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Possibility of Life On Mars Looking More Remote
Riding with Robots writes "The never-say-die robotic geologist Opportunity continues its extended explorations in Victoria Crater on Mars. The latest findings from the mission suggest that while plenty of water did exist in this location, it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold. 'Not all water is fit to drink,' said Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team. 'At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic. Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life.'"
"The rovers [can] do in a day what a skilled field geologist can do in 30 seconds." -- Steve Squyres.
Squyres was given the 2005 Wired Rave Award for science by Wired for overseeing the creation of Spirit and Opportunity that had, at the time, lasted thirteen times longer than expected.
As we approach sol 1500, this means the rovers have done about 12.5 hours of field geology. And that's being generous, as Squyres was talking about the combined work of both rovers and only one of the rovers has been operating at full capacity.
So maybe, just maybe, Andrew Knoll is a little premature in declaring the planet dead.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's a frozen dustball now. Many years ago, who knows? And Earth was supposed to have had a poisonous atmosphere a long time ago (similar to the one we're trying to create nowadays :-)
Its rather retarded to think the our planet hosts the only life that has ever existed or will exist. Especially if you are not religious. While the requirements and conditions must be almost perfect for life to form as we know it, there are for all intents and purposes, infinate possiblities for such a thing to occur in the universe due to the shear size and mass available in it. While the odds are that it will probably have some sort of mostly random distribution across the universe, statistics and odds are just that. They aren't facts, and the possiblity that it existed/exists in our own back yard is there. And ... we can actually look there, so doing so isn't a bad idea. Worst case, we try out our methods for looking in someplace relatively close, as a practice run for checking out planets in other solar systems. You have to start somewhere, Mars is as good a place as any, and its not nearly as different from Earth as some of the other planets in our solar system.
... okay ... our types of chemical reactions can't occur on Mars ... it doesn't have to be the same type of chemical reaction! Or ... for that matter a chemical reaction. Could end up being that we are rare, cause the rest of the life forms in the universe are electrical reactions, or magnetic, or nuclear. Its just plain stupid to think we understand or know about all forms of life. What these scientists are looking for is mostly life forms like us, but also just signs of life in general in the hopes that if its not like us, they may discover some other form.
It is also rather retarded to think that because life formed on Earth as a carbon based organism that anything anywhere else in the universe will have done it the same way. Its extremely short sited to say 'life won't exist on Mars because no Earth based life form could live there'. Even on Earth we still find life that survives in places we never thought possible... and all of the sudden we find it and say 'holy crap, how the hell is it doing that?!' And then we figure it out that life doesn't have to work by the narrow little rules we have defined for it.
Life is, after all, just one big serious of chemical reactions, so
You sir, are too close minded to be a scientist.
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Here on earth we have several strains of halobacterium that can live inside salt crystals and survive off sunlight and residual moisture. Our terrestrial ones generally like a hot environment too.
No, a high-salinity environment doesn't rule out life at all.
Nor do other extrenes. There's plenty of microbes that will live in concentrated acids and bases. In one of my wife's old labs, she once had to through out a jugs of concentrated NaOH solution because a fungus was growing in it...
The Viking data seemed to show a *Martian* circadian pattern to gaseous emissions in incubated soil samples not present in sterilized soil samples (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/23/1951245).
Quite convincing now, but apparently circadian rhythms weren't much recognised / understood then.
As for this statement: "...it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold., tell that to the fish, or the many extremophiles found here on earth.
I still think that life was discovered on Mars, in 1976. See link for further, fascinating, details.
This is just a restatement of the fallacy known as argumentum ad ignoratio.