The wet planet: There was life on Mars (probably)

The wet planet: There was life on Mars (probably)

Scientists now say that an ocean several miles deep once covered a third of the surface of the planet, enough water to support the origin and evolution of life. The red planet, they said, had once been a deep blue, just like Earth.

Forget the panic that ensued after Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast of H G Wells' classic, The War of the Worlds, no one is worried by the prospect of a Martian attack but what people should worry about is that Mars might have been like the earth in terms of the water supply.

The true nature of Mars, however, emerged in the late 1960s when the Mariner space missions paid the first visits to Earth's smaller neighbour. Mars turned out to be heavily cratered, dotted with extinct volcanoes, colder than Antarctica and, crucially, drier than the Atacama desert - the driest place on Earth.

Mars was a dead place, a desiccated wasteland sterilised by harsh solar radiation...

Let's hope that Earth will not be subjected to a radiation (nuclear or otherwise) that would render desolation.