As Nasa chooses the six women and four men who could be the first to travel to the Red Planet, some experts believe the reason for humanity’s desire to go there – it’s our ancient home
For as long as we’ve looked up at the night sky, Mars is the one planet that has stood out from all the rest. Glowing red in the distant darkness, it has been an obsession of humans for millennia.
Babylonians called it Nergal, the great hero. To the Greeks it was Ares, god of war. The Egyptians even named their capital Cairo after it – al Qahirah, or “the conqueror”. But in the 21st century, Mars has gone from ancient myth and mystery to a place we are actively exploring – and will soon actually set foot on. Yesterday, Nasa introduced the world to the six women and four men selected from 8,000 applicants who could be the first to travel to the Red Planet.
Ben Bailey, Lauren Edgar, Adam Fuhrmann, Cameron Jones, Yuri Kubo, Rebecca Lawler, Anna Menon, Imelda Muller, Erin Overcash and Katherine Spies will train for nearly two years. They will then be eligible for science and exploitation missions to low Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars.
Nasa scientists announced last week they had found “the clearest sign of life” on the planet, which at its farthest is about 140 million miles away from us. Samples drilled by the Perseverance rover from Neretva Falls, an ancient river channel, in July 2024, showed surface spots and nodules often associated with microbial life on Earth.
Associate administrator of Nasa’s science mission direc-torate, Dr Nicky Fox, said: “We’re kind of one step closer to answering one of humanity’s most profound questions – are we truly alone in the universe?” Astrobiologist Paul Davies is even more emphatic. Speaking on Sky History’s Ancient Aliens, he says: “Do I believe that there is or was life on Mars? Yes, I’m absolutely certain of it.”
For some, though, the groundbreaking discovery gives weight to an even more audacious belief – that perhaps humans are drawn back to Mars because that was where life on Earth originally began.
READ MORE: NASA finds clearest sign yet of life on Mars as huge discovery made on planet
That the first stirrings of life started on the Red Planet before jumping to Earth seems like a fantastical theory, but it’s one expounded by geochemist Steven Benner, former chemistry professor at Harvard University. When he studied Mars meteorites, he found the key chemical ingredients for life – boron and molybdenum – were far more abundant on early Mars than they ever were on Earth.
In 2013, he shocked many contemporaries by suggesting the meteorites may be responsible for seeding life here, perhaps on a stray meteorite. Mr Davies agrees: “I’ve always felt that Mars was actually a better place than Earth for life to get going.
“Certain elements that are actually essential for organic chemistry to work properly are more abundant on Mars than they are on Earth. We can imagine that life on Earth started on Mars so in a sense we’re all Martians or descended from Martians.”
Others have suggested that our depiction of Martians, with elongated bodies and big almond-shaped eyes, isn’t science fiction, but ancient memory. Mythologists point out that extraterrestrial creatures have been depicted in ancient texts – often described as “fallen angels”. In the Biblical book of Enoch, they are called the Watchers, and similar stories appear in ancient Jewish texts, the Book of Jubilees and the Damascus Document.
The idea that there was once an advanced civilisation on Mars has caused many to speculate on objects shown on photos of the planet’s surface, taken by the Nasa rovers.
Some believe they have seen half-buried statues or other artificial structures, including what some people say looks like a Buddha figure and the ruins of an Inca-like city.
Author Mike Bara is among those who hold the belief – dismissed as fantastical by most cosmologists – that Martians, escaping a catastrophe on their planet, brought life to Earth. He tells Ancient Aliens: “There are a lot of different objects on Mars that people think they see and it’s really hard to dismiss them, because they do look like sculptures human beings make. Even after a massive cataclysm, like what apparently took place on Mars, you’re going to find remnants from a lost civilisation that’s leaving behind those last hints that ‘we were here’.”
So how close are we to sending humans to Mars? The new space race is well under way, with both national space agencies such as Nasa and private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX competing to be the first.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reached the Red Planet in 2006, has circled the planet more than 40,000 times and, in 2015, discovered evidence of water, which is vital to sustaining human life.
The first astronauts to travel there, however, will face a long and perilous journey. While it took three days to reach the moon, going to Mars will take at least 240 days, given current technology, and will be fraught with deep space hazards.
But many believe Mars is our best chance of establishing a human colony outside Earth. Temperature fluctuations are less extreme than the moon, for example, and its gravity is also more like Earth’s. And Mars already has an atmosphere, so modifying the temperature and surface, to create an environment suitable for human life, is hypothetically possible.
Technology forecaster Stephen Petranek says: “If we heat up the poles on Mars and we start having flowing water, water itself will go into the atmosphere, which is another greenhouse gas. And we will warm up Mars, and we will be able to plant crops.”
While he believes that scenario is probably at least 300 years away, Nasa aims to send humans to Mars in the late 2030s to early 2040s. SpaceX hopes to get there by 2029-2031, which experts consider optmistic.
When that day comes, it will be considered the greatest feat in the history of humanity – much more momentous than when Neil Armstrong jumped off the ladder on to the Moon, followed later by Buzz Aldrin.
Mr Petranek believes colonising Mars is key to our survival. “There are lots of threats to life on Earth,” he says. “We just need to get a single hit from an asteroid that’s as big as the one that took out the dinosaurs. Going to Mars, it’s something we have to do, or we die.”
