How to Find a Martian

Are we really alone in the universe? When life began four billion years ago, there was a second habitable planet in our Solar System: Mars.

Today Mars is an arid, frozen, inhospitable waste. But there are signs everywhere – in the contours of the land, the crystals in the rocks, the chemistry of the air – of a kinder world that vanished long ago. Did life arise there too? To find out, today’s Mars rovers are not looking for living creatures. They are looking for fossils.

Leading astrobiologist Sean McMahon reveals the fascinating and profound scientific ideas that underpin this extraordinary multi-billion-dollar endeavour. Drawing on groundbreaking recent work by astrobiologists and palaeobiologists around the world, How to Find A Martian offers its readers a foretaste of what may be the greatest breakthrough of our age: the first evidence of life on another world.