Would Finding Life on Mars Really Change Anything?

In a recent interview with the Telegraph, NASA chief scientist Jim Green said it’s possible we’ll soon find evidence of life on Mars but that “we’re not prepared for the results.” Green said the discovery would be as world-shaking as the revelation that the solar system doesn’t revolve around Earth. But while finding our first aliens would no doubt be amazing, it’s not a given that it would have any major impact on life on Earth. Green spoke to the Telegraph about upcoming missions to Mars, namely NASA’s yet-to-be-named Mars 2020 rover and the ESA’s ExoMars rover, named the Rosalind Franklin, both of which could be roaming the surface of the Red Planet by 2021. In his comments, Green said a “real possibility” exists that one of these rovers, and possibly both, will detect traces of life. So confident is Green about this fantastic prospect that he’s already worried about having to break the news to the public, as he explained to the Telegraph:

“It will be revolutionary,” he said. “It’s like when Copernicus stated ‘no we go around the Sun.’ Completely revolutionary. It will start a whole new line of thinking. I don’t think we’re prepared for the results. We’re not. “I’ve been worried about that because I think we’re close to finding it and making some announcements.” These are, needless to say, some rather big and bold claims. To be clear, there is currently no definitive evidence of life on Mars (whether extinct or extant), and there are no imminent announcements about the discovery of life on Mars. To be sure, we reached out to Green for further clarification. “It’s incorrect to think that we have found life and that we are working toward an announcement,” Green wrote in an email to Gizmodo. “What we have are missions that we’re going to launch that will look for life.”

Similar to the way “the human Moon landings changed the conception of our place in the universe, the discovery of life elsewhere would also be a civilization-changing event,” said Green. But some experts we spoke to disagreed that finding alien life would truly change much on Earth. “Well, yes, maybe [we’re unprepared],” said Wieger Wamelink, a senior ecologist at Wageningen University & Research and an advisor to the MarsOne project, in an email to Gizmodo. But this “is mostly a philosophical issue that will have an impact, but not on day-to-day life,” he said. “The stock exchange will not react, and countries will not go to war because of this.”

Steve Clifford, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, doesn’t think we’re unprepared for such a discovery, pointing to an episode 23 years ago as an important precedent. “In 1996, scientists at the Johnson Space Center announced that they had discovered potential evidence of life in the Martian meteorite 84001,” Clifford wrote in an email to Gizmodo. “That announcement was widely covered in the media, and the public followed that announcement with great interest, but [there’s] little evidence that [it] provoked any widespread concern. I think that decades of rational scientific discussion about the likelihood that life is likely prevalent in the universe has helped prepare the way, should we discover unequivocal evidence of life on Mars or elsewhere.”

Given that the potential for alien life to be found in our solar system has been a mainstream idea for decades, is it even accurate to say such a discovery would be revolutionary? “I think news of life on Mars, if found, would be a big deal that would shake up people’s thinking about how rare or common life is in the cosmos,” Bethany Ehlmann, a research scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of the NASA 2020 rover team, wrote to Gizmodo. “It would be awesome and thought-provoking, which is what I bet Dr. Green was trying to convey.” “Yes, I think such a discovery would be momentous, more momentous than the Copernican Revolution, but philosophically very similar,” David Weintraub, a professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University, told Gizmodo in an email.

Pre-Copernicus, most thinkers—whether for religious or philosophical or metaphysical reasons—accepted that Earth was the center of the universe. Thus, we were likely the center of creation and God’s attention… Copernicus de-centered humanity. The discovery of life beyond the Earth will, similarly, decenter humanity. Life on Earth would no longer be unique. Honestly, I can’t think of a more momentous discovery.” Bruce Jakosky, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, agrees. Even though “we suspect that life could be widespread throughout the galaxy,” he said, “finding even one example of life off of the Earth would be a big deal.” That said, the discovery would have “no immediate consequences for anybody but us scientists who are working in that area” and it “wouldn’t change anybody’s day-to-day activities. Still, it would change our entire philosophical view of the universe.”
What about implications for religions? Would finding alien life cause a mass crisis of faith?

“Unfortunately, I’ve spent years working through these questions,” said Weintraub. “My 2014 book, Religions and Extraterrestrial Life is devoted entirely to how religions of the world would react. The short answer is that some already believe in ET (e.g., Mormonism, Bahá’í ), some assume such life likely (Hinduism, Buddhism), some think that ET is God’s business, not ours (Judaism), and some (mostly conservative Christian denominations) would have big problems.” Since certain religious groups already deny dinosaur fossils’ veracity, however, it’s not a stretch to imagine that they would also refute any evidence of alien life.

Finding life on a planet other than Earth would be momentous, even if that life is merely microbial. But a discovery on Mars—right in our backyard, relatively speaking—would carry even deeper implications. By finding a second habitable planet in our solar system (assuming it arose independently from life on Earth and is not the result of planet-on-planet contamination), our conceptions and expectations of pan-galactic habitability would have to undergo a complete revision. It would strongly suggest that our galaxy, and likely the entire cosmos, is exceptionally friendly to life (a so-called biophilic universe). So on this point, Green is absolutely right to say the discovery of life on Mars would be huge.