On September 29, 2015, NASA announced new evidence of the presence of liquid water under the surface of Mars. This item even found its way onto the first page of The New York Times (despite all the competing news from Pope Francis, President Xi Yinping of China, and the ongoing invasion of Europe by hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East). Mars, the “red planet” virtually in the back yard of our Earth, has for many years been the focus of human imagination about intelligent creatures in outer space. Science fiction has generated libraries of books about “little green men” from Mars coming to visit. I suppose that the latest news from NASA will revive these fantasies, though if there is life in these underground puddles at all, it is unlikely to be more interesting than (at best) bacteria—quite unable (as in that classic cartoon) to walk up to a horse and say “take me to your leader!”
And with the enormous expansion in the power of telescopes, the search for extraterrestrial life has been looking farther afield. Astronomers have been making lists of far-flung stars with planets that might be able to support life. The one given the name “Gliese 832c” is, at the moment, a plausible candidate. (Don’t ask me to give its location on a map of the galaxy. I imagine that Gliese is the name of the astronomer who found the star, a very big one. The “c” stands for the location of the planet as number 3 going out from the mother star.)
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