Yes. That could now happen. I'm starting to regret putting my name in there, what if there's already aliens on Mars, and now they can take over my life. I'm sorry in advance.

You know how the nazis were so efficient in rounding up people? You just gave up your name to the martians!

@Ka-pi96 It would confirm suspicions that life is universal and not a happy accident on Earth. The more signs of life on other planets, the higher the chances are there is more advanced life out there as well.

The chances of finding that advanced life are depressing though. Distances in time and space are too big and the more life we find, the more it would also confirm that the laws of physics, ie the speed of light and ever expanding universe will keep us apart.

Let's just hope the Martians didn't all die from a dormant more deadly coronavirus about to be shipped back to Earth :)

Latency should be fine with Starlink.

I'm looking forward to one day touching down on Europa and exploring its depths.

That's really cool!

I became interested in astronomy after I caught myself wondering how many worlds that we don't know yet are out there. Will we ever find out if we are alone in the universe? Understanding more about Mars is a good starting point to a lot of promising missions. Sadly, I think we won't live enough to see the answers to all the questions in our minds.

Play Elite Dangerous for a bit and you'll start getting a feeling for how huge our galaxy is. (with between 100 and 400 billion stars) Then realize that the milky way galaxy is just one of 125 billion in the observable universe.

The chance that we are alone is pretty much nil. However the chance to actually encounter another intelligent species might also be close to nil. It takes light 80,000 years to reach the other side of the milky way galaxy. It takes the sun 230 million years to complete one orbit around our galaxy. Who knows how many civilizations have already come and gone across the Galaxy.

Perhaps we'll find more clues that Mars once supported life. 4.2 billion years ago Mars had an atmosphere, which it slowly lost until it was gone 3.7 billion years ago. 4.2 billion years ago Earth was still a hot mess, spewing debris into space which formed the moon. Mars was probably not habitable either, so soon after the solar system formed. However evolution has its own timetable of stagnation and sudden growth spurts. I wonder what we'll find on Mars!

A shot from the surface:

When it come to exploring Mars there is only one Bowie song.

Ooh look at that curvature, Mars is so much smaller than we thought. You should be able to walk around it in 10 minutes! It's like a Mario Galaxy planet! :)

To put yourself in the shoes of curious advanced alien life, how would you go about finding other life in the universe. The fastest way within the known laws of physics seems to be by artificial self replicating life, exponentially spreading out in the universe to report back findings. Send a robot to the next solar system where it will duplicate to send robots to all nearby solar systems and so forth.

We know the minimum amount it takes to get an answer back, it must be more than twice the distance in light years. And then by the time word reaches back to you, the candidate solar system is already that many thousands or millions of years further along. And yep, any signals we could pick up are from long ago. We see the center of our galaxy as it was 20,000 years ago. Andromeda, as it was 1.3 to 2 million years ago.

Now suppose any aliens have already send probes out across the galaxy, what are he chances any probes visited the solar system during the past few thousands years that signs of intelligence became visible from space. The pyramids are only 4,000 years old, a blip on a search project on the scale of an entire galaxy. To find us, they need to not only look at our grain of sand in between all the other grains of sand on the beach, but also at the right time, measured in millions if not billions of years.

How could you make yourself visible and reach out. The best way seems to be by manipulating a star to create a beacon, turn the light of a star into a morse code beacon that can't be explained in any natural way. Perhaps there's already a few of those out there, how to find them though. Individual stars are hard to pick out beyond a certain distance, other galaxies are just specks of light. And then when you find one, it's a relic of the past with likely no success sending a signal back (which won't get there for thousands of years)

The scale is both depressing and exciting. The chance of being the only intelligent life is very slim. The challenge is to stick around for millions of years to find it...

More images:

Also, apparently the flying drone, Ingenuity, is reporting back that it is functional and doesn't seem to have been damaged by atmospheric entry or landing. It is currently charging from the rover, but after being set down it will rely on its own solar panels for power.