What are the Chances of "Anything Coming From Mars"?

Excerpt from Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds: The Eve Of War (listen):

And that's how it was for the next ten nights. A flare, spurting out from Mars - bright green, drawing a green mist behind it - a beautiful, but somehow disturbing sight.

Ogilvy, the astronomer, assured me we were in no danger. He was convinced there could be no living thing on that remote, forbidding planet.

"The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one," he said. "The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one - but still they come!"

Of course, in H.G. Wells' classic novel, Jeff Wayne's musical and more recent movie adaptations (that will remain nameless) of The War Of The Worlds, Ogilvy the astronomer was wrong. Martians did traverse interplanetary space to attack Earth. However, back at the time when Wells put pen to paper, describing the first sci-fi alien invasion that began in a small village in Surrey (UK), Mars looked a lot different than it does now...

So, today is H.G. Wells' 143rd birthday and Google began celebrating this fact two weeks ago. Leaving clues in artistic renditions of their logo (otherwise known as "Google Doodles"), the Internet company had the world guessing ever since they painted a flying saucer on the logo. Subsequent doodles depicted crop circles and then, today, a full-on War of the Worlds invasion force of Martian tripods in the English village of Horsell.

Wells penned The War of the Worlds when he was living in Surrey in 1898. He pondered what it would be like if a superior race of Martians invaded the rural county, zapping the terrified populous with a heat-ray weapon. And so began a story that has captivated the literary, musical and movie world for over one hundred years.

At the turn of the 20th century, however, we knew little about the Red Planet, and even with the most powerful telescopes all we could resolve were lines that resembled canals. Legendary astronomer Percival Lowell was fascinated with these lines across the Martian surface, speculating they may have been an extraterrestrial transportation network.

However, it wasn't until the first unmanned lander to successfully land and image the planet in 1976 that the idea of an advanced alien race building an Earth-invasion fleet could conclusively be put to rest. NASA's Viking lander found a lifeless, barren world (the first Mars panorama is shown, below).

Although there have been several Mars surface missions studying the alien regolith since Viking, there's only been a few indications that extraterrestrial life may have once lived there. Most recently, the Phoenix Mars Lander indicated that liquid water may exist near the Martian surface, while observations from Earth-based observatories and orbiting satellites indicate a quantity of methane in the atmosphere.

Liquid water (albeit fairly salty) would be a great indicator for the potential of microbial life, and methane in the atmosphere could indicate there are existing microbes thriving under the surface (although there are other explanations, too). Sadly (or happily, it depends on which way you look at it), there is no evidence to suggest that H.G. Wells' Martians exist, or ever have done, certainly not with any kind of advanced technological, human-frying capability.

So, what are the chances of anything coming from Mars? Zero. But H.G. Wells' ground-breaking story about mankind's extermination at the hands of soulless Martian tripods will continue to live on, terrifying children and adults alike for years to come...

Happy Birthday Herbert George Wells!