It’s been a big week for NASA, no doubt about it. Not only did we find liquid lakes on Titan, but we have now finally proven beyond doubt that there not only was water on Mars, but it’s still there today.

Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”

This is huge. What this really means is that, assuming life ever existed on Mars, it’s probably still there. No, not herds of Martian buffalo roaming the tundra and munching on arugula, but down in that permafrost there may be bacterial or even yeast-like life. Mars is a harsh place, no doubt, but it’s a Garden of Eden compared to Titan. There is still an atmosphere on Mars, albeit a thin one, and it even has a tiny amount of oxygen in it. There’s more oxygen trapped in the soil. There is also carbon dioxide. When you combine those basic elements together you have the formula for sustaining some form of life. We have found life on Earth in some really unexpected places with conditions harsher and more extreme than you find on Mars.

If it’s there and we can find it, the next step is to determine if it’s identical to similar life forms on Earth or if it is entirely different in nature, having evolved independently. Either way, we would officially “not be alone” even if the neighbors are poor conversationalists. If life found a way to get started on Mars at some point, then the entire galaxy is probably lousy with it. Should life have never taken hold on the red planet, maybe there really is nobody out there. If that’s the case, as Carl Sagan wrote in his novel “Contact,” it sure seems like a huge waste of space.