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because if there is this much water on Mars, it means that there is plentiful life everywhere in the universe. And it's interesting, one of the more recent theories on how life developed here, which was not a focused weeding out of the less competitive (i.e., less adaptable, less intelligent, if you will), aimed at producing higher and higher intelligence--i.e., us--but rather a staggering plenitude of life, thrown out by Mother Nature like a wildly rich cornucopia, trying every imaginable form of life possible with these ingredients, which, at one point, got whacked by meteor and reduced to just four phyla, from which everything that we know, including us, then--wildly, profligately--evolved. In other words, Nature works by trying EVERYTHING, like a farmer throwing out every kind of seed to see what will grow.
And if that theory is more or less true on earth--and I think it remains without serious challenge--then why wouldn't it be true everywhere else--and not only in places with similar conditions (which we are finding out are much more prevalent than we previously realized), but also in places with different conditions and different life ingredients (as sf writers have often posited)? In fact, the sulfur-based plants and critters recently discovered at the bottom of the ocean establish that oxygen respiration and sunlight are unnecessary to life. Life can figure out how to convert all sorts of ingredients into energy. There could be life on icy planets. There could be life on very hot planets. There could be life between planets, even between stars. And if abundant, profligate life is the rule, the chances of other intelligent life zoom.
I think, actually, we need to shed our notion that we are the only intelligent life on earth. I suspect that dolphins, whales and elephants are more intelligent than we are. We just have been unable to translate their very different and complex language, produced by their very big brains. (Have you ever seen the film footage of elephants mourning their dead? It makes you shudder to think of what humans have done to elephants!) So we could--and some are--starting our search for intelligent life right here. Are WE all that intelligent? We're trashing the planet! Seems pretty stupid to me, that we haven't been able to figure out how to restrain the greedy among us, and are LOSING our home planet because of it. How adaptive is that?
But the thing that may save us--and pull us out of our narrow myopia and egocentricity--is that there are life-friendly conditions everywhere we look and an abundance of life. Maybe some day when we are desperately terraforming Mars and the Moon, and trying to figure how to replicate Nature's abundance--if we make it to that point--we will finally realize what we had, what we lost, and what we must never lose again--respect for the Ancient Goddess of Life.
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