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NASA's Perseverance rover took a stunning photo during its cruise through the Yosandu Valley region of Mars.
In the photo, it can be clearly seen that Mars is scattered with dozens of fossils of all sizes that look like "fish", which is a kind of cold window "makeover", if it was placed more than 20 years ago, maybe netizens would really believe that this is a real Martian "fish fossil".
However, after the gradual deepening of scientific research, more and more people realize that the "fossils" in the universe are not the "fossils" we understand, but "mineral fossils".
So are these "fish fossils" mineral fossils?
Fossil minerals on Mars.
Seeing this kind of "fish"-like mineral fossil, I am afraid that if it had been placed more than 20 years ago, people would really have to believe it.
Because when it comes to the traces of life on Mars, this is not just a "blind guess" that netizens have taken happy and happy pictures.
I am afraid that scientists all over the world believe that there was an extremely high probability of life on Mars at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
Why?
It was the first probe to go to Mars in the 70s of the 20th century, "Mars 9", took a live photo, but the photo taken by the probe at that time looked like this, which directly exploded the pot of everyone present in the world.
In the process of space exploration, Mars 9 arrived at the surface of Mars, and then immediately activated its own camera to shoot, hoping to find some locations where life exists on Mars in the photos.
Sure enough, Mars 9 unveiled a photo that made everyone scream, showing the bodies of three dead Martians, and this probe became the first probe in the history of human space exploration to "touch alien creatures".
If the hoax-level lying of Mars 9 was the reason for the ban, then after this incident, scientists continued to move forward on the next exploration path, but the photos taken by Mars 9 have always been circulated in the world.
Time has passed, and finally ushered in the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century or so, scientists believe that if they can use the technology in their hands to try to restore the traces on the photos left by Mars 9, then these earliest pictures in human history to reveal the truth about extraterrestrial life will be higher than the current observation level.
So, a group of scientists eagerly picked up the instruments in their hands, hoping to restore these pictures to the picture of alien life that Mars 9 saw at the beginning.
Many people have paid their own efforts and even their youth for this, but in the end, no one has been able to completely restore the picture of alien life revealed by Mars 9.
So everyone had to find another way to explore Mars.
The theory that life once existed on Mars was put forward in 1996, when a meteorite with Martian rocks that hit the Earth from Mars was discovered in the United States, and after careful study of it, it was extremely heavy and materially very similar to the landing site on Earth.
As a result, American scientists judged that the meteorite definitely flew from Mars, so they began to study it in more detail.
In the process of studying this meteorite, scientists found that the surface of this meteorite actually has traces of life activities that look very much like microscopic photographic enlargements.
This trace was mineralized as early as 500 million years ago, but when zoomed in, it is very clear that the lines on the trace are very obvious, and these lines look like linear cells divided into small "segments".
So the scientists analyzed these "fragments", and finally something surprising happened, after analyzing these "fragments", they were surprised to find that these "fragments" are actually "very" similar to bacteria on the earth.
But this "very" is the avoidance of the words in the minds of scientists, and there is still a huge difference between the bacteria on the earth and the traces of cells that are "very" like.
But it is necessary to study the fossils of Mars according to the idea that life was once "very" possible, but scientists have been lacking some key evidence in the process of studying fossils on Mars.
This is one of the reasons why they wonder how the fossils they study compare to those on Earth.
The traces and fossils left by the remains of the earth where life exists, these "fossils" are based on the process of stone formation, and after the death of many organisms, the bones or corpses left behind will be petrified in the ground, turning into rock or soil.
However, according to the degree of understanding of the basic elements on Mars, the fossils of Mars cannot be rocks that life has petrified underground, and at most can only be traces left by life above after a series of processes.
That's why scientists haven't been sure if Martian fossils are really mineralized lifeforms.
Latest photos.
After several days of roaming, the Perseverance rover made a few more days in the Yosandu Valley area, during which time it took several photographs of the area.
Two of the photographs show about 20 large and small pieces of mineralized life scattered incidentally in the valley of Yosandu Valley.
After seeing this set of photos, many netizens immediately made a detailed analysis of the content of the two photos, such as how the fossils were formed, what the creatures were like, and so on.
Most of these analyses are based on the photographs of the insects and the environment on Mars, but according to an amateur extraterrestrial life explorer in the West, the mineralized life in the two photographs may be of two different natures.
When the amateur researcher, a man who has had a strong interest in living things since childhood and was obsessed with finding them on other planets, he saw the photographs and found that the fossils in two of them were likely to be of two different natures.
The first thing to analyze was the two minerals on the photographs, and after looking at the photographs, the amateur researcher was very certain that the two minerals could be traces of mineralization of two different species of fish.
The large "fossil" may be a fossil of an ancient Martian fish, while the smaller one appears to be a mineralization trace of a small aquatic animal that reproduces on eggs.
The amateur researcher's reference to the ancient Martian fish was not conclusive, and he himself knew that this was only his own speculation, and many people later speculated further based on his analysis, and finally concluded that the two minerals may have been mineralized traces from the same organism.
This speculation is based on the fact that neither of these mineral lifeforms has grown fish-like eyes, and that the smaller mineral life has not even grown any organs, which is why the mineralized life forms of these two fish have not left traces of their appearance because they were left traces during their lives.
The reason why the large mineral life forms do not leave eyes is because the life forms on Mars do not have a developed visual system, and there are also differences in body size between the large mineral life forms and the small mineral life forms, which may be the relationship between male and female fish.
Speculation of fish.
In fact, there is some truth to the amateur researcher's speculation that there was once life on Mars.
He speculated about the two mineral organisms based on a combination of details from the two photographs, and the results of the analysis were the same as the scientists' opinion: the large fossils could be fish, and the small fossils could be fish eggs.
The reason why the mineralization traces of the two mineral life forms have so many similarities with the fossils on the earth is not only because the morphology of the two fossil minerals has many similarities with the life minerals on the earth, but also because there are many similarities in the environment in which they appear.
When scientists analyzed the bulk mineral life, they found that this mineralized life form is very likely to be a marine organism, first of all, because the mineral volume of this mineralized life form is very large, but they have not found sedimentary minerals similar in volume to the volume of mineralized life on the earth.
This suggests that the bulk of the mineralized life may be a migratory fish, and after their death, the water in their bodies is evaporated through mineralization, leaving only the mineral in the shape of a fish, perhaps not as hard as a mineral, and then after many years of wind and rain, their size has become smaller.
In addition, some elements of seawater have been found in the minerals of large mineralized organisms, which further confirms the speculation that this mineral life form may be marine organisms.
However, the composition of seawater is not found in the minerals of small mineral organisms, which is likely due to the different ways in which small mineral organisms are mineralized.
If a large piece of mineral life is a fish, then a small piece of fossil life is likely to be a fish egg.
This speculation is based on the similarity of the two mineralized lifeforms, with the shape of the egg being a rounded oval and the shape of the large mineralized lifeform being rounded and oval.
At the same time, there is a certain degree of scientific basis in the process of fossilization of these two mineral organisms, modern science believes that the process of fish mineralization is possible to form fossils in a large time frame, while the process of fossilization of eggs may be more difficult
As a result, there are a lot of fossilized fish on Mars and very few fossilized eggs.
epilogue
It is also possible that the fossilized mineral life in these photographs may be fish eggs, but the difficulty with which eggs are fossilized suggests that the large mineral life form may have been a large aquatic organism.