It is one of our greatest cosmic misfortunes that we have completely missed the golden age of Mars…About 3.5 billion years ago, during the first billion years of the solar system’s existence, the Red Planet was indeed a blue planet, flooded with oceans, seas, and rivers as Earth is today.

But all was lost–even before the same great miracle began to take place on our planet.

Ancient sedimentary basins, delta estuaries, and river beds are all that remain of Mars’ watery past, which ended when the planet’s magnetic field broke down, allowing the solar wind to drag away the atmosphere and water to be lost to space.Many things could have happened in that first billion years, including the emergence of life.

On Earth, life began well before the planet’s billionth birthday, leading many exobiologists-scientists studying the possibility of extraterrestrial life to believe that wherever there is liquid water and the correct chemistry, biology could quickly take hold.