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So far, we’ve seen a human face on Mars, a monster crab, and a cannonball.

At least that’s what the internet tells us.

It’s easy for people to look at images from the red planet and see all sorts of things that seem to indicate alien life—even though the truth is much less exciting. The human face is a mesa, the crab is just a rock, and the cannonball is a pebble.

Most scientists aren’t surprised when some people come up with a sci-fi explanation for an image from another planet. After all, humans evolved to find recognizable patterns amid chaos. There’s even a word for it: pareidolia. But what we don’t expect is for fellow scientists—those who have been trained in the scientific method—to make those claims. When they do, it hurts science as a whole.

Read More Here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-premature-claims-of-life-on-mars-hurt-science/

If life exists on Mars, it still hasn’t showed itself—but recent evidence from the Red Planet increasingly supports the possibility. Life could have developed there. Most of the conditions are right, and nothing found so far rules out the possibility, either in the distant past or today. 

If something is or was alive on the Red Planet, it’s probably tiny. Because microbes make up the vast majority of life on Earth and live in its most inhospitable environments, they are the most likely thing to find somewhere else. It’s not so easy figuring out what “alive” means on another planet—let alone discovering a living microbe. Scientists are still puzzled by life on Earth— struggling to understand how life started, what it requires to survive, what it looked like 4 four billion years ago, and how to recognize traces of ancient life today. 

Read More Here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/did-life-sign-the-guest-book-on-mars/