Is there life beyond Earth in our solar system? Wow, what a powerful question.
Curiosity — which has been roving on the surface now for about three years — has really shown us that it’s sitting in an ancient river bed, where water flowed rapidly. And not for a little while, perhaps hundreds of millions of years.
We brought it into the rover, we tasted it, and guess what? We tasted organics. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, they were all there.
If there’s any place in the solar system where life is not like us, where the substitute of water is another solvent, and it could be methane, it could be Titan. Well, is there life beyond Earth in the solar system? We don’t know yet, but we’re hot on the pursuit. The data that we’re receiving is really exciting and telling us, forcing us to think about this in new and exciting ways. I believe we’re on the right track.
Lifeforms.
That in the next 10 years, we will answer that question. And if we answer it, and it’s positive, then life is everywhere in the solar system. Just think about that. We may not be alone.
