Science Quote by Steven Squyres

Mars sells itself on resemblance, and Squyres knows it. As a scientist who helped lead NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, he’s not pitching a sci-fi fantasy so much as a disciplined act of imagination: a way to make an alien world legible without pretending we already have the answer. The phrase "enough like Earth" is doing the heavy lifting. It’s a careful, calibrated threshold - not "just like", not "basically Earth", but similar in the few ways that matter to biology: rock, water’s former presence, seasons, chemistry you can plausibly map onto what life needs.

The subtext is strategic humility. "You can imagine" signals that Mars is compelling precisely because it sits at the edge of evidence: close enough to generate testable hypotheses, distant enough to remain genuinely unknown. And "possibly once having taken hold" subtly shifts the goalposts from finding Martians to finding history. That’s more scientifically defensible and, culturally, more potent. Past life turns Mars into a detective story about origins and extinction, not a disappointing sweep for creatures that never promised to be there.

Context matters: Squyres is speaking from an era when Mars moved from romantic canals to data-driven geology, when rovers made the planet tactile - pebbles, strata, dried riverbeds. His intent is to frame exploration as continuity with Earth science: read the rocks, reconstruct the climate, infer the habitability. Mars isn’t special because it’s exotic; it’s special because it’s plausibly familiar in the one way that unsettles us: it might have been alive, and then stopped.