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This is not a morality tale about planetary preservation – and what happens if you don’t take good care of your literal ground of being. But after years of assuming that Mars is and always had been inhospitable to life, scientists at NASA are now convinced that an ocean once covered 20% of the surface of Mars. In some places, the ocean was likely a mile in depth. And according to Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, “The longer water persists on a planetary body in one location, particularly if there is geological turnover, the more likely it is that it would provide a habitable environment for a suitable duration for life to either originate or proliferate. An ocean would meet this need.”
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The question of whether life ever existed on Mars has inspired scientists – and songwriters – for decades. The Red Planet is currently an arid, icy desert where no sign of life remains, but was it always this way?

It is widely recognised that living entities have three basic requirements: standing water, an energy source and the five chemical elements, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus and nitrogen. Then a very long time for the chemical soup to stew. The rover Curiosity has found evidence of all three in certain areas of Mars, namely the Gale Crater, but were these available for long enough for life to develop?
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Now it’s the Aussies. On October 13, 2000, a bizarre display of upper atmosphere pyrotechnics mystified the midwestern U.S. On Tuesday, December 26, a similar event took place over Queensland in Australia. As in the U.S., police were swamped with calls about the strange lights and booming noises in the sky.

There were reports of “explosions in the sky, sonic boom-type noises and flare-type lights.” In the U.S. on October 13, witnesses described the phenomenon in various ways, primarily as a large white light surrounded by five smaller balls of light or as a flaring body breaking up and moving slowly across the sky.
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