on Monday, March 8th, Jon said

This is an interesting topic. It is fortunate in the case for extraterrestrial life that we have found and proved that there was liquid water on Mars and that conditions were suitable for life to exist.

There are two other interesting issues now. Firstly, the NASA probes are not equipped to look for signs of past or present life and consequently will not be able to answer the most pressing question of all with any certainty - was there ever life on Mars?

In addition, it may answer one question we have about the proliferation of life throughout our solar system, but it doesn't answer as many questions as it may appear.

Vertebrate life on Earth began around 500 million years ago, shortly after an asteroid shower that battered the Earth for a long period of time. The origin of these asteroids is suspected to be Mars.

One theory that currently stands is that since Mars was capable of supporting life before Earth, that it evolved there first, and some of it was carried to Earth on those asteroids. The diversity and competition created when the native Earthlings met the Martians could have caused a rapid evolutionary speedup which led directly to the vertebrate life.

In addition, recent reports on the BBC's science website suggested that there is a good chance that life can be transmitted in inter-stellar asteroids, possibly trapped in pools of liquid water under the surface of icy balls of rock.

We should then consider the possibilities that firstly, we may be Martian in origin, and secondly, we may not even come from this solar system originally. We are a long way from proving that life is not unique in the Universe, if the two theories above hold.

Someday, science will give us the answers. Let's live on in the hope that we, as a tiny speck of creation, can someday comprehend the whole.