Avi Loeb

By the way, Mars may have had life before the Earth because it's a smaller body, so it has a bigger surface area for its mass.

The mass of the object tells you how much heat it can retain from the formation process, and then the surface area tells you how fast it can cool.

And Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth.

So life may have started on Mars, actually, because it had rivers...

lakes, oceans of water, and it could have been actually delivered to Earth.

You know, we might be all Martians, and when Elon Musk

you know, considers going to Mars, it might be the second trip around.

We might be going back to our childhood home because there were tiny astronauts inside rocks that were chipped off the surface of Mars that arrived to Earth and seeded the Earth with life as we know it.

Yeah.

And in fact, you know, we can find out if we,

get this material back to Earth, as NASA is planning to do, hopefully within a decade, then we can make sure that these were microbes.

And perhaps we can infer whether the building blocks of these microbes are similar to the ones

we have here on Earth, whether the DNA, RNA kind of process took place in both places.

Yeah, I've seen the data.

It's not conclusive, but it's intriguing because both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere right now.

So what happens on Earth is that when an object roughly the size of a person or smaller goes through the atmosphere, it burns up.

creates a fireball just like an atomic explosion you know and actually you have an object of order a meter colliding with earth every year every year there is an atomic explosion size fireball in our atmosphere it's not reported in the news because it happens pretty high at an altitude of 50 kilometers so it doesn't do anything and you know 71% of the earth is covered by oceans but

Yes.

So these meteors, they are quite important.

Obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66 million years ago were extinguished by a giant impact by an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island.