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."

Comments

Cool.

[Capt'n Hector]

Now the question is not whether Mars can support life, it is whether or not Mars could have supported its abiogenesis and subsequent evolution.

Re:Cool.

[hostyle]

I was thinking the same thing. Unless these life-forms evolved completely independent of other similar life-forms on earth, there is practically no corellation between life on earth (albeit at similar temperatures / conditions) and life on another planet. Earth-evolved life surviving on another planet might well be possible, but life beginning there is something else entirely.

Re:Cool.

[Fred_A]

Well, we now know that Norway can support life, so why not Mars ?

Re:This may sound dumb

[Lucractius]

because if you build a fancy machine and dont test it before you actualy get there, What happens when it doesnt work, you dont know if thats actualy a real reliable reading. It doesnt make any sence to send untested equipment millions of miles to search for something when you dont even know if it can find it at all.

Photo of these virtual Martians

[commodoresloat]

The photo shows one of these Martian-like creatures at work in their natural habitat. Apparently they look just like coke dealers here on earth filling up baggies for distribution. Except they are all red with purple hands.

Mistake?

[SolitaryMan]

I wonder, is there a possibility of not identifying Mars' living things as form of life, just because it is very different from ours? How do one check, whether the thing is alive or not?

Re:Mistake?

[commodoresloat]

I've always thought that it was the height of human arrogance to presume that life on other worlds would be recognizable to us as "life" at all. There may be life on the moon for all we know. We assume certain organic forms, but why? Our experience with the world beyond earth is infinitesimal; how can we assume anything? what if there is life that doesn't exist as bacteria, as flora and fauna, as little green men, etc. Life elsewhere might be made of substances and energies that we don't even know exist. Evolution here took place in a particular context and environment -- who's to say what could happen in other environments? When it comes down to it, there is a whole lot we don't even know about life here on earth -- how can we assume that our assumptions about life here will have any relevance on other worlds?

Re:Mistake?

[aussie_a]

I've always thought that it was the height of human arrogance to presume that life on other worlds would be recognizable to us as "life" at all.

No, I'd say it's optimism, not arrogance, that lets us hope that we will be able to recognize life on other worlds. Because if we can't recognize it, well for us, it might as well not exist. It would be great if there was life completely unlike we know it on another body (whether it be moon, jupiter or mars) and we did recognize it. That would be earth-shattering. But if we didn't recognize it, that isn't something I'm as interested in. Simply because even if I am interested in it, I'll never be able to know if it exists or not.

The detail is amazing

[ReformedExCon]

While this is amazing proof of life on Earth, unfortunately it is not proof of life on Mars.

These Earth-borne creatures are red because of the propensity of life on Earth to use iron as a key component in blood. I would expect that Martian creatures would have copper coursing through their veins.

What is life?

[VincenzoRomano]

We are looking for a precise thing we call life. This quest is very specific and could lead to wrong considerations.
The point is that we know too little about life, Universe and everything to do something resembling a real search for life.
I recall Cristoforo Colombo that knew too little about India to understand that it was not India at all!

I gotta ask..

[xx01dk]

What would it mean if we discovered microbial life on another planet? Honestly. What would it mean. One, it would mean that the posibilty of life is not that uncommon. Life prevails under the harshest of circumstances here on Earth. Why not elsewhere?

Two, if it does exist elsewhere, then what's so special about our planet?

Three, what's stopping it from evolving beyond the microbial stage? It opens the floodgates on "what is possible" in this universe.

I for one, welcome.... nm. I'm interested to know if mankind as a whole is ready to comprehend the fact that life is not indigenous to Earth...

not that easy !

[alarch]

high school buiology is oversimplified and to large extent obsolete. imagine a simple electronic thingie which can respond to stimuli (my computer can do that), but is it alive? imagine a robotic factory programmed to replicate itself - is it alive just because it replicates itself and not cars or whatever? i think not. defining life is not that easy consciousness may be? but i am one of those that are sure that animals have "souls" and are consciouss as well as plants and may be even bacteria... but... we cannot mesure level of consciousness

Re:not that easy !

[meringuoid]

imagine a robotic factory programmed to replicate itself - is it alive just because it replicates itself and not cars or whatever?

Erm... yes. Yes, it definitely is.

'A robotic factory programmed to replicate itself' is a really good definition of what a living thing actually is. It's something every living thing has in common. It takes in materials and energy from its environment, and uses them to maintain itself and to manufacture more like itself. Bacteria do it. Plants do it. Animals do it. And your robotic factory does it. That's life.

Reaching the wrong conclusion

[arun_s]

'Test Equipment Finds Life in Mars-like Conditions '
Yes, but its life that has evolved over millions of years on the Earth. Living creatures are extremely adaptable. Given time, you could expect some life form or the other to make it thru' in the worst of climates.
So it does not follow that you can extrapolate this to a conclusion that life of a similar sort could have existed in Mars. The toughie is finding out if life can start anywhere, and in what initial conditions. Natural selection will take care of the surviving.

Question is whether we choose to add life to Mars

[fantomas]

You ask a very good question: but surely the findings of this research raise another question: if Mars-like conditions (therefore Mars itself) can support life, should we be importing life to Mars?

Long term colonisation of Mars would require locally grown food, and preferably not at the expense of shipping in from Earth all the resources they need to grow. Is this a step towards finding hardy life forms that can be mutated to grow in Mars, or in a hybrid Mars-Earth condition? (ie. giving plants some support but not having to create Earth conditions). Hence making the possibility of long term missions to Mars more achievable...

Re:Better things to focus on...

[vidarh]

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.

Because it is by no means a foregone conclusion that there is life elsewhere. Probable? Possibly, but we don't have much data to back it up. So far we know of only carbon based lifeforms, and we know of no planets outside the solar system even remotely likely to be able to sustain lifeforms like us. We don't have any data (as opposed to theories) that indicates that other types of lifeforms are even possible.

We don't even know if planets likely to harbour life will ever be found outside the solar system, or if our system is an aberration.

You say it's an overblown sense of how special we are, but that's not only it: IF there is only one planet with intelligent life in the universe, then if you are discussing the issue of whether or not there is life in the universe you will be on that planet.

In other words, the likelihood is 100% that in the case only one planet harbours intelligent life, and intelligent being will find itself on that planet.

So talking about the probabilities is meaningless: If the odds of life starting are high, then yes, the probability that we are alone is low. But we don't know that - we have never observed the evolution of life from precursors to life in any meaningful sense, and still do not understand the process very well.

And we certainly don't know if the conditions in which life arose on earth has ever existed anywhere else, nor if there are other conditions which are favorable enough for life to develop.

That is why finding life on Mars would be important - it would increase our number of data points from one to two, and possibly give us significantly better data on the range of conditions that life can survive in as well as the forms of life that exists.

Re:Question is whether we choose to add life to Ma

[going_the_2Rpi_way]

Hey, I know you! You're the guy who planned the introduction of new species to Australia, right? Hence making the continent more easily colonized in the long term by Europeans.

Anthropocentricity

[panurge]

• The Earth is flat and the sun goes under the earth at night
• The Earth is a sphere. OK, Eratosthenes, why don't we fall off?
• The sun,moon and stars are perfect bodies made of a substance that does not occur on Earth. That's why they don't fall down. Mind you, the moon is a bit of a problem. Anyway, the Earth is the centre of the universe.
• Actually the Earth might go round the Sun rather than vice versa. Watch it, Kupfernigk. The church won't like that. Call it a hypothesis and publish when you're dead.
• The Earth moves, and Jupiter has moons, and there are spots on the sun. Put him under house arrest, we don't want lunatics like Galileo spreading nonsense.
• The Earth is more than 6000 years old.Blasphemy!
• The Earth is millions of years old(Actually, at this point in the 19th century the clergy at Cambridge were not only alongside the idea, they were doing the research. Religious people are not always backward.)
• Man and apes share a common ancestor.Rubbish him! Misrepresent his ideas! After all, black people aren't really human, so how can monkeys be?
• Anyway, even if the Earth is just another planet going round a so-so star in an enormous universe, and the human race is more than 98% the same genetically as chimpanzees, we are unique because there isn't life anywhere else in the universe! Yes, in all that huge old universe with trillions of stars WE ARE UNIQUE!

  The simple fact is that to any reasonably educated scientist who understands roughly how the Earth fits into the universe, there is nothing unique or special about our position. As such, if life has evolved on Earth, it would be expected a priori to evolve anywhere else where suitable conditions existed. It will be very difficult to prove the falsifying hypothesis - that there is no life on Mars - but, given the existence of life on Earth, that is the hypothesis that needs to be proved. Anybody who lets their religion get in the way of their understanding of the universe deserves to be tied to a chair and lectured by Richard Dawkins for a few hours (now, sadly, Jay Gould is dead.) Unfortunately, like the animals in Animal Farm, I increasingly find myself looking from fundamentalist Muslim to fundamentalist Christian and being less and less sure of the difference.

Atmospheric Equilibrium

[centauri]

Earth's atmosphere is in disequilibrium, because lifeforms constantly replenish certain chemicals - methane, for instance.

The atmosphere of Mars, what there is of it, is in equilibrium. So, if there ever was life on Mars, it's dead now.