As researchers learn more and more about the planet Mars, the likelihood of life having developed on the Red Planet increases. Two separate discoveries, one involving the discovery of what may be planet Earth’s oldest fossils, and another that shows that Mars may have had more water on its surface than anticipated, reinforce the idea of life having once thrived on the Martian surface.
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An experiment that was conducted aboard — or rather outside of — the International Space Station, proves that biological organisms can survive the harsh environment of space for extended periods of time. The experiment was designed investigate how human expeditions to Mars could one day sustain themselves, and how the biology of extremophiles — organisms that thrive in conditions that would be deadly to other creatures here on Earth — would fare in the harshness of space. The success of the experiment not only provided surprisingly positive results, it also offers new evidence that life on Earth may have originated from elsewhere in the cosmos.
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Despite the insistence of some physicists that quantum effects only affect things on an extremely small scale, new theories continue to be put forward that the smallest known processes may be responsible for some very, very big phenomena, ranging from things such as the navigational sense of migratory birds, to the potential that they may also be responsible for the very existence of life as we know it on Earth.
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While life was once thought to just be a happy accident by mainstream science, the building blocks of DNA and RNA are proving to be not only tenacious, these organic molecules also appear to be able to form in the most unlikely of places, including in deep space on the surface of comets.

In 2014, the Philae lander touched down on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and during it’s investigation of the comet’s chemical makeup, it detected the presence of 16 types of organic compounds. These findings prompted the development of an organics detector for the lander, which led to experiments that simulated the chemical makeup and environmental conditions of the comet to determine what could be found there.
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