NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has made a significant claim regarding the discovery of ancient life on Mars. In a recent interview with Benny Johnson, Isaacman pointed to the universe’s vast scale, including two trillion galaxies and countless habitable yet undiscovered exoplanets, as a solid reason to expect extra-terrestrial life.
Asked by Johnson about his take on the existence of life beyond Earth, Isaacman said, “There’s two trillion galaxies and how many stars are there? And how many of them have exoplanets in a Goldilocks zone? Surely there must be life out there somewhere.”
“I would say there is a chance there could be life out there — everywhere,” he added.
When specifically talking about Mars, Isaacman asserted that if we can get to Mars and bring samples back, “I put it at a better 90 percent chance that we could prove there was some microbial life on Mars.”
Isaacman also discussed the Europa Clipper mission, designed to explore traces of ancient life and biosignatures on Jupiter’s moon Europa. In July 2028, NASA is scheduled to launch Dragonfly, a highly ambitious mission exploring Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
While NASA has explored Titan before with the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens lander in 2005, this mission involves a robotic rotorcraft, essentially a large, nuclear-powered drone like an octocopter.
“What if you find the biosignatures there, it would change the whole equation, leading to consequential discovery in human history,” Isaacman said.
Last month, Perseverance rover found subterranean remains of an 4-billion-year-old water delta, providing some of the most compelling evidence to date of Mars’ watery past.