Slashdot Mirror
Test Equipment Finds Life In Mars-like Conditions
DIY News writes "In a test of equipment that might one day be used to search for biological activity on Mars, researchers discovered life tucked deep inside a frozen Norwegian volcano, a test region said to have geology similar to that of Mars. The test instruments discovered a rare and complex microbial community living in blue ice vents inside a frozen volcano, which is the kind of evidence scientists have been searching for on the Red Planet."
It'll be a cold day in a volcano when they find life on Mars!
Wait a minute...
"The organisms found in ice are survivors" . Oh No, not another Reality Show
You know, although I do think it's really important to discover if there's *any* life on Mars, I think ultimately humanity is being foolish by not focusing in other, more fruitful directions.
It would be an interesting discovery if we found life on Mars, because it would be our first opportunity to examine a lifeform (however simple) that is not of Earthly origin.
But, I can't help but feel like a lot of the focus on finding life on Mars is for a more basic reason: we're eager to find ANY life on ANY other planet, just so we can finally put to bed the question of whether there's life elsewhere in the universe. Mars may represent the easiest way to meet that goal, since it's the most promising planet that we can actually land a ship on in a timely fashion.
And although I'd love to see it happen, it's sort of a stupid reason to focus on Mars. Why? Because this question of "is there life out there" is all but a foregone conclusion. Honestly, what scientist, from a scientific perspective, thinks we are the only planet with biological life on it? The scenario in which we really are alone in the universe is the statistically improbable one. It's only our emotional sense of galactic loneliness and our overblown sense of how special and unique we are that makes us think it's a significant possibility.
Why is it the majority of the population believes in the existance of God, a being with no scientific basis, but yet we can't just accept that it would be one of the biggest surprises in the history of humanity if we one day discover that we ARE, in fact, alone in the universe.
So I'm just asking whether there's more to be learned from the intense studies being done on Mars, than if that effort were spent focusing on other NASA-like things, such as figuring out how to build better and faster spaceships to take us further from Earth so that we might discover more INTERESTING lifeforms than microscopic bacteria.
Is what we're finding on Mars really more important than expanding our overall space explorations, or are we simply allowing ourselves to be biased from this foolish desire to prove to ourselves that we're not alone in the universe?
Besides, don't you think it would be a lot more efficient to travel through space looking for giant giveaways of intelligient life, like, say, planets that look like ours, satellites and space stations orbiting planets, or OTHER spaceships flying around? Wouldn't we be making much faster progress if we just ASSUMED there is life in the rest of the universe and GET OVER our need to examine every last speck of Mars?