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New Clue for Life on Mars?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday September 20, 2004 @05:47AM from the but-i-wouldn't-wanna-live-there dept.

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."

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Water!! by allden · 2004-09-20 05:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

Why the assumption that life can't evolve without water??
1. Re:Water!! by stratjakt · 2004-09-20 05:58 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Noone assumed life can't evolve without water.
  
  It's just that life as we know it evolved with water.
  
  The only type of life we could hope to positively detect and identify would be life as we know it.
  
  It's possible there's life made out of magical moonbeams and fairy farts but unless you've engineered a gizmometer to test for it, it's hopeless.
  
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  I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Easiest way to settle the question definitively: by physicsphairy · 2004-09-20 05:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

Put life on mars.

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When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Re:Fantastic! by CodeWanker · 2004-09-20 06:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

I read the article. It seems to me that they would get the same results from comet impacts slowly melting/evaporating in the equatorial regions, too.

I really hope life is there, but nothing short of shipping a bunch of naked apes with petri dishes, nutrients, and microscopes will resolve it.

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"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer