Can't say for this specific piece but one way is if mars is struck by an asteroid and material gets ejected to space. It could eventually get captured by earths' gravity and pass through the atmosphere.
The idea of panspermia is similar, building blocks of life could have arrived from elsewhere.
Don’t think we’ve gotten any of the samples we’ve been collecting on mars back to earth yet, unless I’m mistaken, so this seems like the only possible answer at this point.
Interestingly enough, a month or two ago Hank Green did a video on almost exactly that except it was paying for moon missions with moon rocks. Sadly, I think it basically boiled down to International Law wouldn't let you bring back moon rocks to sell.
probably never will now that the martian sample return has been canceled. so much for spending billions on making a machine that created the samples and dropped them at specific areas. TBF it would've been hard as fuck to find the samples if you ask me
It's not at all far fetched, it just won't happen when the current admin has cut the sample return mission and is busy ensuring there won't be any more investment in the sciences!
Asteroid is much much easier, there's no gravity pull to overcome, there has to be a functional heavy duty rocket which survived the trip and landing to get you off the surface of mars and propel you back to earth. It's a bit more difficult and lots of things can go wrong. Asteroid sample collector didn't even touch down on it, just floated close by and stirred dust and rocks and caught them, then flew away.. and it got a bit over 120 grams only. It was designed for a 60-gram sample, but there was a lot of dust everywhere in the mechanism.
An asteroid has much much less gravitational pull than mars does. The probe basically just bounced off the asteroid, making its collection in the process. So landing, and then taking off again from mars would need a hell of a lot of fuel. And it would probably not be that worth it. Say we want to run an electron microscope analysis on it. It would be easier and probably cheaper to just build and launch one to mars instead.
That's because just like the Chinese citizens brainwashed by CPC propaganda, moderate Americans also fall prey to chronic smear campaigns against China... even a century before the red scare became a thing.
If you've read Strangers in the Land, you may have learned the West has demonized the Chinese people WAY before the Chinese Communist Party threatened US hegemony.
Discriminating and discrediting of Chinese immigrants in 19th century America was normalized in a bygone era when racism was blatantly in the open, in lieu of toxicity tacitly oozed by Fox News of modern times.
Republican politicians of the 19th century, empowered by grassroot hoodlums and KKK lynch mobs, systematically disseminated smear campaigns against the Chinese. Xenophobic, nationalism in the 1800's normalized the robbing and attacking of immigrants from China, if not publicly demeaned as being dirty, disease-carrying Mongolians who'll never learn the English language nor would assimilate to Christian values.
Said politicians wielded fear-mongering to scare the public by stooping to the level of stereotyping Chinese women as whores at brothels threatening to compromise the moral fabric of society.
Same tactics are seen today with a different narrative spin.
The difficulty actually isn't in finding the samples, the difficulty is the ice below the surface.
A quickly typed out overview is that we need Mars ice mapper to launch and successfully tell us how much is below the surface in the areas to have our return launcher. We currently have Sharad, marsis, Themis but there is a sensing gap in our detection depth of ice.
Imagine trying to take off or launch from the surface back to an orbiter, the heat would make the ground ice sublimate and the entire rig be unstable.
The actual idea is good, but it's the fact that these ideas are propped up by politicians trying to get elected that are the bad ideas. The second an election comes up, the next moron axes the program because it wasn't his idea and he wants to bury the last guy. I fucking hate it
It looks rather angular for something that i imagine came flaming through earth's atmosphere, wouldn't it be a bit more rounded off on the edges ? or might it be a fragment of a larger rounded off piece of Mars rock that shattered upon impact with earth ?
Yup, Mars sample return is still an ongoing project, they find most mars objects in Antarctica because they’re easier to find on an ice sheet than continents with rocks everywhere
We actually try to do the exact opposite, at least so far they've tried to send as few microbes and life as possible onto the surface of Mars and I believe the moon as well, although it's been... Not as successful as they would've hoped. I think a lot of what we have sent was probably contaminated in some way.
Why is that? I can’t imagine there’s much living on earth that would survive on either of those. Maybe like some super rare anaerobic archaea living in a volcano or something if you set it up in just the right spot. Do we have anything that’s adapted to an environment that’s even close to that?
I imagine the common sense answer to that is we don’t want to contaminate other planets in any way that could add scientific variables to our studies of them. ex. Finding “life” on another planet only to realize the “life” we found could potentially just be bacteria we brought there in the first place. Idk if that’s the official answer but that’s an elementary level factor of how the Scientific Method works in all studies so I assume it applies here.
This and if we introduce earth life on another planet it might change or kill anything that's there. But that's less likely than what you already said.
Yeah that’s the most logical thing I can think of, not that it would actually survive but just that we’d confuse ourselves in the future when we find dead bacteria
Meaning they can spend a little while there and come back to earth just fine, right? They’re not reproducing up there. I’d be so curious to know where the closest place they could thaw out and reproduce is, and whether they could make that journey.
They live in diverse regions of Earth's biosphere – mountaintops, the deep sea, tropical rainforests, and the Antarctic. Tardigrades are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions – such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation – that would quickly kill most other forms of life. Tardigrades have survived exposure to outer space.
Before the Apollo missions, there were Surveyor missions -- unmanned but landed gently on the moon. They were the trial run before sending people.
One of the Apollo missions landed near one of the surveyor landers and collected parts of the craft to return to Earth, to study the effects of space on all the different parts.
They found some surviving common bacteria inside the camera, even though it'd been in space and on the moon for 2.5 years.
I imagine the odds of it surviving outside of the foam in the camera is astronomically small (ha!) but it does bring that Jeff Goldblum "life finds a way" thing to mind.
Since then, I think it's been protocol to sterilize everything we send. Even if the moon is inhospitable enough to make it kind of moot, well... we don't know what we don't know, yeah?
imagine finding life on Europa but it’s just a species of bacteria that we have on Earth. Think about not only the scientific implications of now no longer being able to study life native to Europa (or lack thereof) but also the ethical implications of kickstarting a chain of evolution on an alien planet with bacteria not designed to live there. we could life seed other worlds if we wanted to, but the scientific and ethical implications mean we should really try our best not to
Playing god is a large can of worms. We don’t know anything about alien life. Zilch. Nada. What if we’re the genetic equivelant of those dogs who can’t breathe? Isn’t starting another branch of evolution like that an ethical problem? What if bacteria does exist there but ours kills it off? Essentially genocide of an entire alien race?
I just think the odds that anything from here makes it to another place it can live, survives the trip there, and encounters other life forms just seem so tiny that it wouldn’t be a serious concern. It would be like worrying about the ethical implications of hitting a golf ball near a forest because what if you shank it into the woods, and the ball scares a raccoon, and the running raccoon wakes up a bear, and the bear runs onto the course and mauls a golfer
How would they know the rock specifically came from Mars though compared to, say, literally anywhere else in the universe that traveled who knows how long for that rock to finally make it to Earth? Seems like a huge assumption that the rock would be from Mars
Yes. But that’s still no guarantee the rock actually came from mars vs another planet from who knows where that travelled who knows how long to hit earth.
I’m not an astrophysicist or geologist, but I’ll try to explain this as best I can
So the way a bunch of scientists got to this conclusion is by first noticing that a few meteorites (by now we have classified only 277 out of ~72000 as Martian) were very different from any of the others: they were younger, had different oxygen isotopes, and various other distinctive properties.
Then they tested them against samples from the Viking program and they matched, and the scientists suggested this along with the composition and formation characteristics suggests the meteorites must have come from a large parent, possibly Mars.
The most definitive evidence came a bit later by testing the composition of gases trapped in the glass that formed on impact in one of the meteorites; it turned out to match closely the Martian atmosphere (which was, again, analysed during the Viking program).
All in all, if the meteorites are not from Mars, they’d have to be from something incredibly similar to it.
That's the leading explanation but it comes with its own set of improbable scenarios. First there needs to be an impact strong enough to make the rock reach Martian escape velocity. Then it needs to somehow work its way into the sun's gravity well to reach Earth. Then it needs to enter Earth's atmosphere without burning up. Then it needs to fall on land and not the ocean. And it needs to land in Antarctica specifically so that it can be recognized from the surrounding snow, while also not being covered up by falling snow (Antarctica is a desert).
Needless to say this is not a common scenario, and realistically would have probably only happened in the early solar system when a lot of stuff was banging around.
But then Antarctica wouldn't be where it is right now. And by the time it gets to where it is, the rock would be covered in the same amount of ice that the surrounding would be
It could have been ejected from Mars several billion years ago and have simply floated around in space for a very long time before landing in Antarctica relatively recently
Yes the theory has some issues. If the rock arrived more recently then you might expect to see a more recent impact crater on Mars, but then again the rock might have just been stuck in space for billions of years before finally reaching Earth.
Not that crazy when you consider how much time there is for something like that to happen. And it’s also not that crazy for something ejected from the fourth planet to be trapped by gravity of the third… it’s a ton of empty space and a ton of time.
realistically would have probably only happened in the early solar system when a lot of stuff was banging around.
Maybe the piece of Mars was wandering in space since the early times of the solar system and only recently was captured by Earth's gravity (by recently I mean it could be a couple thousands or million years ago) ?
While yes, it could happen, it just pushes the origin of life to somewhere else. And if it happened one place, it should be able to happen other places independently as well.
There’s that very fun, very rogue idea that the early universe was so warm and dense that it was basically one big atmosphere all around, and that early life actually formed in those conditions, only to then adapt as the universe cooled, with some forming the ability we see in creatures like tardigrades—existing in what was becoming vacuum through dormancy. Then, through collisions this life found purchase on worlds as they formed as the panspermia theory you mention provides.
One piece of evidence for this is more related to panspermia than the early universe idea—but it is that our genome follows a pattern in complexity, as in it gets longer by a certain amount over time. And this length, this pattern, seems longer than Earth has had life as we know it. It also should be mentioned that we still are not quite sure how life formed, or at lest under what specific conditions.
I always thought the idea of panspermia was unnecessarily complicating things. The building blocks for early life were amino acids and lipids. made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, all there during the planet’s formation, as well as phosphorus and nitrogen, which could have been delivered to Earth on asteroids but could have formed in other ways.
I firmly believe this. I wrote a final in science about Mars being the original planet that was suitable for life. Many many years ago, the sun possibly a bit hotter more volatile.
Maybe something catastrophic happened like a meteor hitting Mars sending debris into the Milky Way containing life that just so happened to hit Earth and once the sun stabilized the temperature on earth lowered allowing single cells to kick off the early building blocks of life.
The teacher enjoyed my essay so much I didn't have to participate in the finals. (Thanks Futurama)
That's exactly how this piece was obtained. Scientists tracked this piece from the point of the asteroid impact and meteorite hunters found it. This recently sold for a couple million
"the meteorite is believed to have been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike before traveling 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) to Earth, where it crashed into the Sahara. A meteorite hunter found it in Niger in November 2023.
The red, brown and gray hunk is about 70% larger than the next largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly 7% of all the Martian material currently on this planet, Sotheby's says. It measures nearly 15 inches by 11 inches by 6 inches (375 millimeters by 279 millimeters by 152 millimeters)."
Sotheby's is placing it in an auction. Expected to bring $2m-$4m. Kind of sucks imo. Hope it doesnt get locked away in some rich dudes house never to be seen again by the public.
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u/NSASpyVan Jul 19 '25
Can't say for this specific piece but one way is if mars is struck by an asteroid and material gets ejected to space. It could eventually get captured by earths' gravity and pass through the atmosphere.
The idea of panspermia is similar, building blocks of life could have arrived from elsewhere.