What If We Found Life?

What if we found life

on Mars.

Not like aliens with the small necks and big green heads and black eyes, just something simple. A tiny little creature, what we might liken to a puppy here on Earth, but smaller. By all measurements we were able to obtain it would fit in the bowl of our cupped hands. Imagine the interest this would induce.

Because as humans, we understand that there’s something special about life.

We have entire branches of science dedicated to trying to figure out how life began, what makes it keep going, and where we might have come from.

We’re fascinated to learn about how resilient life can be, from extremophiles that survive in boiling waters near thermal vents in the ocean to penguins stumbling and sliding around the frozen tundras of Antarctica.

We spend the best of our days meandering around zoos, aquariums, and national parks, gawking in amazement at animals in all their variety. We even adopt certain kinds of them into our families and homes. A cat prowls across my desk as I write this. Persistently perplexed at why I stare at an inanimate screen instead of him, he stops directly in front of it, sits on my keyboard, and starts purring. He’s reminding me that he is life.

We spend millions of dollars on missions into space designed in part to detect life on other bodies in our Solar System. Just finding a single-celled prokaryote on one of the moons of Jupiter would be the discovery of the century. We cup our telescopic ears as far as we can hear out into our galaxy, hoping our radios are tuned to just the right frequency to pick up a faint riff from an extraterrestrial rock concert broadcasted 1000 light years ago.

We think we’ll know life when we see it.

Imagine if we sent a manned spacecraft to Mars to bring that tiny peculiar puppy back to Earth. Imagine the hero’s welcome – for both the astronaut and their precious cargo. Imagine the care and protection we would give this newly found life while trying to learn about the wonders of its existence. We’d do whatever it took to keep it alive.

Then, imagine if someone broke into the lab one night and killed it.

Imagine the outrage.

Because as humans, we understand that there’s something special about life.

What if we found life

and it was ours.