Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

For centuries, humans have looked at Mars and pondered if this fiery planet can sustain life. To many people the equation is simple – find water and there will be life. I remember when we looked out to space wishing that one day we would find water and therefore we discover that we are not alone.

Within a few decades that wishing has been replaced by real evidence of water and it turns out it is everywhere. It is almost embarrassing as the equation that water equals life is so embedded into science and our psyches. Underlying this equation is the belief that life has arisen completely spontaneously without any intelligent input.

This is essential to the God-free, unspiritual world that science likes to portray – that life and ourselves are just random accidents of no significance in a sterile world devoid of consciousness. So life just started in a warm pond easily and spontaneously and this led to evolution and here we are: all through random, unintelligent, unconscious events.

So finding oceans on many planets and on moons and even in jets from sunspots should be rocking these such beliefs especially if we do not find even the most simple of bacteria in them. Maybe we have to face that life is so extraordinary complex that the creation of just one single cell in a warm pond by chance and random collisions alone would not just take one miracle and defy the laws of entropy but it would need repeated miracles.

So the finding of water on Mars should provoke and stir up a lot of these old wistful notions but it may also force us to face that life could involve more than some random collisions in a warm pond. Before 2015 we knew that channels on Mars suggested there was water on the planet in the past. So far so safe, we don’t have to face up to the prospect of life on Mars. But then evidence of seasonal water on Mars was found and it was realised that water on Mars is not only currently present it is also being renewed. The importance of the news warranted a NASA press conference in autumn 2015.

But the question really should be why? Why is there water on Mars and elsewhere? If you have been following the Black Hole Principle you will know that I have been saying for some time that the gamma-ray bursts in the Earth’s upper atmosphere that produce gamma rays, fast moving electrons and antimatter are demonstrating the same mechanism that black holes at the centres of galaxies do. These so called Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes or TGFs are associated with thunderstorms. The fast moving electrons that come out of them are what we normally call lightning.

There is one feature of thunderstorms that for many years I battled with and that is rain. It means that for the Black Hole Principle to be truly universal and occur in a similar fashion at all levels of the universe, black holes need to produce water. It also means everything that almost everything we understand about our water cycle becomes null and void. Water becomes the end point of a higher dimensional process. I think, but I am not sure that water is produced by the process of light splitting into antimatter and matter at the edge of a black hole. I would have to do some more work on the mechanism. But I did realise that water would have to be produced by galactic black holes in order to be a truly universal process.

To see my presentation at the International Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water 2015 on the subject of water coming from black holes at every level of the universe visit

So when it was revealed that black holes do indeed produce water, I was amazed and realise that the Black Hole Principle had been vindicated all this time. This is a universal process that happens from the macroscopic level – huge galaxies in the far reaches of space, to the microscopic – potentially your cellular processes work this way too to somewhere in between – the rain clouds you see in the sky now.

I also made this prediction about the oceans of planet Earth when giving a keynote address at the Institute of Noetic Sciences,

The Earth’s Oceans have long been a mystery as to where they originated and the question was fobbed off with some garbling about an asteroid seeding water here in the past. I knew that the Earth’s interior too is a black hole dynamo and therefore capable of producing water. So it was not a big leap for me to predict that Mars is capable of producing water in real time as are other bodies that are ejecting water such as comets and the moons of Saturn.

So this is why the renewed water on Mars was not a big shock to me. However, we may have to revisit our long held equation that the presence of water automatically means that life is also present.
That is simplifying what life is enormously. Life is not a random arrangement of atoms – this does not make sense from the perspective of science either – see Punk Science for a break down of these issues.
So for now we are having to admit that our previous mantra of ‘follow the water to find life’ may not have been correct. This was whilst finding water in space was unexpected. Now we know it is everywhere maybe we need to look again at why biological life has occurred on Earth in the first place and also why water is present there at all.
This National Geographic article discusses the problems will taking the water = life equation.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150928-mars-liquid-water-life-space-astronomy/

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona