There’s a reason we’ve sent a rover called "Curiosity" up to Mars: Astronomers want to prove the theory that microorganisms on an asteroid from Mars that crashed into the Earth billions of years ago may have started life here. We do know that fragments from distant planets might have been the "sprouts of life" on this one. Mars may now be dead (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), but we may live on as the progeny of that planet.
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The new Mars rover was named Curiosity because it hopes to answer one of the greatest questions of modern man: Are we really Martians?

A few billion years ago, Mars may have been a planet covered with oceans. We’re not sure what happened (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), but we do know that the liquid has mostly burned away. Curiosity will probe the soil that they left behind in order to look for tiny fossils.
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When our satellites search for other planets that might harbor life, they always search for water. But now, for the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that’s cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets. And with oceans, life could spring up–or maybe migrate to the planet from another place.
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