NASA officials on Wednesday announced that extensive analysis of data collected from examinations of Martian rocks by the Perseverance rover last year have revealed the strongest evidence yet that the Red Planet was once teeming with tiny microscopic germs, the AP reports.

It’s not conclusive yet because the samples need to be examined in a lab here on Earth, which necessitates sending another probe there to retrieve the samples and who the fuck knows when that’ll happen plus Ketamine Brain’s supposed to be sending 50,000 people to die there so they might as well bring lab equipment with them to run the tests before they die and blah blah blah…

Then, assuming that there’s a definitive conclusion that these are indeed fossilized Martian E Coli, there’s a whole other mess of trying to establish a clean wall of separate abiogeneses on the two planets. The whole reason that this is and will not be actually THAT big of a deal is that it’s been almost three decades that the idea of microbial life on Mars has been internalized and accepted in the popular imagination because of that one rock found in Antarctica that definitely originated on Mars also bore possible signs of fossilized microbes. That acceptance pretty much immediately opens the door to the panspermia theory and questions about whether the Martian microbes might’ve actually originated on Earth or vice versa that life actually began on Mars and then made its way to Earth where it evolved into what we know today or whether both planets were pollinated with primordial microbes from some other source elsewhere in the solar system – or even beyond.

All of which is a long way of saying that anyone interested in the topic should keep their fingers crossed that these dead Mars germs truly look like nothing on Earth – either living now or in the fossil record – so they can come away confident that this is the real deal and that life really has originated elsewhere, separately. Just proving that microscopic extremophiles can ride ejecta from boloid impacts across the void and make it to the other planet has already been done.