Nathalie Cabrol

When I'm underwater, I'm fine.

And if I wanted, I could stay longer, but it wouldn't be very wise.

So when you're looking at the environment of Mars early on, it's fairly similar to that of early Earth.

Never was exactly the same because Mars was always farther from the sun than the Earth, right?

So it was always a little cooler.

But you have to imagine maybe the Arctic during the summer, that would be early Mars, with a lot going on for it in terms of environment, very favorable to even life as we know it.

We don't know how fast life happened on Earth.

There are signs right now showing that it might have actually originated only 200 million years after the crust cooled down.

This still has to be verified, but that's the closest.

And these are indirect evidence.

carbon left by the activity of life, not life itself.

And there is a twist in the story for Mars is that it seems that Mars came together as a planet faster than the Earth and had water earlier than the Earth.

So it may be that Mars was habitable and might have seen the beginning of life

earlier than the Earth.

So all of this is speculation.

Obviously, we haven't found any evidence or solid evidence yet.

I would say unambiguous evidence, but unambiguous evidence of life is going to be something interesting to prove because we don't know what life is, remember.

So I always joke that the only way we would know that there is life on Mars if there was a rabbit jumping in front of the rover, but we might be

You know, gathering, we have what we call a ladder of life detection, which is that you have a series of rounds that you need to go through.

that actually are not proving you that you discovered life, but are making the possibility that what you discovered was made only by the environment more and more improbable.