"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." - Matthew McConaughey, Interstellar

We've been staring at the dirt for so long - at the cracked earth of our heating planet, at the churned mud and concrete dust on battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza, at the bloodied streets of the US amid its bitter cultural war - that it was easy to miss the news that makes us look up.

But there it was - NASA last week announced that its robotic rover, the aptly named Perseverance, had uncovered the strongest evidence yet of ancient life on Mars. Not proof. But leopard-like spots on a rock in Jezero Crater, similar to chemical compounds produced by microscopic life here on Earth, contained enough possibility to lift our gaz

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