by Dick Bain

     Mars has always been of special interest to us mortals. To the ancients, the baleful red color suggested that Mars might be the god who visits wars on humanity. In Holst's composition, "The Planets," the section about Mars is titled "Mars, the Bringer of War," and the music of this section sounds warlike.  But Mars has also been seen as a place where life may exist. Percival Lowell, a well known astronomer in the early 20th century, believed that Mars is inhabited, and that the lines he thought he saw on Mars are canals used by the Martians to distribute water for irrigation.  He founded Lowell observatory especially to study the surface of Mars. While Lowell's ideas about an advanced civilization on Mars were generally discounted by other astronomers, the idea of some form of primitive life lingers on.

     In 1976 two Viking spacecraft orbited Mars and each sent a lander to a selected site on the surface of the red planet. Each lander contained equipment designed to perform experiments on soil samples scooped from the surface of Mars. The results of the experiments were contradictory. One type of experiment seemed to indicate biological activity in the soil samples, whereas another type indicated no such activity. Many biologists feel that the apparent biological activity was due to some inorganic interaction. So the question of life on Mars has stood unanswered for 20 years. But now new evidence has reopened the question.

     In August, 1996, the world's press surprised us when they announced that evidence for life in Mars' past was discovered in a meteorite found in Antarctica.  While the evidence certainly supports the case for the existence of primitive life forms in the Martian past, this verdict is by no means universally accepted by the scientific community. Some feel that non-biological processes could have produced the same results. Besides, the evidence for life forms is indirect. There appear to be elliptical objects in the rocks that could have been life forms and mineral deposits near these objects that are the same as those created by the decay of life forms on earth. The problem is that they are much smaller than any primitive life forms that have ever existed on our planet.

     While the supporting evidence for life in Mars past is intriguing, unfortunately the jury will  be out for a long time unless the objections can be answered satisfactorily. But if we suppose that life did exist on Mars early in it's history, what are the implications for students of The Urantia Book?

     The Urantia Book authors tell us that life, in a primitive form that they call "life plasm" on p.399, is implanted on a candidate world by the Life Carriers. This single-celled life form carries the potential to evolve into so-called "mortal will creatures" such as ourselves. According to the authors, the first true mortals emerged from the evolutionary process about 449,000,000 years after the original life implantation. (667;707) If it turns out that life existed on Mars millions of years ago, then it would appear that the Life Carriers were responsible for this life.

     If life was implanted, but none exists there today, does that mean that the life implantation failed? The authors intimate that life implantation may not always succeed: "The Life Carriers of a planetary corps are given a certain period in which to establish life on a new world, approximately one-half million years of the time of that planet. At the termination of this period, indicated by certain developmental attainments of the planetary life, they cease implantation efforts, and they may not subsequently add anything new or supplemental to the life of that planet." (400) So did the life implantation on Mars fail, or is evolution still progressing there?

     According to planetologists studying data from various sources, Mars appears to have had rivers and even vast oceans of water early in its history. A billion years ago, it also had a carbon dioxide atmosphere several times denser that our present atmosphere. Apparently because of its lesser gravity and other factors, Mars has now lost most of its atmosphere and perhaps much of its surface water.

     It appears that Mars would have been an ideal place to implant Urantia type life in those long ago ages. But undoubtedly the Life Carriers would understand enough of planetary evolution to predict its loss of atmosphere and water. Would they implant life on such a world? The authors of the book tell us that life can exist on a world such as Mars, so perhaps they did implant life there with the potential to adapt to the present conditions. "If intelligent creatures should exist on a planet with an atmosphere similar to that of your near neighbor, Venus, they would belong to the superbreather group, while those inhabiting a planet with an atmosphere as thin as that of your outer neighbor, Mars, would be denominated subbreathers." (561)

     An article in Nov. 1996 Scientific American  relates the conditions on Mars today. The average temperature at the equator is -76 degrees F!  It does occasionally get warm enough to melt ice at the equator, but the ice is probably permafrost perhaps hundreds of meters below the surface, so we would not expect to see any liquid water in this area of Mars. There may be ice at the surface in the polar regions, but the temperature there would never get above the melting point of ice, so again, no liquid water is expected at the surface.