I’m always disappointed by how stupid people can be. With three Mars rovers from the United Arab Emirates, China, and the USA reaching Mars, speculation is high about the prospects of finding evidence of life on that planet. Ever since Schiaparelli reported seeing “channels” on Mars in 1877, his use of the Italian word canali was mistranslated into English as “canals”, and people went crazy over the prospect of life on Mars. H.G. Wells wrote a hit novel about an invasion of Martians, which has been made into a number of movies. Yes indeed, life on Mars is a profitable speculation.
What disappoints me so much is that nobody — I mean NOBODY — is approaching this topic in a rational manner. Way back in 1944, Erwin Schrodinger, the author of Schrodinger’s Equation (the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics), laid out the basic principles of life in a little book entitled “What is Life?” Here’s a quotation from that book:
It [a living organism] can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy -which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.
This is the fundamental nature of life. If you want to understand biology, this is the starting point: all living systems live by harvesting negentropy. NOT ENERGY!!!!! Energy is merely the transport mechanism for negentropy. Yes, all life ultimately depends upon energy from the sun — but that energy is not the sustenance, it is the carrier. You can’t eat money, you can’t wear money, and you can’t shelter under money — but money can purchase food, clothing and shelter. Believing that energy is the driving force behind life is akin to believing that money is essential for human existence.
Sadly, not many people understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the nature of entropy — which is why they don’t understand biology. Even many scientists fail to grasp the fundamental role of negentropy in living systems, which explains why we have so much nonsense about life on Mars.
Wikipedia has an exceptionally long article on the possibility of life on Mars. It includes fully 287 citations to support its points. It discusses at great length the many factors scientists have delved into in their attempt to determine whether there is or has been life on Mars: temperature, seasons, the existence of water, various other chemicals, and so on. Yet NOT ONCE does the article mention negentropy or even indirectly refer to its importance. This is rather like discussing computers, integrated circuits, software, and transistors without ever mentioning electricity.
If you wish to understand something, you must start with the fundamentals. The fundamental driver of life is negentropy. All these other considerations (temperatures, water, length of day or length of year) are mere engineering details. Without negentropy, there’s no point in even considering the possibility of life on Mars.
As it happens, Mars does indeed receive negentropy from the sun, just as the earth does. But here is the crucial point: because Mars is further away from the sun than the earth is, Mars receives about one-third as much negentropy per unit area than the earth. To put it another way, the driving force for life on Mars is only one-third as powerful as it is on earth.
This means that was harder for life to form on Mars than it was on earth. It would have taken longer for life to form on Mars than on Earth. Yes, it is possible that life did arise on Mars in its first billion years, but we must recognize that the odds were very much against it.