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canyonstom t1_it1tykg wrote

Reply to comment by TimeLeopard in Curiosity Mars Rover Reaches Long-Awaited Salty Region by Pluto_and_Charon

I'm not OP but it's probably just short of impossible it could chance upon a fossil of any sort of multicellular organism. Based on Earth history, we have evidence of microbial life from approximately 3.7 billion years ago.

The first evidence of multicellular organisms don't appear until circa 600 million years ago, so evolution took 3 billion years to advance from single to multicellular life.

From our observations of Mars, it is believed the last water would have dried up around 3.7 billion years ago. Its approximate age is 4.6 billion years, or around the same age as Earth.

Taking what we know about our own planet it is fair to say that any single celled organisms on Mars didn't have long enough to evolve to become multicellular, assuming there ever were any single celled lifeforms there in the first place.

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TimeLeopard t1_it29c13 wrote

Well also consider that even if Earth and Mars are the same age, we can factor in that most models predict the moon slaming into earth during its early formation. If the same event didn't happen until much later in Mars formation, it could be possible Mars had a head start. Granted didnt Phobos slam into Mars too? I don't really know when that was supposed to have happened.

But yeah I'm getting way into speculation here than actually any science.

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danielravennest t1_it3nyy6 wrote

> Granted didnt Phobos slam into Mars too? I don't really know when that was supposed to have happened.

50 million years from now, if we don't mess with it. By then we could have mined it for raw materials, or turned it into an anchor for a space elevator.

We don't know how Phobos and Deimos came to be, but one idea is debris kicked up by an asteroid collision, that then came together by gravity. There are plenty of big craters on Mars that could have been a source.

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