This is a science

This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intaglia.

Got a minute?

Four billion years ago, our solar system

was a very different, very violent place.

So this is the time when life was just emerging on our planet.

Stephen Moyesich, a geologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

It's the time when most of the big scars that you see of the

craters of the moon formed. Those scars are the remnants of what he calls a

game of planetary billiards.

And Jupiter's gravity is the big break,

which sends comets and asteroids flying.

And then these things go bouncing around all over the place.

Many of the directions that they go are unpredictable, even if

they are governed by gravity. Moizish and his colleague Oleg Abramoff used supercomputers

to model the beat-up surface of Mars at that long ago time.

And they found that all that planetary pummeling from tiny sand grains all the way up to rocks at least 25 times as big as the one that killed off the dinos here on Earth

could have translated into enough thermal energy to cook the surface of the planet,

melt the Martian ice, and start up hydrothermal springs.

And for microbial life, hydrothermal systems, also known as hot springs.

It's like the free buffet bar in Vegas.

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