evidence suggest that whales, bats and humans shared parentage roughly 65 million years ago. Wait what? Bats, whales and humans are all related? In a way, yes. They were a really long time ago. Go further back in time, science suggest that genetic analyses indicate that the last universal common ancestor of life on Earth is a single celled organism that likely lived around a sea vent that gave the organism energy and warmth, roughly four billion years ago. We all stemmed from that single celled organism that lived half a billion years after Earth was formed. Amazing.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but where the family tree goes after you break it down to a single celled organism, we have no idea. Weathering and the shifting of tectonic plates demolish rocks that may hold ancient secrets. Most scientists think that this single celled organism originated on Earth. What if it didn't? Think about it for a second. Early Mars might have been a promising place for life to begin. We know that a certain environment must take place for life to form, right? This article states, a friendly environment for life to be cooked up may be land that holds a shallow pool of water. Ultraviolet light is exposed, evaporation and precipitation take place and if you have a heat source let's say from a volcano or an asteroid, could activate certain chemical reactions between dissolved organic compounds. We know that early Earth was completely covered in water and lacked oxygen for the first two billion years. A young Mars was a soggy planet that may have offered far more opportunities for life to exist and may have had the presence of oxygen. If this is true, life may have evolved to an oxygen rich environment on Mars where life then caught a ride to Earth on an asteroid to an environment that eventually developed oxygen. Maybe our understanding of early Earth needs a new model. And maybe our origins need to be multi-planetary.