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Despite being our closest neighbor in the heavens, the planet Venus still harbors a multitude of mysteries, due primarily to its thick cloud cover, obscuring the planet’s surface from study. Space probes sent to its surface are also only able to glean a scant amount of information: because of the intense heat and pressure at Venus’s surface, most probes fail after less then an hour. Adding to the mystique of the Morning Star is a newly-found wave propagating across the planet’s atmosphere, and the idea that Venus’s dark streaks may hold microbial life.
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In late October, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson announced that his company is backing the concept of a carbon tax, saying that climate change brings real risks, and serious action is required to mitigate them.

“We have long used a proxy cost of carbon… there’s a range depending on the country, depending on the tax that we think would be appropriate,” Tillerson explained at the Oil & Money conference in London. “We’re trying to influence and inform people and business on the choices they make.”
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This is not a morality tale about planetary preservation – and what happens if you don’t take good care of your literal ground of being. But after years of assuming that Mars is and always had been inhospitable to life, scientists at NASA are now convinced that an ocean once covered 20% of the surface of Mars. In some places, the ocean was likely a mile in depth. And according to Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, “The longer water persists on a planetary body in one location, particularly if there is geological turnover, the more likely it is that it would provide a habitable environment for a suitable duration for life to either originate or proliferate. An ocean would meet this need.”
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The question of whether life ever existed on Mars has inspired scientists – and songwriters – for decades. The Red Planet is currently an arid, icy desert where no sign of life remains, but was it always this way?

It is widely recognised that living entities have three basic requirements: standing water, an energy source and the five chemical elements, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus and nitrogen. Then a very long time for the chemical soup to stew. The rover Curiosity has found evidence of all three in certain areas of Mars, namely the Gale Crater, but were these available for long enough for life to develop?
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