Avi Loeb

So it's extremely likely that Mars had life.

In fact, it may have had it before Earth because it's a smaller body and objects cool based on the surface area.

And the amount of heat that they have from the formation is proportional to their volume.

So if you consider a planet that is smaller, there is more surface area per unit volume the smaller you make it.

So Mars is smaller and must have cooled earlier than Earth.

So it may have had life before Earth.

And we are talking about difference in hundreds of millions of years.

And the...

The last universal common ancestor, it's called Luca, was dated at 4.2 billion years ago.

That's the source of all forms of life as we know it on Earth.

4.2 billion years ago is just around the time when life from Mars could have been delivered to Earth by rocks.

And if that never happened, Earth could have delivered rocks with life to Mars.

So I'm pretty confident there was life on Mars.

I don't think it would shock me in any way.

Primitive life, for sure.

Whether intelligent life developed within 2 billion years, twice as fast as it developed here on Earth,

That remains to be seen.

One way to find out is to go into these caves on Mars.

Yes.

You know, these lava tubes and put a drone inside of them to search for prehistoric paintings on the walls of these caves.