Scientists Say They've Identified the Best Place for Life to Have Existed on Mars

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Scientists Say They've Identified The Best Place For Life to Have Existed on Mars:

The surface of Mars, by every measurement we've taken, is currently an inhospitable wasteland. Only dust devils roam its arid surface; the only water is permanent ice. Yet evidence that water once flowed and pooled on the planet's surface keeps mounting.

[...] New research has found an answer: geothermal heat could have risen from deep inside the planet - in which case, the best place for life to thrive would have been deep underground.

"Even if greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor are pumped into the early Martian atmosphere in computer simulations, climate models still struggle to support a long-term warm and wet Mars," said planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha of Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

"I and my co-authors propose that the faint young Sun paradox may be reconciled, at least partly, if Mars had high geothermal heat in its past."

The faint young Sun paradox is the contradiction between the presence of liquid water in the early Solar System, and the faintness of the Sun. According to our understanding of stellar evolution, in the billion or so years after its formation 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun's heat and light would only have been about 70 percent of its current output.

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