‘Is there life on Mars?,’ asked David Bowie, and would not stay for an answer. The astrobiologist Steven Benner has an answer – which is that Mars not only has had life but still does. The first part of that answer is broadly accepted; the second remains highly contentious. His book is a scattershot plea for increased attention to be paid to searching for evidence – or, as he sees it, more evidence. The stakes are high. As he says in his introduction, if life exists only on Earth, that’s a coincidence; if it exists on Earth and a close neighbour, that’s the start of a pattern.
Mars has always excited the imagination. No one has ever speculated hubristically about the chances of anything coming from Mercury. C.S. Lewis apart, the literature of Venus is as thin as its atmosphere is dense. It is Mars where Elon Musk dreams of dying – ‘but not on impact’. As Benner notes, the film of Andy Weir’s book The Martian made $630 million worldwide; throwing in Interstellar and Arrival brings the total pretty close to the budget of an actual Mars mission.
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