First, Curiosity just isn't exploring in a likely place for this to happen, to best of our knowledge.
Mars is now one of the best studied planets in our solar system from orbit apart from Earth. We can spot the tracks of our rovers easily from orbit.
Details from here: Curiosity Rover Tracks, Viewed from Orbit in December 2013
So if there are any intelligent creatures on Mars they don't leave any wheeled tracks, or footprints - or they are tiny.
Also Mars has a near vacuum for an atmosphere and no oxygen to speak of. It has half the light levels of Earth. And average temperatures same as Antarctica - that's at the equator. Higher lattitudes are even colder. At night it gets so cold that CO2 would begin to freeze out as dry ice even for many nights at the equator (much larger extremes between day and night than Earth).
So all said, it's a tough environment to live in. Even on Earth with all the wide variety of species we have here - the places on Earth closest in climate to Mars only have microbes - and sometimes lichens. No insects, and no higher animals. And that's with an oxygen rich atmosphere.
There may be microbes on Mars, may be lichens, just possibly (but quite unlikely) tiny mobile multicellular creatures.
So most scientists expect not much more than microbes, in present day Mars. Extremely interesting microbes because they may have a different biochemistry from Earth life. Could revolutionize biology. We'd learn a lot from ET microbes.
But intelligent ETs - doesn't seem likely.
About the only really possible place for intelligent ETs in our solar system - this is with the blinkered understanding of our science of course - is Europa - which we think is likely to have an oxygen rich ocean. It just might have ETs there, but if so it will be some time before we can contact them, hidden from us by many kilometers thickness of ice - and we have to be super careful not to introduce Earth life to the Europa ocean.
If they did find intelligent life, anywhere, of course they'd tell everyone. This whole idea that NASA is secretive doesn't match up with the way they are in my experience.
Indeed the most "secretive" are actually the ESA. Compare Rosetta with Pluto. And Curiosity. The NASA missions release photographs within days or at most a week. ESA with the Rosetta mission still hasn't released many of the close up photographs from last year. We only got to see the much lower navigation camera images.
There's a reason for this. It's to protect the researchers so they can make discoveries from the images before anyone else, having put their life's work into acquiring those images. That makes sense in most areas of science. But in planetary exploration with the general public so keen and excited to see the images, one wishes they could release them sooner. By the time they do release them, nearly everyone has forgotten the actual event that they photographed in them and interest has moved on to something else.
If they discovered an extra terrestrial in a Rosetta image - I think they would probably carefully crop out the comet from the image to protect their scientific research :). That's a joke, but it gives an idea.
Remember these are scientists who are organizing everything here. Not government officials. And not military types. There is no military need at all to study Mars or the Moon, thank goodness. The Outer Space Treaty helped to bring about this current state of affairs where exploring space is seen as a competitive science, sort of like the Olympics in space science, rather than a military endeavour.
So, the NASA is not a department of the US Department of Defence, as some seem to think. It is a civilian space organization. It did sometimes fly DoD missions in the Space Shuttle. Nowadays I think the DoD mainly does separate missions. At any rate spacecraft to Mars are not DoD and there is no reason to keep any discoveries secret from the rest of the world. Rather - as soon as they discover anything interesting, they tend to over hype it if anything, and announce it to the whole world that they have found something exciting, which to non scientists may not seem so exciting as it was to them.
I expect they'd also over hype discovery of an intelligent ET on Mars (or anywhere in our solar system) if it was at all possible to over hype it.
Mars is now one of the best studied planets in our solar system from orbit apart from Earth. We can spot the tracks of our rovers easily from orbit.
So if there are any intelligent creatures on Mars they don't leave any wheeled tracks, or footprints - or they are tiny.
Also Mars has a near vacuum for an atmosphere and no oxygen to speak of. It has half the light levels of Earth. And average temperatures same as Antarctica - that's at the equator. Higher lattitudes are even colder. At night it gets so cold that CO2 would begin to freeze out as dry ice even for many nights at the equator (much larger extremes between day and night than Earth).
So all said, it's a tough environment to live in. Even on Earth with all the wide variety of species we have here - the places on Earth closest in climate to Mars only have microbes - and sometimes lichens. No insects, and no higher animals. And that's with an oxygen rich atmosphere.
There may be microbes on Mars, may be lichens, just possibly (but quite unlikely) tiny mobile multicellular creatures.
So most scientists expect not much more than microbes, in present day Mars. Extremely interesting microbes because they may have a different biochemistry from Earth life. Could revolutionize biology. We'd learn a lot from ET microbes.
But intelligent ETs - doesn't seem likely.
About the only really possible place for intelligent ETs in our solar system - this is with the blinkered understanding of our science of course - is Europa - which we think is likely to have an oxygen rich ocean. It just might have ETs there, but if so it will be some time before we can contact them, hidden from us by many kilometers thickness of ice - and we have to be super careful not to introduce Earth life to the Europa ocean.
If they did find intelligent life, anywhere, of course they'd tell everyone. This whole idea that NASA is secretive doesn't match up with the way they are in my experience.
Indeed the most "secretive" are actually the ESA. Compare Rosetta with Pluto. And Curiosity. The NASA missions release photographs within days or at most a week. ESA with the Rosetta mission still hasn't released many of the close up photographs from last year. We only got to see the much lower navigation camera images.
There's a reason for this. It's to protect the researchers so they can make discoveries from the images before anyone else, having put their life's work into acquiring those images. That makes sense in most areas of science. But in planetary exploration with the general public so keen and excited to see the images, one wishes they could release them sooner. By the time they do release them, nearly everyone has forgotten the actual event that they photographed in them and interest has moved on to something else.
If they discovered an extra terrestrial in a Rosetta image - I think they would probably carefully crop out the comet from the image to protect their scientific research :). That's a joke, but it gives an idea.
Remember these are scientists who are organizing everything here. Not government officials. And not military types. There is no military need at all to study Mars or the Moon, thank goodness. The Outer Space Treaty helped to bring about this current state of affairs where exploring space is seen as a competitive science, sort of like the Olympics in space science, rather than a military endeavour.
So, the NASA is not a department of the US Department of Defence, as some seem to think. It is a civilian space organization. It did sometimes fly DoD missions in the Space Shuttle. Nowadays I think the DoD mainly does separate missions. At any rate spacecraft to Mars are not DoD and there is no reason to keep any discoveries secret from the rest of the world. Rather - as soon as they discover anything interesting, they tend to over hype it if anything, and announce it to the whole world that they have found something exciting, which to non scientists may not seem so exciting as it was to them.
I expect they'd also over hype discovery of an intelligent ET on Mars (or anywhere in our solar system) if it was at all possible to over hype it.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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