My Young Earth Creation friends often try to explain away mudcracks in rocks that they interpret to have been deposited during Noah’s flood. Even so, mudcracks are clear evidence that the sediments were deposited under conditions that included episodic wet and dry periods. I find it very interesting to see that the polygonal cracks just like we have on Earth have been spotted on Mars. One difference is that there has been no one there to walk on them and crunch the dry parts that curl up.
In fact, that is the part that interests me. Scientists often chase funding in search of the illusive evidence of life. If there is one planet other than our own that would seem likely to host life, at least from a naturalistic perspective, that would be Mars. The contrast between the vast extravagant variety of life on earth vs. the dry barren landscapes on Mars is stark. Why is that?
Think about the advantages that Mars has. It has the same star we have. It is located what might be considered a habitable distance from that star. It formed around the same time. It has had water on it and has some ice today. Mars has carbon found all over its surface, but not from life. (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2304270-organic-compounds-on-mars-were-produced-by-water-and-rocks-not-life/#:~:text=Organic%20compounds%20%E2%80%93%20those%20containing%20carbon,if%20we%20ever%20find%20it.) It has little oxygen in the atmosphere now, but then Earth’s didn’t have much until plants began to release it into the atmosphere over a billion years.
So far, despite having many aspects that would be favorable for life, we have not found evidence that it ever existed there. I watch with great interest to see if we discover evidence that something equivalent to bacteria will be found. So far, it seems that Mars missed out. Evidence of life has been found on Earth in rocks that are 3.75 billion years old, as soon as the surface was stable enough to support it. We will see if Mars ever had such life, but I predict that it didn’t. Naturalistic explanations for an abiotic origin of life continue to fail. Someday, perhaps NASA will be able to send a person to examine places in Mars, such as where these mudcracks are.
Sky and Telescope’s article observed,
“Even if the wet-dry cycles did help to create ancient life on Mars, they could also have worked against it. “The conditions to sustain life over a long period of time again could be very different,” Becker says. “Since first life was likely very fragile, wet-dry cycling might have caused too much external disturbance.” Life’s maker could ultimately have been its destroyer.
So, while these cracks are an important piece of the Martian puzzle, we are still a long way from being able to say whether the conditions were right on ancient Mars for life to spark out of the mud.”
It will be interesting to see what scientists learn over time. At this point, they have not idea what it might take “for life to spark out of the mud”. Regardless of what they learn, the contrast with Earth will remain stark.
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