Scientists analysing data from NASA’s Perseverance rover have reported a tantalising discovery from Jezero Crater on Mars: rocks rich in minerals and chemical patterns that could represent potential biosignatures — the traces left behind by ancient life. The findings, published by an international team led from Imperial College London, point to the remains of an ancient lake where conditions may once have been favourable for microbial life to take hold.
The evidence comes from mudstones, clays, silica, iron-phosphate and iron-sulphide nodules, along with carbon compounds that appear to have undergone redox reactions. On Earth, such processes are often associated with biology, though the researchers are careful to stress that non-biological explanations are still possible. It will take the return of rock samples to Earth, with far more powerful laboratory techniques, before firm conclusions can be reached.
Background: Mars’ Watery Past and Why It Dried Out. Billions of years ago, Mars was a very different world. Orbital and geological evidence shows that rivers once carved valleys across its surface, lakes pooled in craters, and perhaps even a shallow ocean covered the northern lowlands. Minerals such as clays and carbonates, which only form in the presence of liquid water, are widespread in ancient Martian rocks.Even so, the significance is hard to overstate. If these features turn out to be biological in origin, then Mars would represent a second, independent cradle of life within our own solar system. That alone would be a profound blow to those who insist that life can only arise through supernatural intervention, because it would show that under the right conditions, life can emerge more than once without any need for divine tinkering.
So what went wrong? The leading theory is that Mars lost its protective magnetic field early in its history. Without a strong magnetosphere, the solar wind gradually stripped away much of the planet’s atmosphere. As the atmosphere thinned, surface pressure dropped, and water could no longer remain stable in liquid form. It either froze as ice beneath the surface or escaped into space. Today, Mars is a cold, arid desert with only traces of water ice at the poles and in the subsurface, but its geology still bears the scars of its wetter past.
The Chemistry of Potential Biosignatures
The recent Perseverance rover findings are especially intriguing because of the specific minerals and chemical reactions detected. Among them:
- Clays and Silica - These minerals are excellent at trapping and preserving organic molecules. On Earth, they often act as both a record of past biology and as potential catalysts for prebiotic chemistry.
- Iron-Phosphate and Iron-Sulphide Nodules - These mineral nodules can form through biological activity. Microbes on Earth commonly exploit redox reactions involving iron, phosphorus, and sulphur to obtain energy. Their presence in Martian mudstones hints at similar processes.
- Organic Carbon Compounds with Redox Signatures - The detection of carbon compounds that appear to have undergone reduction–oxidation (redox) reactions is important. Life on Earth is powered by such chemistry—transferring electrons between molecules to harvest energy. Abiotic redox chemistry is also possible, but when coupled with the right mineral assemblages, it begins to look suspiciously biological.
If future analysis shows isotopic fractionation (a preference for lighter isotopes, as living organisms display) or microfossil-like textures, the case for past life on Mars will become far stronger. Even now, the convergence of water-rich geology and life-like chemistry makes Jezero Crater one of the most promising places yet explored for finding evidence of extraterrestrial biology.
For creationists who have long insisted that abiogenesis—the emergence of life from non-life—is "impossible," discoveries like this are deeply awkward. Their case depends on maintaining absolute certainty that natural processes can never produce life. Yet every time science uncovers new evidence of prebiotic chemistry, habitable environments beyond Earth, or now, potential biosignatures in Martian rocks, that certainty looks less credible.
Of course, creationists will not simply abandon their claims. Some will seize on the scientists’ cautious language—"potential biosignatures," not confirmed life—as though scientific integrity were a weakness. Others will argue that these chemical traces could just as easily be non-biological, or even that if life once existed on Mars, it too must have been "specially created" or seeded there by design. In this way, they try to insulate their beliefs from evidence by shifting the goalposts.
But these evasions do little to address the real issue: science works by testing hypotheses against evidence, while creationism simply asserts conclusions and scrambles to retrofit them to the facts. If ongoing analysis strengthens the case for ancient life on Mars, the scientific community will adjust its understanding accordingly. Creationists, by contrast, will be left clinging to ever narrower and less plausible explanations, their certainty eroded one discovery at a time.
The Creationist Responses – and Why They Fail
So how might creationists respond to this latest hint that Mars could once have supported life? One thing of which we can be sure, they are never going to admit life from non-life without their particular god's intervention because that would destroy their one remaining god-shaped gap, so the playbook is fairly predictable, and we’ve seen variations of it every time new evidence emerges that points to life’s natural origins.
- "It’s all too tentative to mean anything."
Creationists will be quick to highlight the careful language scientists use—words like "potential" and "possible." They’ll claim this proves the discovery is meaningless. But this misses the point entirely. Scientific caution is a strength, not a weakness. Researchers are obliged to spell out the limits of their evidence. That doesn’t make the findings trivial: it shows science is honest about uncertainty, while still acknowledging the growing weight of evidence that life is not unique to Earth. - "It could all be abiotic chemistry."
Yes, that’s possible—and scientists themselves are considering such explanations. But if creationists want to rest their case here, the burden is on them to present a specific, testable chemical pathway that reproduces all the observed features. It’s not enough to wave vaguely at "other processes." Science thrives on models that can be tested and refined; creationism provides none. - "If there was life, God must have put it there."
This is the fallback whenever evidence points too strongly towards natural explanations. It avoids the problem rather than answering it. If life on both Earth and Mars had to be separately "created," why do the chemical signatures look so similar to what we see in natural processes here? Why would a designer deliberately create misleading evidence of natural origins? At best, this argument just pushes the question back: how can anyone tell the difference between a "designed" outcome and a naturally occurring one if the evidence looks the same? - "The geology might be wrong."
Another line will be to dispute the interpretation of Jezero Crater as a former lake environment. But this isn’t idle speculation—multiple instruments on the rover have confirmed mineral assemblages that only form in water-rich conditions. To dismiss the geology outright would require rejecting the entire scientific process of planetary exploration, which is hardly a credible position. - "Earth is still unique."
Finally, some will claim that even if Mars once hosted life, Earth remains unique in producing higher organisms, intelligence, or civilisation. But this simply moves the goalposts. The claim that abiogenesis is impossible collapses the moment we have evidence of life elsewhere. If life can emerge twice in one solar system, it becomes far harder to argue that Earth’s biosphere requires supernatural explanation. - "The Laws of Thermodynamics make life from non-life impossible."
This old chestnut gets wheeled out whenever creationists are pressed on abiogenesis. They claim the Second Law of Thermodynamics forbids order arising from disorder, and so molecules could never assemble into something as complex as life without divine intervention. The problem is that this completely misunderstands the law. The Second Law applies to closed systems, where no energy is added. But neither Earth nor ancient Mars was ever a closed system. Both were flooded with energy—sunlight, geothermal heat, chemical gradients—that can and does drive local decreases in entropy, provided the total entropy of the system increases overall. That’s why snowflakes form, crystals grow, and chemical order emerges naturally from energy flows. Life is not a violation of thermodynamics: it’s a product of it. - "Why didn't they evolve into humans?"
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution has no end goal and no blueprint aimed at producing humans—or any particular species. Every organism alive today, whether bacterium, oak tree, beetle, or human, is the product of its own evolutionary history. If Mars once hosted life, it would have followed its own path shaped by Martian conditions.
On Earth, multicellular life took billions of years to appear, and complex animals only arose relatively recently. Mars lost its magnetic field and much of its atmosphere early on, which means its surface environment became hostile long before there was time for such complexity to evolve. Even if we find evidence of nothing more than ancient microbes, that in itself would be astonishing, because it would mean life managed to get started independently on two neighbouring worlds.
'Potential biosignatures' found in ancient Mars lake
A new study suggests a habitable past and signs of ancient microbial processes on Mars - and Imperial scientists provided crucial context.
Led by NASA and featuring key analysis from Imperial College London, the work has uncovered a range of minerals and organic matter in Martian rocks that point to an ancient history of habitable conditions and potential biological processes on the Red Planet.
An international team, including researchers from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering (ESE) at Imperial, propose that these geological features within the so-called Bright Angel formation in Mars's Jezero Crater are closely connected to organic carbon, and could be a compelling potential biosignature of past life.
Professor Sanjeev Gupta, Professor of Earth Science in ESE, and Academic Co-director of Imperial Global India, said:
This is a very exciting discovery of a potential biosignature but it does not mean we have discovered life on Mars. We now need to analyse this rock sample on Earth to truly confirm if biological processes were involved or not.
Professor Sanjeev Gupta, co-author.
Department of Earth Science and Engineering
Imperial College London, London, UK.
Promising signs
A core component of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, the Perseverance Rover has been exploring the 45-kilometre-wide Jezero Crater since 2021, a site chosen because it once held a huge lake and a river delta – environments that are considered prime targets in the search for signs of past life. Its key goal is to collect and store the first set of selected rock and soil samples that will be brought back to Earth for detailed analysis.
NASA's Perseverance rover took this selfie on May 10, 2025, marking its 1,500th Martian day, or sol, exploring the Red Planet.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
The new study, published in Nature, focuses on a distinctly light-toned outcrop in the crater, dubbed ‘Bright Angel’, located within an ancient river valley which provided water to the Jezero lake.
While driving through the valley, called Neretva Vallis, Perseverance came across a thick succession of fine-grained mudstones and muddy conglomerates. Here, it conducted a detailed analysis of these rocks, using instruments such as the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) and Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC).
An unexpected lake
By mapping the types and distributions of different sedimentary rocks at Bright Angel, ESE researchers (including Professor Gupta and Dr Robert Barnes, a Research Associate in ESE, who were both funded by the UK Space Agency), were able to reconstruct the environment in which these mudstones were deposited.
Their analysis revealed a range of sedimentary structures and textures indicative of lake margin and lake bed environments, including a composition rich in minerals like silica and clays – the opposite to a river scenario, where fast-moving water would carry these tiny particles away.
This pointed to a surprising conclusion: they had found lake deposits in the bottom of a river valley.
Perseverance captures photo of 'Bright Angel' in 360-degrees.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/ASU.
Co-author Alex Jones, a PhD researcher in ESE and collaborating scientist with the NASA Perseverance team, who has conducted a detailed analysis of the ancient lake environment, said:"This is unusual but very intriguing, as we wouldn’t expect to find such deposits in Neretva Vallis. What our sedimentological and stratigraphic work has done is indicate a past, low-energy lake environment – and that is precisely the kind of habitable environment we have been looking for on the mission.
I'm thrilled to be involved in such a discovery and contributing to Perseverance operations during my PhD. It’s also pretty cool to apply my terrestrial geologic field experience I gained as a student to investigate such an exciting unit at Jezero!
Dr Alex J. Jones, co-author
Department of Earth Science and Engineering
Imperial College London, London, UK.
The finding may suggest a period in the history of Jezero Crater where the valley itself was flooded, giving rise to this potentially habitable lake.
Compelling context
With the lake habitat scenario pinned down, the Perseverance science team turned their attention to the mudstones themselves. It was inside these rocks that they discovered a group of tiny nodules and reaction fronts, with chemical analysis revealing that these millimetre-scale structures are highly enriched in iron-phosphate and iron-sulfide minerals (likely vivianite and greigite).
These appear to have formed through redox reactions involving organic carbon, a process that could have been driven by either abiotic or – interestingly – biological chemistry. Importantly, this sets the stage for everything that happened next: the formation of this specific type of oxidised, iron- and phosphorus-rich sediment was the essential prerequisite for creating the ingredients for subsequent reactions
.
Nodules and reaction fronts on the Martian rock ‘Cheyava Falls.’Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
Since these ingredients mirror by-products of microbial metabolism seen on Earth, it can be considered a compelling potential biosignature, raising the possibility that there was once microbial life on Mars.
A question for Earth labs
Ultimately, the only way for the true origin of these structures to be determined is by returning the samples to Earth, a possibility that rests on when future missions will manage to successfully collect the samples from Mars’ surface.
Fortunately, Perseverance has already drilled and cached a core sample from the Bright Angel outcrop, named ‘Sapphire Canyon’, which, along with others collected by the rover, is awaiting the Mars Sample Return mission – a joint NASA-ESA endeavour aiming to bring them to Earth in the 2030s.
Once in terrestrial laboratories, samples like Sapphire Canyon will be analysed with instruments far more sensitive than those on the rover by scientists from around the world. Only then will we determine the precise origin of these features and whether they are the result of unique abiotic chemistry, or constitute evidence of past microbial life on Mars.
This discovery is a huge step forward – the samples we helped characterise are among the most convincing we have. The work was an impressive international effort and highlights the power of collaboration and advanced robotics in planetary exploration.
Professor Sanjeev Gupta.
This exciting discovery represents a significant step forward in our understanding of Mars and the potential for ancient life beyond Earth. The chemical signatures identified in these Martian rocks are the first of their kind to potentially reflect biological processes that we see on Earth and provide more compelling evidence that Mars may have once harboured the conditions necessary for microbial life. Professor Sanjeev Gupta and his team at Imperial College London, supported through UK Space Agency funding, have made an invaluable contribution to this ground-breaking research, demonstrating the world-leading UK exploration science by leading the establishment of the geological context for the research. While we must remain scientifically cautious about definitive claims of ancient life, these findings represent the most promising evidence yet discovered. The upcoming Rosalind Franklin Mars rover mission, built here in the UK, will be crucial in helping us answer whether samples similar to those observed in this study represent genuine biological processes, bringing us closer to answering: are we alone in the Universe?
Matthew Cook
Head of Space Exploration at the UK Space Agency.
Publication:
AbstractThe Perseverance rover’s discoveries in Jezero Crater don’t yet prove that Mars once hosted life, but they push us closer to answering one of humanity’s oldest questions: are we alone in the universe? Even the suggestion that chemical traces on another planet resemble those produced by living processes is remarkable, because it shows how narrow the creationist claim of “impossibility” really is.
The Perseverance rover has explored and sampled igneous and sedimentary rocks within Jezero Crater to characterize early Martian geological processes and habitability and search for potential biosignatures1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Upon entering Neretva Vallis, on Jezero Crater’s western edge8, Perseverance investigated distinctive mudstone and conglomerate outcrops of the Bright Angel formation. Here we report a detailed geological, petrographic and geochemical survey of these rocks and show that organic-carbon-bearing mudstones in the Bright Angel formation contain submillimetre-scale nodules and millimetre-scale reaction fronts enriched in ferrous iron phosphate and sulfide minerals, likely vivianite and greigite, respectively. This organic carbon appears to have participated in post-depositional redox reactions that produced the observed iron-phosphate and iron-sulfide minerals. Geological context and petrography indicate that these reactions occurred at low temperatures. Within this context, we review the various pathways by which redox reactions that involve organic matter can produce the observed suite of iron-, sulfur- and phosphorus-bearing minerals in laboratory and natural environments on Earth. Ultimately, we conclude that analysis of the core sample collected from this unit using high-sensitivity instrumentation on Earth will enable the measurements required to determine the origin of the minerals, organics and textures it contains.
Main
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission is the first in a sequence of missions designed to return a scientifically selected suite of Martian rock, regolith and atmosphere samples to Earth for laboratory investigation. The goals of the mission are to explore the Jezero Crater landing site and its surroundings, constrain the geologic history and habitability of the site, seek signs of past life, and prepare a cache of samples for potential return to Earth1. The Perseverance rover carries an instrument payload designed to fulfil these goals, with the capability to characterize rock targets, their submillimetre-scale textural attributes, and potential organic and inorganic biosignatures, placing these features into an outcrop-scale context1.
Perseverance has explored three geologic terrains in Jezero Crater (Supplementary Fig. 1): (1) the crater floor, which includes lava flows and igneous cumulates that have experienced aqueous alteration under a variety of 2,3; (2) the Western Fan, a sequence of sedimentary rocks derived from mafic to ultramafic sources and deposited in a fluvial-deltaic-lacustrine setting4,5,6; (3) the Margin Unit, a layered-to-massive sequence of rocks with strong orbital spectroscopic signatures of olivine and carbonate that is exposed between the crater rim and the Western Fan7. This study focuses on a suite of rocks exposed in Neretva Vallis, a valley incised through the Jezero Crater rim and Margin Unit, which was the feeder channel for the Western Fan8 (Supplementary Fig. 1). Perseverance initially explored a distinct, bright-toned outcrop exposed on the northern margin of Neretva Vallis. This outcrop area is informally named ‘Bright Angel’ (Fig. 1a). In High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) images of this deposit, albedo variations appeared to indicate layering at the metre scale. Subsequently, Perseverance explored strata exposed along the southern margin of Neretva Vallis, in an area informally named ‘Masonic Temple’ (Fig. 1a), where rocks with similar characteristics crop out. As described below, the outcrops in these areas share many characteristics and are referred to collectively as the Bright Angel formation. Subsurface structures detected by the Radar Imager for Mars’ subsurface experiment (RIMFAX) ground-penetrating radar (GPR; Methods and Supplementary Fig. 2) can be interpreted to indicate that the Bright Angel formation lies stratigraphically above the Margin Unit, but at the present time, we cannot rule out the possibility that the Bright Angel formation represents a part of an older unit.
Outcrop-scale observationsFig. 1: Perseverance’s path through Neretva Vallis and views of the Bright Angel formation.
a, Orbital context image with the rover traverse overlain in white. White line and arrows show the direction of the rover traverse from the southern contact between the Margin Unit and Neretva Vallis to the Bright Angel outcrop area and then to the Masonic Temple outcrop area. Labelled orange triangles show the locations of proximity science targets discussed in the text. b, Mastcam-Z 360° image mosaic looking at the contact between the light-toned Bright Angel Formation (foreground) and the topographically higher-standing Margin Unit from within the Neretva Vallis channel. This mosaic was collected on sol 1178 from the location of the Walhalla Glades target before abrasion. Upslope, about 110 m distant, the approximate location of the Beaver Falls workspace (containing the targets Cheyava Falls, Apollo Temple and Steamboat Mountain and the Sapphire Canyon sample) is shown. Downslope, about 50 m distant, the approximate location of the target Grapevine Canyon is also shown. In the distance, at the southern side of Neretva Vallis, the Masonic Temple outcrop area is just visible. Mastcam-Z enhanced colour RGB cylindrical projection mosaic from sol 1178, sequence IDs zcam09219 and zcam09220, acquired at 63-mm focal length. A flyover of this area is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FAYABW-c_Q. Scale bars (white), 100 m (a), 50 m (b, top) and 50 cm (b, bottom left).Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS.
The Bright Angel formation consists of approximately metre-scale blocks formed by fracturing and physical weathering of the exposed outcrop (Fig. 1b). In RIMFAX GPR profiles, radar-reflective layers express a range of apparent dip angles, from horizontal up to about 30° at the northern contact with the Margin Unit (Supplementary Fig. 2). The Bright Angel formation appears to be subdivided into concave-upwards to flat-lying bodies of layered rock lying within the Neretva Vallis channel (Supplementary Fig. 2). Assuming that the observed layer orientations formed during deposition of the Bright Angel formation, the topographically highest-standing outcrops near the contact with the Margin Unit are stratigraphically lower than outcrops farther from the contact.
A representative example of Bright Angel formation outcrop is visible in the ‘Beaver Falls’ workspace (Fig. 2). Here, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) and Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and Engineering (WATSON), SuperCam, and Mastcam-Z instruments (Methods) analysed a rock containing the targets ‘Cheyava Falls’ and ‘Apollo Temple’ and a core sample, named ‘Sapphire Canyon’, was subsequently collected. In this rock, centimetre-scale, reddish-to-tan-coloured, recessive layers are separated by thinner, relatively resistant, light-toned layers (Figs. 2 and 3a). The layers in this rock dip more steeply and strike at an angle to layers in the nearby outcrop, implying that it may have been displaced from its original orientation. Topographically above but stratigraphically below this rock is a darker-toned rock with a coarsely granular texture, the site of the target ‘Steamboat Mountain’ (Fig. 2). This darker-toned rock was investigated as a possible transitional lithology between the Bright Angel formation and the Margin Unit.
Fig. 2: The Beaver Falls workspace.
Mastcam-Z image mosaic of the Beaver Falls workspace on sol 1217. The light-toned layered block contains the Cheyava Falls natural surface target, the Apollo Temple abrasion and the Sapphire Canyon core sample location. The Sapphire Canyon sample was collected from approximately the same location as Cheyava Falls after analysis of the target was completed. The red box shows the location of the SuperCam target Kolb Arch (Supplementary Fig. 11). The darker-toned granular block contains the Steamboat Mountain abrasion. Downhill is to the left on this image. Mastcam-Z enhanced colour RGB vertical projection mosaic from sol 1217, sequence zcam09264, acquired at 110-mm focal length. Scale bar, 10 cm.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS.In general, macroscopic rock textures in the Bright Angel outcrop area are diverse and complex. Intervals of rock are wind-fluted and massive in appearance (Supplementary Fig. 3a), show large (centimetre scale) nodular features (Supplementary Fig. 3b), and are layered and cross-cut by light-toned erosionally resistant and mineralized fractures and veins (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 3a,b). Primary textures include layered and structureless intervals with limited evidence for transport and deposition by currents, such as cross bedding or plane bed laminations. Across Neretva Vallis, in the Masonic Temple area (Fig. 1a), outcrops express wind-fluted, massive, layered and granular surface textures such as those seen in the Bright Angel area (Supplementary Figs. 4–6). However, the Masonic Temple area also includes poorly sorted conglomerates composed of rounded to subangular millimetre- to centimetre-scale clasts embedded in a fine-grained matrix, as seen in the targets ‘Bass Camp‘ (Supplementary Fig. 7) and ‘Wallace Butte’ (Supplementary Fig. 8a,b).Fig. 3: Layering, nodules, reaction fronts and organic detections.
a, WATSON nighttime image of Cheyava Falls with both white-light LED groups on acquired on sol 1188 at a stand-off distance of 3.91 cm. Image resolution: 21.0 ± 0.4 µm per pixel. b, Colourized SHERLOC ACI image acquired on sols 1201–1202 outlined with a white box and overlain on the WATSON image from a. The ACI image is a focus merge of 13 ACI images acquired between stand-off distances of 4.035 cm and 4.335 cm and has an image resolution of about 10 µm per pixel. Three 1 × 1 mm SHERLOC spectral scans were acquired at the orange square location at stand-off distances of 4.01 cm, 4.035 cm and 4.06 cm. One 1 × 1 mm spectral scan was acquired at the blue square location at a stand-off distance of 4.035 cm. The black dotted rectangle shows the footprint of the PIXL scan acquired from this target. The magenta cross at the corner of the scan provides a reference point for comparison with c, which is the colourized SHERLOC ACI image from b. The image shows the authigenic nodule and reaction front features as well as the SHERLOC and PIXL scan locations. d, SHERLOC Raman spectra from representative targets in the Bright Angel unit with fits to an instrument –O-stretching overtone feature from the SHERLOC fused-silica optics (light grey, labelled ‘Bknd’) and the G-band signal at about 1,600 cm−1 associated with organic carbon in the targets Walhalla Glades (blue), Cheyava Falls (red) and Apollo Temple (green fit on grey spectrum). Malgosa Crest (yellow) shows no G-band signal above the instrument background. Scale bars, 5 mm.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
Hurowitz, J.A., Tice, M.M., Allwood, A.C. et al.
Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars. Nature 645, 332–340 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09413-0
Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
If Mars did nurture life, then abiogenesis is not only possible but may be a natural outcome when conditions are right. That would mean Earth is not the miraculous exception creationists insist upon, but part of a wider pattern in the cosmos. And even if Mars never progressed beyond simple microbes, that in itself would tell us something profound: that life can emerge in multiple places, but its trajectory depends on local circumstances, not on any grand design pointing towards humans.
The scientific method does not claim certainty — it deals in probabilities, evidence, and testable hypotheses. Creationism, by contrast, clings to dogma and dismisses anything that threatens its narrative. The more we learn about Mars, the more contorted the evasions will become, because the evidence points in only one direction: life is not as improbable, nor as divinely dependent, as creationists would have us believe.
In the end, the real divide is not between Earth and Mars, or between microbes and humans, but between two approaches to understanding reality. One demands evidence and adapts as new data arrive. The other starts with the conclusion and works backwards. As the rocks of Jezero Crater slowly yield their secrets, the choice of which approach leads us closer to the truth should be clearer than ever.
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