Scientists discover hidden water beneath Mars that could have supported life

[gortex]

A team of scientists at the New York University Abu Dhabi have been examining data from Curiosity rover in Gale Crater which was once home to a lake , rock formations on the crater floor suggest once they were sand dunes turned to stone due to interaction with water moving bellow the surface.

Their analysis suggests that water from a nearby Martian mountain gradually seeped into the dunes through tiny fractures. As the moisture moved upward through the sand, it left behind minerals such as gypsum, which is commonly found in desert environments on Earth. These minerals are especially important to scientists because they can capture and preserve traces of organic material. As a result, such deposits are considered promising places for future missions searching for evidence of ancient life.

"Our findings show that Mars didn't simply go from wet to dry," said Atri. "Even after its lakes and rivers disappeared, small amounts of water continued to move underground, creating protected environments that could have supported microscopic life."

The discovery sheds new light on how Mars changed over billions of years. It also strengthens the idea that underground environments could be some of the best places to look for signs of past life on the planet.

The research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets, focuses on ancient sand dunes located in Gale Crater, an area explored by NASA's Curiosity rover. According to the study, these dunes slowly hardened into rock billions of years ago after interacting with groundwater moving beneath the Martian surface.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...004340.htm

I think we are moving slowly toward science putting 2 + 2 together and coming up with 4.
The annual "mystery" methane spikes in Spring coupled with the fact Mars was once Earth 2.0 with better conditions for life before it all went tits up was enough for me.

Life will prevail.

[quintessentone]

Not all life will prevail from the looks of it there on Mars and here on Earth, and the Drake equation argument is something to consider as well. With the expanding universe 'grabby' and 'quiet' aliens will most likely never reach their intergalactic travel goals.

"Almost all arguments involving the Drake equation suffer from the overconfidence effect, a common error of probabilistic reasoning about low-probability events, by guessing specific numbers for likelihoods of events whose mechanism is not understood, such as the likelihood of abiogenesis on an Earth-like planet, with estimates varying over many hundreds of orders of magnitude. An analysis that takes into account some of the uncertainty associated with this lack of understanding has been carried out by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord,[46] and suggests "a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox