Science and Inquiry discussion

For August 2025, we had a tie for the selected book. You can read whichever one you wish.

This thread is for one of them, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson.

Please use this thread to post questions, comments, and reviews, at any time.

I've been working my way through this relatively short book and I feel like it's taking me forever. Either I have a focus problem or the book is not holding my focus. The writing is beautiful so it's not that. It seems like it's mostly autobiographical in nature which is perhaps the reason. I just read an entire page in which the author went to a baseball game and found I just didn't care! How many pages were like that and I just kind of read over them? I'm thinking many.

It is an interesting read, beautifully written, but it did seem a lot autobiographical to me, too.

aPriL does feral sometimes wrote: "It is an interesting read, beautifully written, but it did seem a lot autobiographical to me, too."

I wrote in my review that it is more of an autobiography than it is a book about Mars. Some of the bigger ideas about Mars will stick with me though, like that Mars was a hugely different place earlier in its history and may have harbored life at that time. Rounded pebbles are evidence of running water and sand piled into fluted patterns is evidence of wind.

I also underlined a section about the study of a meteorite found in Antarctica. It had three features suggestive of life: carbonates, magnetic minerals and PAHs.

I finished the book, and my review is here -> https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

There does not seem to be much discussion going on here. So I will ask a question. The book was published in 2020, and she ends the science thread with a discussion of the goals of the Mars 2020 mission. Reading it now in 2025, the Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity Helicopter are historical accomplishments, and I needed to resort to some internet searches to learn what the impacts of their findings have been. I’d be happy if someone could give me a reference for an overview of the findings of Mars 2020, better than the Wikipedia entry.