Andy Weir

If you were some aliens and you came to Earth and you said, I wonder if this place has life, you could grab a handful of aliens

anything from Earth, put it under a microscope, and it would be teeming with life.

Like you could grab just some air from the atmosphere.

There'd be microbes in it.

You grab dirt from the ground, microbes.

You grab sand from the most barren parts of the Sahara Desert.

There'd still be microbes in there.

Grab the edge of a volcano or the bottom of the North Pole, whatever.

You'd find life everywhere.

You cannot avoid finding life.

And yet we've gone to Mars and we've looked all over the place and done these exact experiments and found nothing.

I believe that if life ever existed on Mars, it would be all over the place on Mars.

Even if it was just microbial, it would still be all over the place, and it's not there.

I grew up reading, actually, my father's science fiction collection.

I'm a Gen Xer, but I'm kind of a one-generation-off, I'm a baby-boomer-era sci-fi fan.

So basically, I grew up reading Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov.

If I have to pick a favorite author, I say Isaac Asimov.

He was a visionary.

And if I have to pick a favorite book, I always say iRobot.

Those three authors are kind of what defined for me what science fiction was.