“The new findings probably deliver the final blow to the possibility that the surface of early Mars was a “warm and wet” incubator for any martian life. They are consistent with a history in which Mars has been almost always rather cold and dry, Ehlmann says. The later weathering of rock into salts seems to have occurred during geologically brief intervals when water flowed on the surface, she says. “The most stable, [habitable] environments may have been underground.””
I always fantasized that all life on Mars – microbial – was deep in the rock. And in my story, we’ve given up hope that there’s life on Mars and are colonizing and using water from deep aquifers. But one drilling engineer is surreptitiously trying to find life in the deep water. And does.
