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All life on Earth could be alien life.

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So says professor Steven Benner, who has presented a thesis that life in our solar system may have developed not on our blue planet, but on Mars.

“The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock,” he told the BBC.

The surprising idea was presented by Benner — from the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Gainesville, Florida — at the Goldschmidt conference in Florence.

Benner argues that life needs very specific conditions to develop. Adding energy to the primordial soup of early Earth, Benner says, wouldn’t have created RNA, one of the three key molecular building blocks of life (along with DNA and proteins).

Generating RNA, Benner says, would have needed very specific “templating” minerals — specifically boron and molybdenum, which are far, far more abundant on Mars than they are on Earth.