Speech on "Is there life on Mars?"
Answers
Answer:
Is there life on Mars? Some of our friends at the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences in Peoria, Illinois, wonder whether there is life on ...
Explanation:
plzz mark me as brainlaist
Answer:
In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli turned his 21.8-centimetre telescope – one of the finest of the time – on the enigmatic disk of Mars.
Scientists had long known that rather than simply being a point of light in the sky Mars was an entire world unto itself, but Schiaparelli was the first to attempt to map it in detail.
He observed dark areas, which he presumed to be seas, connected by linear features hundreds of kilometres long. He dubbed the latter canali, a term that technically means channels, but was translated into English as “canals.”
In the 1870s and ’80s, Schiaparelli mapped Mars again and again, convincing himself that the canal system was rapidly expanding – much as if an advanced civilisation were desperately trying to preserve its water supply in the face of drought.
Even at the time, many of Schiaparelli’s colleagues were dubious, wondering, in the words of US astronomer David Weintraub in his 2018 book Life on Mars (Princeton University Press), whether these features were simply “the result either of bad optics in Schiaparelli’s telescope or in his own head.”
But Schiaparelli’s vision captured the public imagination. Others would even suggest that the Red Planet’s colour was due to ruddy vegetation, much as if it were covered in Japanese maples. In 1938, Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds panicked hundreds of thousands of listeners, convincing them that death-dealing Martian “tripods” were on the verge of showing up at their doorsteps.
In 1976, when NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter provided the first good images of Mars, one, dubbed the “Face on Mars”, entered tabloid infamy as proof that humanoid aliens once existed on our planetary neighbour, creating giant structures that would put the ancient Egyptians to shame.
We now know that the Face on Mars, like the canals, was a trick of light and shadow. But the search for life on the planet continues to tantalise. Orbiting spacecraft and landers have proven that Mars was once remarkably Earthlike, with oceans, lakes and rivers, plus an atmosphere considerably denser than the thin film it has today.
The Red Planet’s earliest epoch is now officially dubbed the Noachian – a term designed to conjure images of vast amounts of water.
Today, the burning question isn’t whether Mars might once have been habitable – at various times in its distant past, it most certainly was – but whether it might have developed life before its climate became too cold and dry. If so, that would be evidence of what astrobiologists call a “second genesis” of life (the first being our own).
Even if that second genesis never developed beyond single-celled microorganisms, it would mean that life arose at least twice in our own solar system. And if that happened here, how often might it have occurred on the thousands of planets astronomers are finding, circling distant stars? And, how often might some of those microorganisms evolved into creatures like us?
The easiest way to find life on Mars would be if a multi-tentacled something from a science-fiction writer’s dream jumped out from behind a rock and waved to us: “Welcome, Earthings, here I am!” Second best would be if a rover were to scoop up a soil sample and see a bunch of wriggling microorganisms.
But the surface of Mars is an extremely harsh environment, and signs of life, if it exists or ever existed, could be hard to detect. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of well-thought-out ways to hunt for it.
✌️✌️ THANK YOU ✌️✌️
PLEASE MARK AS BRAINLIEST