"How Strippers Explain Life On Mars"
by John Wilder
“I’m telling you, don’t do it. I’ve got nothing against strip clubs,
but I do have something against them at noon on a Monday.
The day shift at a strip club? You can’t unsee that.”
– "The Office"
"Last week, NASA had a press conference on what they’re calling “the strongest evidence yet” for life on Mars. According to their announcement, the Perseverance rover had taken pictures of a rock sample dubbed “Sapphire Canyon”. This is a coincidence, since that was the name of the stripper at my bachelor party. The rock was from a site called Jezero Crater, which I assume (based on her face) was the stripper’s real name. As I recall her face was a temporal anomaly: it could stop a clock. The only explanation for this was my best man was on a budget of something like $4.98.
The rock did not work for tips, however, but like the stripper it shows potential biosignatures dating back about 3.5 billion years. These biosignatures include organic materials, chemical reactions that mimic microbial activity, a g-string, and what the scientists called “leopard spots”, which I really hope can be cured by antibiotics.
The people who write press releases for NASA Scientists are cautious, of course; they emphasize that non-biological processes could explain it, like geochemical reactions under specific conditions. But after a year of peer review in Nature®, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy went so far as to say, “We can’t find another explanation, so this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.” Unlike Sapphire Canyon.
This isn’t the first time NASA has twerked and gyrated with the idea of Martian microbes. Let’s rewind to 1976, when the Viking landers touched down and ran their own biology experiments to hunt for life. The Labeled Release experiment, led by Gilbert Levin, injected Martian soil with nutrients and watched for gas emissions that meant “metabolism!” These are, in layman’s terms, signs of life chowing down on the snot that NASA sprayed into the dirt.
Positive results popped up on both Viking 1 and 2, but NASA dismissed them. Why? Well, it appears that NASA wanted to not find life, and hunted for explanations high and low until they came up with:
• perchlorates in the soil oxidizing everything to
• it was Tuesday and we don’t do our best work on Tuesday, to
• it was the Bicentennial and we were distracted by the shiny new quarters or
• we won the war, go back to sleep.
The scientist in charge still insists to this day that it was life, but NASA just said, “Well, we don’t know what we were thinking with doing an experiment like that. How did you sneak it on the Viking? The experiment never could have found anything. Have you seen "Smokey and the Bandit®?”
Fast-forward to the 1990s, and I recall the unveiling of Martian meteorite ALH84001. This fragment of rock, ejected from Mars about the time your mother was born 17 million years ago and crash-landing on Earth the time that stripper was born about 13,000 years back, contained carbonate globules with what looked like fossilized bacteria complete with hydrocarbons.
The scientists noted that these were possible microbial remnants from a wetter Mars. But skeptics piled on: “The fossils were too small because I can’t fit in one, the hydrocarbons could be from space dust or an Exxon® station, and we won the war so everyone should go back to sleep and have you seen "The Usual Suspects?”
Now, we’ve made it to 2025. right on the dot with the rover findings pushing the timeline for life on Mars back to the Solar System’s dawn, around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. I’ve predicted that we’d find evidence of life on other worlds before (I think but am too lazy to check) 2030, and intelligent life before 2040. Mars counts as “other worlds,” right? I’m calling this as a win. We’ve ticked the box on “life elsewhere.” Dust off the telescopes, crack open the hot tub and light up a cigar.
Now comes the deeper question: Where did life come from? Life on Earth is improbable enough. The current theory is that a cosmic vegetable drawer in the Frigidaire™ Galaxy sits for long enough where atoms randomly congeal just the right molecules to morph into RNA, then DNA, slap on some cell walls, and voila, you’re evolving from slime to Shakespeare in just a weekend.
The odds of that? Astronomically against. Take protein folding: some proteins are so convoluted that the random chance of them assembling correctly exceeds the age of the universe by factors of 10 FOLLOWED BY 77 ZEROES or more. That’s not something that I’m making up. Actual biochemists have crunched the numbers, showing that even simple enzymes require precise sequences that blind luck couldn’t hit in billions of years.
It’s like expecting a tornado in a junkyard to assemble a functional air fryer, but with extra steps involving quantum hiccups, existential dread and daytime-quality strippers named Destiny. So, if life popped up on Mars around the same time as it did on Earth, both in that narrow window post-Solar System formation, random chance starts looking like a lousy bet.
Enter panspermia: the idea that life (or its building blocks) hitchhikes through space on comets, asteroids, or meteorites, seeding planets like dandelion fluff from the movie "Alien." I did a thought experiment and came to this conclusion: it’s the lazy way to colonize the galaxy. There is no need for warp drives and spaceships when biology, gravity, and time does all the work. Spew out spores into the void, wait for them to land on a Goldilocks world, and boom: mold on bread, except the bread is a planet.
Oh, wait: bread doesn’t mold anymore thanks to all those preservatives and microplastics. My bad. Anyway, biological life is the universe’s perfect replicator, even better than A.I. It’s self-sustaining, adaptive, and cheap. Forget A.I. overlords; this is nature’s von Neumann probe, probing without permission, replicating, and repeating. But here’s the rub: something had to kickstart the whole shebang.
Panspermia just kicks the can backwards in time: where did the original life come from? And don’t forget the timeline. Life as we know it, Jim, needs heavy elements heavier than the primordial hydrogen: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, the stuff that makes water, proteins, and yes, even PEZ®.
Those only form in supernovae, and it takes time to make enough of them so we’ve got the iron and phosphorus that we need to make steaks on a nice rocky world. The Solar System itself is just a punk at 4.6 billion years old, so early life on Mars or Earth had to brew from second- or third-hand atoms. No heavy atoms, no guitars so no heavy metal. What’s the simplest conclusion? Hmmmm.
Yup. Intelligent design. Life’s complexity indicates purpose, not at all an accident and the math shows that. To think otherwise is like finding an air conditioning unit in the desert and thinking, “Must be erosion.” The canyon between life and not-life is so vast and the math is so brutal that Occam’s Razor slices away the nonsense, leaving design. Your mileage may vary. But for now, Mars whispers, just like Saphire Canyon, “You’re not alone.” Whether that’s comforting or terrifying depends on your worldview.
But for me, in a universe this designed, even the stripper jokes write themselves. Life is the easy way to conquer the galaxy, so we have to ask ourselves, are we twerking hard, or hardly twerking?"
o
