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Article by Seth Shostak October 4, 2019 (nbcnews.com)

• In 2020, Mars and Earth will be relatively close to each other in their adjacent orbits around the sun. Taking advantage of this fortuitous orbital circumstance, NASA and European-Russian space agencies will be dispatching a small brigade of spacecraft to Mars. The new NASA craft will go beyond merely scouting for locations that were once suitable for life. They’ll be looking for life itself.

• Jim Green, the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, is concerned that scientists haven’t thought much about the next steps should life be found on Mars. What if they found a biota that went extinct billions of years ago on Earth under the surface of Mars? Are we prepared for the discovery of life beyond this planet? Green isn’t worried about an overreaction by the public, though. In 1996, fossilized microbes were found in a meteorite that was ostensibly from Mars itself. The public barely took notice.

• What if we found an intelligent civilization on Mars? Would we do any better than the Spanish did to Native Americans in 1492? A recent survey at Arizona State University reveals that most people would welcome the revelation of intelligent extraterrestrials coming to the Earth. These rubes believe that the advanced beings would be friendly to them. Sure. Thanks ET (the movie).

• No need to worry, says Shostak. There are no intelligent beings on Mars, and certainly no civilizations. And there is no evidence that there ever were. It is a ‘silly concern’. Any life we encounter on Mars will be microscopic. But even this discovery would be enormously significant. It would be evidence that life is a process that begins on many worlds and consequently that the universe may be brimming with biology. But as of now, this is no more than hypothesis.

• [Editor’s Note] Senior SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, the poster boy for the Deep State, is at it again. Here he is smugly reciting the status quo disinformation that extraterrestrial intelligence does not exist anywhere near the Earth, and that the only life we can hope to find off-planet is microbial life. To the very end, Shostak and the Deep State will deny that there are in fact many intelligent species currently visiting the Earth. We are a part of a local star cluster teeming with extraterrestrial civilizations all around us, waiting for us to shake off the shackles of ignorance cultivated by the Deep State serving an elite Illuminati cabal, to pull ourselves out of this third-density zombie apocalypse, and to join the other advanced civilizations of the Galactic Federation.

In the next decade or so, it’s entirely possible that you’ll see a headline announcing that NASA has found evidence of life in space.

Would that news cause you to run screaming into the street? An article that appeared recently in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph hints that Jim Green, the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, thinks the public might be discombobulated by the discovery of biology beyond the bounds of our own planet. But that’s not really what Green believes. He’s concerned that we haven’t thought much about the next steps by scientists, should we suddenly confront the reality of Martian life.

Here’s the backstory: In 2020, Mars and Earth will once again be relatively close to each other in their adjacent orbits around the sun. To take advantage of this fortuitous orbital circumstance, space agencies will be lobbing a small brigade of spacecraft toward the Red Planet. Unlike the robotic explorers now prowling Mars’ dusty landscapes, these new craft — launched by both NASA and a European-Russian collaboration — will be engaged in a type of reconnaissance that hasn’t been tried since NASA’s Viking landers set down there in the mid-1970s. The new craft will go beyond merely scouting for locations that were once suitable for life. They’ll be on the hunt for life itself. Dead or alive.

It’s the imminent dispatch of these new robotic explorers that prompted Green to say that we might learn of life on Mars within a few years. They could dig up compelling evidence of biology. But he also said that the next steps are murky. Now, he wasn’t saying that news of extraterrestrial life would inevitably disquiet the public. We know it won’t because, after all, we ran that experiment more than two decades ago.

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Featured image by Jake Gillman and Andie Isaacs.

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