Life on Earth would not have been possible without a key ingredient, and that ingredient did not come from Earth:  New research indicates that it came from Mars.

At an annual gathering of geochemists in Florence, Italy, Professor Steven Benner of the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in the US said, “The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock.”

It’s widely believed that the basic organic elements of ribonucleic acid (RNA) were excited by heat or light to form the building blocks of life.  But Benner says two more items found in meteorites from Mars, the elements boron and molybdenum, are key in assembling atoms into life-forming molecules.  They help the Earth materials to form into the correct shape to become RNA.

“It’s lucky that we ended up here, nevertheless - as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life,” said Benner.  “If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there may not have been a story to tell.”

Maybe not quite as exciting as that 1960s Hammer Studios film “Quatermass and the Pit”, but pretty cool.