ABSTRACT
Defining life in a single sentence may be impossible. Nevertheless, almost everyone agrees that living things have several special characteristics. Life requires a complex mix of organic molecules to survive, and living cells are capable of producing most of them. However, it seems logical that organic molecules must have existed before life arose. The idea that life somehow developed within a primordial soup of organics laying in pools on the Earth’s surface remains a viable theory. The emergence of oxygen from oxygenic photosynthesis was a major turning point in the Story of Life. Life changed the planet forever and opened the door to multi-cellular life which relies on the oxygen waste product of the cyanobacteria. If life takes only 500 million years to develop, as it seems to have on Earth, then there’s a chance that it developed on Mars in its early years when it had a substantial atmosphere and before its environment became so hostile.
