Aye GJDS, with only 3 esses tho’!
A computer term, I believe. 
I forget… also Order Of Magnitude
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And TM. 
Or is that Ohm?
Good point.
Actually, stromatolites have existed for some 3.5 Gyrs, granted the bests survivors so far have had a maximum range of 500 Myrs … octopuses (actually Cephalopods) and sea anemone are something like 500 Myrs, sharks are pushing around 400 M, roaches 350. There are not many things that have survived 1 G, but it is not completely zero.
I have not been able to follow all the literature and activities related to the Mars mission to say anything of authority about the likelihood of life evolving on Mars, either on its own or via some form of panspermia.
There seem to have been long-standing lakes, but the sediment only seems to have grown by a few mm per year, which doesn’t seem highly active to me. There are places like that in the geologic history of the earth, but such a place would be at best just “treading water”.
I had not considered possible geologic activity though without anything really to sustain it, it has the same problem as the static lakes.
I am really on the fence about this issue. I cannot help but feel that this push to find life on Mars is a sort of a remnant of Carl Sagan and the Drake equation and mostly a fool’s errand, but there are times when persistence can pay off. It would be interesting if they do find something, but I am not optimistic, personally.
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Not in interplanetary space they ain’t Wayne! Or Earth would have terraformed Venus, Mars, Jupiter et al still billions of years ago with extremophiles. They’re tough, but they ain’t that tough. And we’re talking individuals, not species.
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