Desperately looking for news this morning that wasn’t distressing, I stumbled upon the latest from NASA, which announced last week that its Perseverance rover (love that name) found rocks representing, “The clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars.”
Boy howdy, as my Other Worldly series persevering protagonist Rowan Layne would say. Given that my first novel, Alienable Rights, depicts Mars as a devastated planet undergoing environmental restoration—by aliens, of course—this latest NASA news tracks.
Unfortunately, greedy humans are trying to add to the devastation on Mars by seeking to mine red diamonds on the red planet without following restorative protocol, as addressed in book three Aliens Abound, when Rowan first travels into space, and especially in book 5, Alien Sensation.
I’m no scientist—despite being a bit of a rockhound—nor am I a fan of typical dystopian science fiction. Yet I have tried, using literary license, to take fact-based science and launch from there into world-building of the fantasy kind. I’ve also, as a former environmental lawyer, woven messages regarding the perils of planetary devastation and the urgent need for environmental protection and restoration on Earth into each OW novel.
Which is why it’s always good news to see a kernel of scientific truth emerge that fits within the imagined world of what I deem otherworldly, as in extraterrestrial and teeming with alien life. Though Mars is considered a “dead planet,” by Earth’s scientists, this NASA rock discovery seems to definitively conclude that organisms—as in an individual animal, plant, or single-celled life form—once existed there.
The Perseverance rocks came from a dry riverbed sample taken in July 2024 from an arrowhead-shaped rock called Cheyava Falls, along the edge of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river within the Jezero Crater. Before I expound further, can I just say that those names seem straight out of a sci fi fantasy novel? But (highly annoying) spellcheck definitely doesn’t like them.
Water once flowed at the Perseverance sample site, because the Cheyava Falls rock is rich in chemical compounds that could have supported life, including organic carbon, sulfur phosphorous, and oxidized iron, or rust. At least some of those are likely familiar to my fellow non-scientists.
Various markings on the discovered rocks suggest microbes may have once converted those materials into energy—which is kind of straight out of concepts I created, specifically regarding Mars, in Alien Sensation. I’m tickled—not pink but—red.
High-resolution images of the rocks showed “leopard spots,” or lighter specks surrounded by dark rings, containing signatures of minerals found on Earth, specifically vivianite and greigite. Vivianite, or hydrated iron phosphate on Earth, is apparently often found near decaying organic matter and sediments on our planet. And greigite (which spellcheck also rejects) is known to humans as iron sulfide and is produced by some forms of microbial life.
If I haven’t lost you yet with all the geeked-out gushing over science that I don’t fully understand but would dearly love to, here’s what I have to say about this latest Mars discovery. Earth’s inhabitants, beyond that of actual scientists, could and should try to learn from this. Because our own planet is well on its way to total environmental devastation wrought by humans alone, while movies usually make aliens out to be the bad guys.
In my OW novels, there are planets that were similarly destroyed by their own inhabitants, necessitating relocation to other spots in the galaxy. Do we really want to wait until the environmental devastation we’ve wrought makes it too late for us to live and breathe on Earth anymore?