Stage 7

Mars

The last rehearsal — a compact world almost like ours

A day like ours. A tilt like ours. Land of continental scale. Air that was once thicker. The last stop before a living Earth.

What the cameras and papers show

Mars turns in 24.6 hours at about 25° tilt. Dry land is of the same order as Earth’s continents. Olympus Mons and the Tharsis rise are still among the largest volcanoes known.

Air now is less than 1% of Earth’s, mostly carbon dioxide, with polar ice of water and dry ice. If crater counts hold, some volcanic surfaces on Olympus Mons are only a few million years old — a clipping this site posted in 2015 from Neukum and Mars Express.

Late floods are reported in the last few hundred million years. Valley networks and lake beds record earlier, wetter times.

Two small moons are not used here.

How this site reads it

This looks like a compact rocky world after the icy outer stages: spin, land, late water, late fire.

The hypothesis: Mars is Stage 7 of the present cycle, the last dress rehearsal before living Earth.

What would kill this stage

If Mars has always been an inner-system planet, assembled dry 4.5 billion years ago, Stage 7 comes off the table.