Science & Cocktails: Did we find life on Mars?

Name: Science & Cocktails: Did we find life on Mars?
Start: 2026-01-23T19:00:00+01:00
Location: DR Byen - Koncerthuset

Schedule

Fri, 23 Jan, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

DR Byen - Koncerthuset | Copenhagen , SK

Science & Cocktails is proud to welcome Sanjeev Gupta, Earth & Planetary Scientist at Imperial College London and senior science leader on NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions, for an evening that journeys from a frozen, arid Mars of today to the warm, watery world it once was—and asks the biggest question of all – was there life on Mars? All this after Carsten Dahl, master composing pianist, has free space to play whatever he wants.
What do we actually know about the history of Mars? How do we search for life on the red planet? What did early Martian landscapes look like? What kind of evidence would truly prove past life—and what are the prospects for humans to go there?
Today the Martian surface is hyper‑cold, bone‑dry, and hostile to life, but its rocks preserve abundant clues to a warmer, wetter, and potentially habitable past. In this episode of Science and Cocktails, Sanjeev Gupta shows how robotic exploration of ancient riverbeds, deltas, and lake mudstones lets us reconstruct landscapes from billions of years ago and use them to guide the search for life. He’ll close with the latest results from Jezero crater: intriguing chemical traces in ancient rocks that may hint at past microbial activity—and what it will take to test that claim.
Perhaps you’ll find out that you’re not alone in the universe.
More info:
https://www.scienceandcocktails.org/en/events/copenhagen/did-we-find-life-on-mars
Event held in English with the generous support of the Novo Nordisk Foundation.