Favourite Martians

The JPL Rover Curiosity is in the process of preparing for its groundbreaking mission. The first high resolution panorama photographs are arriving daily as it scans its surroundings in preparation for its mission. So will Curiosity succeed where so many have failed ? Personally, i'm confident that it will discover life on Mars. But what form might that life take ? Two years ago NASA recently made the news with a discovery that it had discovered microbial life that substituted Arsenic for Phosphorus as a necessary requirement for life. Phosphorus is chemically similar to Arsenic, but although most life on Earth requires it, those same life forms find Arsenic toxic. NASA was criticised for implying the microbe may have been brought to Earth via meteor, although no direct evidence to this effect was shown. So it will be clear that Curiositys search will be very thoroughly governed and any results will be carefully checked.

Since the italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli thought he saw a system of 'canals' on Mars in 1877, it has been speculated that life was present on the red planet. H.G Wells most famously wrote of the martian invasion by hyper intelligent, leathery skinned beings and many other science fiction writers including Edgar Rice Burrows and the late Ray Bradbury, penned adventures on the surface of this enigmatic world.

Arthur C Clarkes excellent book, Man and Space, in the Time Life series is a great source of information on extraterrestrial lifeforms, but from a more scientific perspective. Clarke goes into much detail regarding the theoretical forms which life on other worlds may take, such as the following illustrations of beings from an aquatic, heavy gravity and mars-like world.

The last illustration for a small world with light gravity shows a bipedal alien with a huge chest cavity and flaring nostrils, well suited to a thin atmosphere and frail, skeletal limbs which would ave developed under the lesser gravitation.

So what do you think ? Will Curiosity find more red sand and empty desert ? Or might it finally discover the traces of a long vanished lifeform, which may have flourished briefly on a thriving world, before the upstart blue planet began to develop and stake its claim as the crucible of life in the known universe...