Life on Mars Yet Again

Isaiah 48:13

“Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand hath spanned the heavens: when I call unto them, they stand up together.”

You only have to wait a couple of weeks for a new story about life on Mars. Since scientists began to look at the red planet through telescopes, they have been tantalized by the possibilities of life there. It is a natural evolutionary belief. After all, if life evolved on Earth, surely it could evolve on Mars also to a lesser extent. It has been the dream of evolutionary scientists to find such life ever since Giovanni Schiaparelli thought he had seen artificial canals on Mars in 1877.

“Fact” and fiction writers alike began to have a field day. Those canals must have been built by intelligences, so their imagination peopled the red planet with Martian people. Subsequent observations and unmanned missions to Mars have not uncovered signs of such life, but scientists, in any case, are now looking merely for microscopic life, having given up on larger life forms years ago.

In Lester Del Ray’s 1952 novel Marooned on Mars, a stowaway teenager discovers an underground civilization on the planet. The technique of putting Martian life underground neatly explained why we could not detect it. Today, these ideas have come full circle, as a recent study has suggested that the long hoped for microscopic life on Mars might, like Del Ray’s underground city, be found only underneath the surface. It is hard for them to give up on the idea of Martian life, but the Bible teaches that only the Earth is inhabited.    Author: Paul F. Taylor

Father, we know that Your word is true in every respect. Thank You for the unique place that You have put us and how You have designed everything so well. Amen.

Ref: Brown University. “Ancient Mars had right conditions for underground life, new research suggests.” ScienceDaily, 24 September 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924102040.htm>. Image: Percival Lowell’s drawings of canals on Mars, Public Domain image.