Could there be life on Mars? NASA Jared Isaacman claims chances are 90%

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has dropped a big claim regarding the discovery of ancient life on Mars.

In a recent interview with Benny Johnson, Isaacman has 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.

When asked by Johnson what his take on the existence of life beyond Earth was, the NASA chief 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.

While specifically talking about Mars and the possibility of ancient life on the Red Planet, he asserted, “If we can get to Mars and we can 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 talked about the mission named Europa Clipper, designed to explore the traces of ancient life and biosignatures on Jupiter’s moon Europa.

In July 2028, NASA is scheduled to launch a highly ambitious mission called Dragonfly to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

While NASA has explored Titan before with the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens lander in 2005, this mission is unique because it involves a robotic rotorcraft, essentially a large, nuclear-powered drone like 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 the subterranean remains of an 4-billion-year-old water delta, providing some of the most compelling evidence to date of Mars’ watery past.