New Clue for Life on Mars?

thhamm writes "Recent analyses of ESA's Mars Express data reveal that concentrations of water vapour and methane in the atmosphere of Mars significantly overlap. This result, from data obtained by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS), gives a boost to understanding of geological and atmospheric processes on Mars, and provides important new hints to evaluate the hypothesis of present life on the Red Planet."

Comments

Re:Water!!

[jericho4.0]

This page has a look at some of the reasons why. Basicly, no (known) combonation of a common element, a solvent, and temperature range display the chemical flexibility of H20 + C + (0 - 100 degrees).

Of course, life could probably exist in a totally different paradigm, but it's kind of hard to design space probes or experiments to test for the unknown.

Re:Water!!

[The Only Druid]

I'm pretty postive that there is no verified example of silicon based life. Rather, due to the chemical similarities between carbon and silicon it is speculated that life (as we know it) could have or could in the future evolve based on silicon rather than carbon.

This is not a limitation of the viewpoint, but rather an acknowledgement of our intrinsically limited conception of life: life which we will recognize as being life must have certain characteristics to differentiate from..."not life", and it those characteristics hinge on certain chemical processes.