Who Needs Life On Mars When It Has Glacial Spiders?

Is there life on Mars? That's the wrong question. Every time scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, or any other terrestrial organization bring news back from Mars of fresh discoveries in the hunt to find evidence of life on the fourth planet, I find myself mildly annoyed that the general populace's focus is trained exclusively on the quest to find the tiniest microresidue of exobiota. That's a narrow angle, one that crops out everything in the background that makes the quest possible or worthwhile. Mars is fascinating because of its broader planet-scale dynamics. It is both earthlike (the two planets rotate at roughly the same speed, their inner layers and elemental compositions are roughly equivalent, and they both have moons), and alien (Mars is relatively small and light, has no atmosphere, and orbits the sun very slowly) in some important ways. Also, the larger-order mysteries about the state of life on Mars are mostly settled. Whatever lived there has been dead and gone for billions of years, unless one generously expands the parameters of "lived." The better question is something like: Why would there have been life on Mars? Is this question even more enticing? We have to be honest: no, of course not. Nothing down that road is as cool as life. But there is still cool stuff. I am talking of course about Mars's glacial spiders.

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