New Evidence For Ancient Life On Mars

siddesu writes in with "compelling" new data that chemical and fossil evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars was carried to Earth in a Martian meteorite. The finding is being highlighted by the same NASA team who made the initial discovery 13 years ago. Spaceflight Now has more details of the analysis.

Comments

Panspermia

[jpmorgan]

I'm rooting for panspermia. There's something kind of cool at looking at Mars and thinking: that's where we came from, and the rovers are just us coming home.

Re:Panspermia

[danlip]

I'm rooting for independent evolution. It would make it far more likely that the universe is teaming with life. But unless we find current life on Mars, it may be hard to tell the difference.

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

Either case means the same thing, that life can travel and spread. It takes millions of years for a rock from mars to reach earth, and vice versa. If life can survive that journey, why couldn't it survive in some small way between stars, over billions of years.

If life once existed on Mars, it will exist now. It is highly unlikely the entire planet became 100% sterile. There will be pockets of life surviving the harsh climate.

The big question is exploration of Mars. If life evolved independently, we will have a much harder time mucking around there, especially colonizing it. Folks will want to leave it alone to its own devices. It life on Mars and life on Earth share a common history, it makes it much easier to muck around on Mars, because it'll just be another extension of life here so no worry about contamination.

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about jesus? I just want unfettered access to the email of these "scientists" so I can judge whether Mars exists at all.

Re:Panspermia

[JWSmythe]

    It could be hit and miss. Just because fossil evidence got here doesn't mean anything living made the trip. But, it does open up a lot of questions. If the Mars microbes didn't make it, that doesn't mean something else didn't. We'll figure it out in a few centuries, if/when we get some decent samples from other places that couldn't have originated here. We're an awful long away from retrieving samples from outside of this solar system.

Re:Panspermia

[Tibia1]

It's going to be funny when they find a fossil of an ancient rover on mars.

Re:Panspermia

[cheesecake23]

I'm rooting for panspermia.

Naw, too messy.

On a side note, can someone tell me the best way to clean my monitor?

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean Earth?

Re:Panspermia

[jc42]

It could be hit and miss. Just because fossil evidence got here doesn't mean anything living made the trip. But, it does open up a lot of questions. If the Mars microbes didn't make it, that doesn't mean something else didn't. We'll figure it out in a few centuries, ...

Actually, astronomers figured it out a few decades ago. They concluded that, while the Mars -> Earth trip is difficult and unlikely, the other direction has happened with probability around 0.999999.... The mechanism is the Earth's "dust tail", a stream of gases and dust much like a comet's tail, but even thinner. It is thick enough to cause a problem for some astronomical observations, though, which is why some astronomers studied it during the 1960s and 70s. They found that the tail includes "dust" as large as bacteria, and since high-altitude airplane and balloon samples had shown bacteria at all altitudes, our default assumption should be that there are bacteria (mostly in spore form) in our planet's dust tail. This wouldn't be a million-year trip. The solar wind blows Earth's dust tail outward along the plane of Earth's orbit. It would sweep over each of the outer planets about once per year, contaminating each planet with bacterial spores in each pass.

So if we find life on any outer planet that is chemically similar to bacteria here, we can't conclude anything about where it originated, except that the most likely source is Earth. It could have reached Earth from the outside, of course, and is just making the return trip.

A fun part of these studies was the conclusion that this thin stream of bacterial spores does eventually get blown out of the solar system. Distances out there are large, of course, but if you look at the numbers, you find that the Earth takes roughly 4 trips around the galaxy every billion years. Since the earliest known bacterial life developed here, we've made 15-20 trips around the galaxy, spewing bacterial spores along our path the whole time. Chances are that they've pervaded the entire galaxy (very, very thinly). If they can survive the millions or billions of years in interstellar space, then we're one of the sources for the panspermia hypothesis.

Of course, the astronomers didn't know anything at all about the survivability of bacterial spores in space. We still don't know much about it. That's the weak link in the whole guessing game.

But it's highly likely that there are bacteria living underground on Mars, and they came from Earth. It would be a lot more fun if we found some there whose biochemistry was different from the micro-organisms on this planet.

(I googled for this topic a couple of years ago, and didn't find much of anything. I wonder if there are any astronomers here who could point us to more details.)

Re:Panspermia

[Wyatt Earp]

In reading about the formation of our solar system, I bet that the building blocks of life in this solar system and anything else that formed out of the nebula we probably came from, are all the same.

My money is on the DNA from whatever is on Mars, Europa, Titan...are all going to be the same as Earth.

Re:Panspermia

[Urza9814]

The life was on Mars first though - so they'd be more likely to find an ancient rover on Earth...

Re:Panspermia

[Walkingshark]

If your hypothesis is right, then any other earthlike planets are also spewing bacterial spores into deep space, which means that life all over the galaxy should be pretty similar.

So maybe the aliens really will be coming to eat us.

Re:Panspermia

[c6gunner]

Either case means the same thing, that life can travel and spread

No, they don't mean the same thing. If life began once and was seeded via meteorites, then it's a giant crap-shoot, and the vast majority of solar-systems are probably sterile. On the other hand, if abiogenesis took place twice in a single solar system, then the universe is probably teeming with life.

If life evolved independently, we will have a much harder time mucking around there, especially colonizing it. Folks will want to leave it alone to its own devices.

Hardly. It might raise some ethical conundrums, but it certainly won't make colonization any more difficult.

If we ever colonize mars, we're going to start by building habitats. We'll have hundreds of years to live on a planet which we haven't even begun to terraform. That will give us plenty of time to have the People for the Ethical Treatment of Martian Lifeforms present a convincing case for why we should abandon an entire planet to a bunch of alien microbes. If they fail in convincing the rest of humanity, then we'll carry on with our terraforming effort, and the Martian bacteria will be relegated to sample jars, museums, and computer databases.

Re:Panspermia

[c6gunner]

I'll take that bet!

You seem to be saying that if I kick over a bunch of paint cans, I'm going to get the same result every time. I'm not sure how you justify such an assumption, but I'm more than willing to take your money!

Re:Panspermia

[c6gunner]

The life was on Mars first though - so they'd be more likely to find an ancient rover on Earth...

Do you have evidence of that, or are you just one of those "pyramids on mars" wackos?

Re:Panspermia

[Urza9814]

Umm, TFA?

ancient microbial life on Mars was carried to Earth in a Martian meteorite.

Re:Panspermia

[c6gunner]

Umm, TFA?

ancient microbial life on Mars was carried to Earth in a Martian meteorite.

I don't think you actually read TFA. Here's a quote:

It showed that microscopic worm-like structures found in a Martian meteorite that hit the Earth 13,000 years ago are almost certainly fossilised bacteria.

FYI, life on Earth has existed for more than 13,000 years. Even given a few million years in orbit before hitting the earth, these meteorites would post-date the emergence of life on earth.

Of course, if you're a YEC, just forget I said anything ;)

Re:Panspermia

[dgatwood]

My money is on the DNA from whatever is on Mars, Europa, Titan...are all going to be the same as Earth.

I'll go one step further and say that whatever they find on Mars, Europa, TItan, etc. will probably turn out to be from Earth. Do you know how many bacteria we've put on other planets and moons over the years? :-D

Re:Panspermia

[i_ate_god]

I'll take that bet!

You seem to be saying that if I kick over a bunch of paint cans, I'm going to get the same result every time. I'm not sure how you justify such an assumption, but I'm more than willing to take your money!

Uh, no. He's saying that if you kick over a bunch of paint cans, then draw separations in the resulting puddle, each separate puddle will be made up of the same stuff.

Re:Panspermia

[Tablizer]

Actually, astronomers figured it out a few decades ago. They concluded that, while the Mars -> Earth trip is difficult and unlikely, the other direction has happened with probability around 0.999999....

Mars-to-Earth is 100% because we found a dozen or so meteorites from Mars, proving it happens. (Kudos to Viking Landers for the chem analysis to compare.)

Because of Earth's size compared to Mars, Earth was still a hot coal when Mars was almost like Earth today, with mild temperatures, relatively thick atmosphere, and lakes, possibly even oceans. Thus, life is more likely to have had evolved on Mars early in the solar system's history than Earth, if it was around then. Mars was the happening club in town back in the days.
   

Re:Panspermia

[danlip]

DNA is much more complex than the basic building blocks floating around in space, and I bet there are many ways to build something that performs the same function as DNA but is not DNA. Genes are even more complex, there are some genes that are common to all life on earth (with mutations, but still recognizable as the same gene) - life that originated independently, even if it used DNA, would not have the same genes - there is too many solutions to each problem. I'm pretty sure if we had genetic material from another planet we could easily confirm or refute panspermia. Unfortunately we don't, and we may never have it.

Re:Panspermia

[drinkypoo]

Do you know how many bacteria we've put on other planets and moons over the years? :-D

Do you have any idea how many bacteria I've put on moons and other planets over the years?

(...ladies...)

Re:Panspermia

[c6gunner]

Well, if by same stuff you mean "paint" then, yeah ok. Or if you mean "atoms", then you'll be even closer to the truth. But as for the patterns created by the paint ... you couldn't be farther from the truth.

To put it in less figurative language: the likelihood that alien lifeforms will have a genetic coding that is structured the same way as DNA or RNA is slim, but possible. The likelihood that their DNA/RNA will slightly resemble that of Earth life is more remote, but still not impossible. The likelihood of their DNA/RNA being "the same as Earth", on the other hand, is so remote as to be completely impossible.

Re:Panspermia

[Tibia1]

I was saying that maybe life on earth was intelligent before humans, mostly as a joke, and that millions of years ago this species sent a rover to mars, only to be wiped out by an ice age or something.

Re:Panspermia

[Hammer79]

If the Earth is leaving a dust & bacteria trail behind, the dust would still be caught in orbit around the Sun. The dust would orbit the galaxies core at the same speed as the Sun unless it was forced out the Sun's orbit by something else.

Re:Panspermia

[turkeyfish]

And you were able to deduce all this from the presence of a "worm-like" object associated with a meteorite?

This looks a lot more like someone from inside NASA desperately searching for a way to save imploding budgets than evidence. Yes it is possible, but its also possible that its just a piece of spaghetti left behind by an alien rushing from that famous Italian take-out joint at the edge of our galaxy, you know, the one we all KNOW is out there somewhere, must be there are just so many places we haven't looked yet. Its also possible that a meteorite from elsewhere, but with a gas signature similar to that expected from Mars is the source.

If this is what passes for Exobiology these days, I think we are wasting a lot of taxpayer's money.

Re:Panspermia

[Urza9814]

This is slashdot! Who RTFA? :)

But damn, if only that meteorite was a few million years earlier. That woulda been cool.

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we could send them blankets with smallpox, in the spirit of Thanksgiving.

Re:Panspermia

[Urza9814]

Ohh wait, and are you saying that the bacteria then came from Earth originally? That'd be pretty trippy.

I was just thinking this morning (as a side note, I'm rather sick right now and was/am somewhat delirious...and on medication) that they should make a sci-fi thriller movie where Adam and Eve were actually members of some ultra high tech oppressive society and they learned some secret that they shouldn't have so they were cast out. And then the society died for some reason. Maybe the secret was the fact that the society was gonna die. And hell, let's have fun with it - maybe the society died fairly recently, and they were actually Atlantis. And Jesus was another member of that society sent to seek out people that they could mate with to stay alive? Or something? I dunno. But hell you could link all kinds of crazy shit to that. OH! Maybe they're still alive, in the Bermuda triangle! Or they moved to Europa. It could be a prequel to 2001!

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it could be that when we look at Venus we are looking into our past and when we look at Mars we look into our future.

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

"It takes millions of years for a rock from mars to reach earth, and vice versa."

Oh? Why should that be true? Assuming a rock is blasted from either body by a meteoric impact or whatever, why should it take millions of years? Either the rock exceeds escape velocity, or it doesn't. Given velocity and the proper trajectory, a decade is more than enough time for the rock to hit the other planet. A lower velocity on a poor trajectory might mean a thousand years before impact. Millions of years? I don't think you have much of a grasp on physics.

Re:Panspermia

[Tibia1]

Sounds like you're tripping balls, man.
I have already theorized that Jesus was an alien with sophisticated technology (probably not the first to think this) and started religion so that he could feel powerful or something. But then I later concluded that he is just a really bad case of broken telephone, and probably never existed.

Oh, and back to the mars stuff, the bacteria couldve still originally come from mars, but it could have evolved here to become intelligent, send a rover to mars, die out in an ice age, and then humans became intelligent later (possible even from bacteria that didn't come from mars), and go to mars to find the fossil of a rover. Therefor, the first rover couldve been from ascendants of mars bacteria, and the second rover couldve been ascended from earth bacteria.

Re:Panspermia

[Tablizer]

And you were able to deduce all this from the presence of a "worm-like" object associated with a meteorite?

No. It's from various studies of Mars. It's had almost a dozen successful orbiters and 5 successful landing vehicles on it. There is plenty of evidence that Mars was once much wetter.

It also comes from knowledge of Earth. Our atmosphere and water is largely protected from space radiation due to our magnetic field, which based on commonly-accepted theories is generated from currents within Earth's semi-liquid-metal core. The field acts as a radiation shield.

Bigger planets take longer to cool. Mars, being about half the diameter of Earth cooled off much quicker, it's core now almost solid (or at least stationary). All planets and large moons had a hot core at one point in time soon after formation, and thus probably also had a magnetic field (assuming sufficient metal content). The difference is in part how fast the core cools, which is largely a function of body mass. (It's expected that Earth's magnetic field may give out in a couple of billion years.)

In fact, Mars' ancient magnetic field left slight magnetic patterns in rocks, almost like tape-recorder tape, which can be detected from orbiters. This tends to confirm that Mars once had an ample magnetic field also, explaining how all that water was able to stay on the surface. A thick enough atmosphere allows water to stay liquid and not evaporate into space via ionization.

Also, the cratering rate of the solar system has been estimated and modeled from studies of the moon. Based on these rates, one can estimate the age of various larger-scale surface features of Mars using crater density. If you know the rate of bombardment throughout history, you can estimate the age of surface features. It's sort of like estimating the age of a car by looking at the pebble nicks on the front bumper.

Sure, it could all be wrong, but it's the model that currently best matches the evidence: Mars used to be "nice".
     

Re:Panspermia

[Urza9814]

Ah, but as someone pointed out in a different reply to my original reply, if you RTFA, the bacteria they found arrived at Earth long after life had already evolved here. Of course, life could have originally come to Earth from Mars on a _different_ meteor, evolved into a highly intelligent race, sent a rover to mars which was then lifeless planting their own bacteria there, which was later discovered on a meteor that hit Earth. That race then died out and humans came and went to mars and find the rover of the previous civilization. But I think that's getting just a bit too cracked out, even for me in my current state. lol

Re:Panspermia

[caywen]

I wonder, though. If Jupiter is the solar system's vacuum cleaner, eliminating much of the deadly debris that might destroy Earth, then wouldn't it also act in the same with with panspermia dust from Earth?

Re:Panspermia

[Tablizer]

I'm rooting for panspermia. There's something kind of cool at looking at Mars and thinking: that's where we came from, and the rovers are just us coming home.

Just like when your baby grows up, and one day comes home from college with a big obnoxious car that embarrasses the family.
     

Re:Panspermia

[jpmorgan]

It'd be funnier if they find a fossil of an ancient rover on earth. :)

Re:Panspermia

[Tablizer]

To be fair, there's probably a wide continuum: some rocks never land, some float around for billions of years, some millions, some thousands of years, and a handful maybe a few decades. I'm sure Jupiter and Co's gravity tosses meteorites every which direction, creating a large probability field.

Most tests show that space radiation is very hostile to microbes. It damages spores fairly quickly. However, we may not know of all strains of microbes. Further, Earth may have "spoiled" life here by protecting it too much from radiation. On a harsher environment, spores may be more hardy. For example, some bacteria put 4 copies of their DNA into spores to have back-up copies in case of damage. Maybe it's possible to have spores with hundreds of copies (along with a way to sew them back together with correction).
   

Re:Panspermia

[jc42]

Yeah, Jupiter would be a sinkhole for a lot of the debris being pushed out by the solar wind. But it's not all that effective. After all, Earth has a couple hundred recognizable impact craters, things the Jupiter wasn't able to grab. Astronomers have also been able to measure the smaller incoming particles, and they amount to several tons per day. (I wonder whether this is more or less than the loss via the dust tail. Anyone know the numbers?)

I've seen a few references to an astronomer's comment that the Solar System is the sun, Jupiter, and a lot of insignificant rubble. I've also seen a suggestion that this could turn out true for living things, too. Of course, the sun would tend to dissociate the molecules of any living thing that falls into it, unless there's "life" that exists in a plasma state. But if you look at the chemical constituents of Jupiter's atmosphere, it does look a lot like a huge biochechemical reactor system. Lots of yummy molecules with C, H, O, N and trace elements. It just might turn out that most of the life in the Solar System is inside Jupiter are various depths. It may be a while before we have a good Jupiter Explorer bot, though. There aren't any Earth-like conditions there anywhere.

Re:Panspermia

[Mortaegus]

Something about this has me wondering, isn't devolution easier for life than evolution? Usually life builds off of itself, becoming more complex as it goes, but retaining most of what was already there. From previous studies it seems as though lots of bacteria are able to adapt to space much more readily than was expected. http://www.infoplease.com/spot/spacefungus1.html (infoplease.com) Watch out for aggressive ads on that site. Doesn't this suggest that bacterial life was previously adapted for space?

Re:Panspermia

[Tablizer]

[If] life on Mars and life on Earth share a common history, it makes it much easier to muck around on Mars, because it'll just be another extension of life here so no worry about contamination.

That may not be a safe assumption. When Earth organisms go into new environments on other parts of Earth, they often encounter microbes they are not accustomed to, and become ill or die. It could be a big risk.

If ANY life on Mars is found, regardless of origin, it may be best to leave it alone. Send only one-way labs or colonies to Mars. Don't risk the sci-fi Andromeda Strain come real.
   

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm rooting for independent evolution. It would make it far more likely that the universe is teaming with life.

Yeah, 'cause two is "far more" than one - why, it *doubles* the chances that the universe is teaming [sic] with life!.

(Omitted: Approximately 250 words, mostly profanity and invective.)

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

the likelihood that alien lifeforms will have a genetic coding that is structured the same way as DNA or RNA is slim, but possible

Citation please?

What if the following two statements are true? 1> Only nucleotides as we know them can form life, and 2> Life emerges independently throughout the universe.

I'm just saying, no two different molecules have identical properties, even versions with opposing chirality. It could be the case that the nucleotides we know are the only way life can work, even to the point that DNA might have to twist the same way! And, it could be that nucleotides that we know are created randomly everywhere, meaning life can spring up everywhere in the universe.

I actually find that easier to believe than to believe that Earth and the life on it is something unique.

Re:Panspermia

[jc42]

Nah; the dust is forced out of the Solar System by the solar wind. For a good explanation of this, look up "heliopause". That's basically the surface where the solar wind reaches interstellar space, and the light pressure from our sun is no longer the strongest force on particles.

Of course, it's more complex than that. As someone else mentioned, anything that gets within an AU or so of Jupiter is seriously deflected, and sent off on a different trajectory. The other planets have similar, but much smaller effects. But this only affects a small fraction of the thin cloud of gas, dust particles, and bacterial spores that are being forced out of the solar system. Much of the solar wind and the various planets' dust tails is forced out of the system over a few years' time.

Re:Panspermia

[JWSmythe]

    Something I like to bring up in these conversations is....

    There are 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars organized into 80,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. We estimate the age of the universe to be 13 billion years, based on our observable galaxy, which ... well ... it's not all that we can see. That's an awful lot of stars, in an awful lot of galaxies for Earth to be the only Earth-like planet. On average, there would be 370,000,000,000 stars in each galaxy. It's estimated that we have 100,000,000,000 to 400,000,000,000 stars just in our galaxy (hey, just about average, how do you like that).

    So, on an average planet, in an average solar system, in an average galaxy, a bunch of the self-believing sentient lifeforms of the planet are talking about how they may or may not be the only sentient beings in the universe, and/or how crumbs may have fallen off of their rock and polluted neighboring planets, and/or how others crumbs may have fallen on theirs.

    (how was that for one hell of a run-on sentence?)

    And I still haven't gotten my subether signaling device back from the shop.

Re:Panspermia

[sourICE]

They found that the tail includes "dust" as large as bacteria, and since high-altitude airplane and balloon samples had shown bacteria at all altitudes, our default assumption should be that there are bacteria (mostly in spore form) in our planet's dust tail.

This is assuming that all bacteria isn't burned up and killed in our atmosphere before becoming the dust trail we have spotted. They would have to test samples from the actual dust trail to know if there is living life exiting our planet and being sent across galaxies.

Re:Panspermia

[Solandri]

Hardly. It might raise some ethical conundrums, but it certainly won't make colonization any more difficult.

If we ever colonize mars, we're going to start by building habitats. We'll have hundreds of years to live on a planet which we haven't even begun to terraform. That will give us plenty of time to have the People for the Ethical Treatment of Martian Lifeforms present a convincing case for why we should abandon an entire planet to a bunch of alien microbes. If they fail in convincing the rest of humanity, then we'll carry on with our terraforming effort, and the Martian bacteria will be relegated to sample jars, museums, and computer databases.

Yeah, that sounds great if you're the one doing the terraforming. I suppose you'll have no problem when the Vogons come by to eliminate Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass, relegating all of Earth to a computer database entry of "Mostly harmless"?

Re:Panspermia

[JWSmythe]

    It's a good idea, but....

    Earth, is struck by objects all the time. And... the planetary orbits are really big. There are lots of gaps for stuff to pass through. I'd wonder how much get stuck in the asteroid belt though.

Re:Panspermia

[noidentity]

It would make it far more likely that the universe is teaming with life.

If they did team up, what would they call themselves, and who would they play against? God maybe. That'd be one hell of a fight.

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we'll need antibiotics for extraterrestrial germs. That's just so...badass.

Re:Panspermia

[timmarhy]

what makes you think it won't be the other way around, that our environment will be hosile to the martian bacteria?

Re:Panspermia

[Tablizer]

what makes you think it won't be the other way around, that our environment will be hostile to the martian bacteria?

That could be true also. Hopefully at least we can study Mars life before we destroy it. Something tells me human curiosity will investigate Mars closer one way or another. We may already have contaminated Mars because early probes were not cleaned sufficiently by some accounts.
           

Re:Panspermia

[niktemadur]

There are lots of gaps for stuff to pass through.

I would rephrase that, for specificity: By a very, very wide margin, gaps are the rule, not the exception.
To quote a post above, Anything that gets within an AU or so of Jupiter is seriously deflected, and sent off on a different trajectory.
A radius of one AU means a diameter of two. Jupiter's orbital perimeter measures around thirty AUs, give or take a couple.
So, if two out of thirty AUs are covered, that's one fifteenth "protection" against any celestial bombardment of the inner solar system.

Because of smaller size and larger orbital perimeters, adding up Saturn, Uranus and Neptune do not change the numbers very much.
So we're not quite naked, but we are basically wearing only an armored thong in a war zone.
But since this thread discusses the possibility of panspermia, the image of a chastity belt keeps popping up in my mind.

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

If life can survive that journey [from Mars to Earth], why couldn't it survive in some small way between stars, over billions of years.

Well, why not. But current understanding is the universe is just a few billions of years old, therefore, to reach another star system today life had to have been evolved shortly after universe's birth. But at that time, as current understanding of star and planet development is, there hadn't been many and much of the heavier elements necessary for complex chemistry.

The big question is exploration of Mars. If life evolved independently, we will have a much harder time mucking around there, especially colonizing it. Folks will want to leave it alone to its own devices.

No, people will destroy it just the way they are about to destroy life on Earth. (Well, that's not exactly true, we are not destroying life on Earth, but we are actively reducing it to a less complex mixture of species.)

It life on Mars and life on Earth share a common history, it makes it much easier to muck around on Mars, because it'll just be another extension of life here so no worry about contamination.

That's exactly why we're exterminating species on Earth. They are worthless and by no means valuable enough to save them, since they're just another extension of ... oh, wait.

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

We know that Jesus is most likely a real historical figure because he is mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus. Whether you believe in the divinity of Jesus is another issue entirely, but Jesus was a real person. Oh and, by the way, Jesus never said he was the only "son of God"...he said all humans are the children of God, but we have forgotten that fact. If only we could realize how this world is an illusion of materiality, we would raise our consciousness and have the ability to manipulate reality at will (like Neo in the Matrix)

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm rooting for panspermia. There's something kind of cool at looking at Mars and thinking: that's where we came from, and the rovers are just us coming home.

Panspermia is a broken theory (hypothesis really). It doesn't address the origins of life, but rather shifts it to "somewhere else."

It smacks very much of religion.

Why would it be more likely that abiogenesis occurred on Mars rather than Earth? Or maybe God lives on Mars?

Re:Panspermia

[Nathrael]

+1 War of the Worlds reference.

Re:Panspermia

[Anonymous Coward]

It's going to be funny when they find a fossil of an ancient rover on mars.

It's going to be even funnier when they find that fossilized ancient rover still collecting data.

Re:Panspermia

[Bigjeff5]

He's saying if all life in the solar system came from the same source, it will all look essentially the same (with overall minor variations). I'll be more specific, so you can understand the analogy.

Suppose you toss a bucket of yellow paint in five directions, making five splashes on the ground. One may land on concrete, and look completely different from the one that landed on grass, which looks totally different than the one that landed on the bush, etc. But when you take a sample of what they are all made of, you'll find they are made of exactly the same stuff: yellow paint.

For a car analogy, suppose there are five models of vehicle in existance. They are very different, some are bigger and tougher, others are smaller and faster, etc. If they were all made at a GM factory, though, then they are similar at the fundamental level - they are all made with the same type of steel, rubber, and plastic, and they have similarities in design across the board.

That's what he's talking about when he talks about all life coming from the same source. It makes it seem less likely that the rest of the universe will be teaming with life if we find that it only happened once to our solar system. In truth, the chances don't change at all, it just seems different. There could just as well be cans of red, or blue, or white paint, as well as fords and toyotas and hondas out there. We already know it can happen once, the chances that it can happen again don't really change whether it happened once and migrated across our solar system or if it happened several times in our solar system, or if it only ever happened once in our solar system. It doesn't do anything for the likelihood of life in a completely separate system.

Re:Panspermia

[Bigjeff5]

I'm guessing none.

What do I win?

Re:Panspermia

[JWSmythe]

    I'm not going to do the math on the total coverage area of a thong or chastity belt, but I'd guess chastity belt is closer to the correct coverage size. :) If you wore some socks too, that'd cover for the debris in it's orbit too. :)

   

Re:Panspermia

[greyhueofdoubt]

Eh, I have to disagree on that point. It has historically gone more like this:

-microbe evolves side by side with a human (or close human relative) population; the humans build up defenses against that particular microbe

Then either:
-Something changes (environment, nutrition, domestic animals, etc.) that tips the scales in one direction or the other, giving you a plague or a reduction in disease
-A previously unexposed group of humans encounters the microbe; the microbe has evolved to deal with human defenses, these humans don't have the defenses, bam, you got yourself a plague.

I have yet to hear of a real human-killing pathogen that just appeared out of nowhere. HIV, for instance, crossed over from our close ape or monkey relatives. Rabies is another one. Anthrax, certain flues, many parasites. My point is that it's very unlikely that life on mars would be deadly to us as an infectious agent because it had spent millions of years focusing on surviving heat, cold, radiation, drought or flood, etc.- and most importantly, there are no food sources that even remotely resemble warm-blooded animals on mars. So the microbes would have to make an evolutionary leap from eating iron, sulfur, or other inorganic substance to dealing with the intricate and extraordinarily hostile environment of a human body.

I'm really not worried about it. There are so many other difficulties to overcome that by the time we actually send people to mars, I'm sure we'll have a pretty good picture of what kind of life, if any, exists there.

-b

Re:Panspermia

[TropicalCoder]

...and the Martian bacteria will be relegated to sample jars, museums, and computer databases.

Or perhaps more likely it will flourish and prosper during teraforming to the point it may become overwhelming dominant on the planet once more.

Re:Panspermia

[TropicalCoder]

I bet there are many ways to build something that performs the same function as DNA but is not DNA

I really wonder about that. DNA/RNA - the whole way it works is incredibly ingenious. Who would have ever imagined such a thing before Watson and Crick? It would be interesting to hear some knowegable biologist weigh in on this question.

DNA may be the only way to create life, or at least - biological, carbon based life. However, this solution could perhaps spontaneously arise in different places in the universe via similar ubiquitous mechanisms, as a parallel of how different species may have a similar appearance when ocupying a similar ecological niche in different ecologies.

Re:Panspermia

[S.O.B.]

For example, some bacteria put 4 copies of their DNA into spores to have back-up copies in case of damage. Maybe it's possible to have spores with hundreds of copies (along with a way to sew them back together with correction).

Sort of a genetic RAID (Redundant Array of Independent DNA).

Re:Panspermia

[Gerafix]

Repeat after me: Mars is Just A Theory.

Re:Panspermia

[danlip]

RNA probably came before DNA, and some life uses only RNA (some viruses for example). DNA is not just 2 RNAs put together, there are substantial differences. So even on earth there are 2 different solutions to the basic problem. Even keeping the basic structure of DNA/RNA there are probably lots of ways to hang a few extra atoms of the bases to create completely different bases (which would then need different transcription enzymes, etc.). And I still wouldn't rule out a completely different structure, since there are so many ways to link carbons together to form complex structures.

Re:Panspermia

[dryeo]

Considering that current theories about stellar evolution point to the Sun putting out about 75% energy back then the question then arises whether Mars had enough green house gasses to raise the temperature to liquid water temperatures that early in the history of the Solar System.
Also when talking about that the early Solar System you have to consider bombardment.
Earth early on seems to have been hit by a massive planetoid which would have remelted the Earths surface.
There is also evidence that Mars got hit by something relatively massive, one hemisphere is quite a bit higher then the other. This may of kept Mars molten when the Earth had cooled down.
Basically it is hard to say which planet cooled down and became habitual first.
 

Re:Panspermia

[Tablizer]

As the most likely scenario, I generally agree with you. However, one never quite knows for sure. For example, the mystery of why human-introduced cross-continent species often quickly out-compete their local rivals and become "invasive" is still unsolved. In theory, the locals should be better adapted for the environment. What if Mars microbes do the same with certain kinds of Earth microbes and change the chemistry of Earth, poisoning it? (Change it faster than life can adapt.)

We are still children, relatively speaking, poking around trying to learn, but we don't know enough to not get into unexpected trouble, and there's no parent around to bail us out.
     

Re:Panspermia

[Tablizer]

Yip :-)

Re:Panspermia

[bobzaguy]

Can I still paint the ford mustang I just found with this yellow paint sitting over here on the floor?

Re:Panspermia

[bobzaguy]

Does anyone know if this worm-like object resembled anyone on our planet, say, for example, Dick Cheney?

Re:Panspermia

[bhiestand]

Hardly. It might raise some ethical conundrums, but it certainly won't make colonization any more difficult.

If we ever colonize mars, we're going to start by building habitats. We'll have hundreds of years to live on a planet which we haven't even begun to terraform. That will give us plenty of time to have the People for the Ethical Treatment of Martian Lifeforms present a convincing case for why we should abandon an entire planet to a bunch of alien microbes. If they fail in convincing the rest of humanity, then we'll carry on with our terraforming effort, and the Martian bacteria will be relegated to sample jars, museums, and computer databases.

Yeah, that sounds great if you're the one doing the terraforming. I suppose you'll have no problem when the Vogons come by to eliminate Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass, relegating all of Earth to a computer database entry of "Mostly harmless"?

I didn't hear him say "This is how we should be", just "This is how it'll happen"... As you're watching the AGW Deniers and anti-environmentalists getting dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, do you really think he's WRONG?

Re:Panspermia

[bhiestand]

I'm not ready to call Earth an average planet. We have an awesome magnetic field and a tidally locked moon. Additionally, it's likely that the majority of planets exist outside of the liquid water zone, although we obviously don't know enough about formation of solar systems to answer that with any certainty. Insufficient evidence still, but it's not crazy to guess that ours is probably a rare planet.

Of course, this is the universe we're talking about. Rare things happen all the time.

Re:Panspermia

[JWSmythe]

    I was going to go off on the egotistical humans, who think they are the superior race on their own planet speech, but I read the rest of what you said.

    Yes, humans don't know about the rest of the universe to even begin to understand how rare or not rare they are. Even if you consider the idea of an infant looking from it's crib into it's room and assuming "this is the world", without understand the size of the planet they are on. We've only seen the surfaces of a handful of planets, and we think that we might just understand how everything works. Until we learn an awful lot more, we're cavemen watching a thunderstorm believing there is a god.

Re:Panspermia

[bhiestand]

I'm glad you read it all :). I almost put a disclaimer up top, but I always felt that was rather tacky. My local fundies say I'm a typical "arrogant atheist liberal tree-hugging fascist communist socialist pinko homosexual" so it would be a fun change to get called an arrogant religious fundie!

I absolutely agree we hardly know anything, and it's pretty amusing that so many people act like they know everything.

Since we're on that subject, my own WAGs:

• Magnetic fields are fairly common in 2nd and 3rd generation solar systems
• Predominance of binary systems will make habitability harder for complex life, although we could see some pretty awesome adaptations
• Large numbers of moons around large planets could make life, especially underground and aquatic, much more common than we expect
• Historians in a thousand years will look back on us and say "most of their predictions were fairly logical given their limited data set... but they still seem so silly!"

Re:Panspermia

[JWSmythe]

    I agree totally. :)

    But what's funnier to think about is the historians a million years ago on another planet, in another galaxy, looking back a couple thousand years on their own knowledge and saying "most of their predictions were fairly logical, given their limited data set, but we can clearly see evolution proceeding on many planets including that blue green rock in galaxy X19-FFZ." Too bad it will be thousands of years before we get access to their archives, and we (or more precisely our descendants) all get a good laugh over it. :)

Re:Panspermia

[SheeEttin]

It's going to be funny when they find a fossil of an ancient rover on mars.

Ancient rovers on Mars? Hell, we haven't found the rovers the microbes sent to Earth yet!

Re:Panspermia

[aug24]

why we should abandon an entire planet to a bunch of alien microbes

Or, perhaps (as there are now, by definition, no aliens, just pansperms), why we should abandon an entire planet to a bunch of microbes that are only slightly older than yeast.

Justin.

Re:Panspermia

[psykocrime]

Hardly. It might raise some ethical conundrums, but it certainly won't make colonization any more difficult.

If we ever colonize mars, we're going to start by building habitats. We'll have hundreds of years to live on a planet which we haven't even begun to terraform.

Cool. Just don't drink the water.

Re:Panspermia

[Painted]

Not to mention chiralism- even if life rising independently settling on RNA/DNA for it's encoding, if left or right handed chiralism is equally likely, it's 50% likely to be completely different than ours. To the point where we could not process a single amino acid if we ate those alien critters...

Re:Panspermia

[hazydave]

Please don't.... a yellow mustang? Never... save it for the Hummer that has yet to be discovered (or perhaps its bones... aren't they extinct? Or Chinese now?). I'll take the Mustang in red or blue, thank-you.

Re:Panspermia

[hazydave]

Historians in a thousand years will look back on us and say "most of their predictions were fairly logical given their limited data set... but they still seem so silly!"

Please... our robot overlords will have long since come to expect that of us. But they like us anyway... we make great pets.

Re:Panspermia

[hazydave]

Also, "seriously deflected" isn't the same as "protected". Any space junk with random heading passing close enough to Jupiter to be deflected, not close enough to be captured, might also be deflected toward earth as away from it.

Re:Panspermia

[bobzaguy]

traditionalist.

I've seen this movie

[Monkeedude1212]

FTFA:

According to scientists, the meteorite was broken off the surface of Mars by the impact of an asteroid, and reached Earth after floating through space for about 16 million years. It landed in Allan Hills in Antarctica.

I instantly thought of John Carpenter's "The Thing"

Oh wow

[Dartz-IRL]

It's life.

Or was life.

If this is true. It's just staggering to me. If there was life on Mars.... there may still be. If there was life on Mars, then how common is life elsewhere in the galaxy? If it can exist on ancient Mars, there's no reason it can't exist on any of the other millions of planets scattered through the billions of stars in our Galaxy.

If life is found on Mars... or found to have existed.... then it can be anywhere.

Under the ice of Europa aswell?

While we may never meet our neighbours..... it would still be nice to know that yes, they may well be out there.... somewhere. The Galaxy may well be teeming. I sure hope it is. I mean, if it becomes clear that rather than being just blacks, whites.... whatevers.... on a cosmological scale where there is actual non-terrestrial life.... shouldn't it be clear that we all are just the one race?

Re:Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You are such a dick.... if your fossilized cells were found in another part of the galaxy they could be certain that there is no intelligent life in our part of the galaxy.

Asshole

Re:Oh wow

[Beelzebud]

Says the AC with nothing better to do than be a boring unoriginal troll.

Re:Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from how quickly life originated on Earth the galaxy would indeed be expected to be teeming with life. It is mind-blowing to think about, but it is no longer considered to be unlikely that we will find life on other bodies in the solar system and that we will get spectroscopic evidence of life on exoplanets.

With that said, we know that it took over 3 billion years to produce the complex organisms of the Cambrian explosion. There is a possibility that the galaxy is full of bacterias, but nearly empty of complex life life. There are even some who think that we are the most intelligent species in the galaxy, or in the whole universe.

Re:Oh wow

[Dartz-IRL]

That'd be sad.

I know that sounds silly, but I really can't think of a better way to put it.

It seems though, with the Cambrian explosion, all it takes is for life to reach a critical mass, then away it goes.

The Internet has been around in some form since the 70's, but it only really hit big in the 90's... and now it's everywhere.

Life on Mars never got to that point.

The BBC ended it after 2 seasons.

Re:Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course we've never before seen a comment such as yours here on slashdot. Mod parent +1: Highly Original.

Oh wait...

Re:Oh wow

[sznupi]

There are even some who think that we are the most intelligent species in the galaxy, or in the whole universe.

Accidentally, they are the members of the same "most intelligent" species.

Re:Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The author Richard D. Fuerle is a classic antisemite. One should take anything that he writes about human races with a spoonfull of salt.

But recent genetic research does seem to imply that it is possible to classify humans (pre-15th century ones, anyway) into a small number of races.

Re:Oh wow

[turkeyfish]

"If this is true." Yes, thats the catchword.

Re:Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, your not being selfish enough! In fact, I've come up with a new theory: our sun is the only source of energy in the universe that can support life. No arguements please, we rule the universe.

Re:Oh wow

[caywen]

In the past, the fighting was about who is the dominant, master race in this world. If advanced aliens were to land in front of the White House, the fighting would become about who is, um, the dominant master race who should represent us as a species.

Re:Oh wow

[Tablizer]

If there was life on Mars, then how common is life elsewhere in the galaxy?

Unfortunately, finding life on Mars may not tell us much about the frequency of life, because it may have been "cross polluted" between Earth and Mars or visa verse (as pointed out by other posters).

It may tell us that life can hop planets, but it may tell us nothing about the frequency of original life. We won't know until we study living Mars life at the genetic level. If it appears genetically completely different, then the independent origin theory gains ground, and independent life appears to be more likely.

If on the other hand it appears related to Earth life, then we couldn't tell if the very first life form in the solar system was unlikely chance or common in the Galaxy. It could have been one little event on one planet that started "Solar System" life. It's hard to test the likelihood of an event if it only happens once.
       

Re:Oh wow

[rastoboy29]

Yeah, but think about the competition.

Could get ugly.  At some point.

Re:Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The author Richard D. Fuerle is a classic antisemite.

Is that an indictment or an endorsement?

Re:Oh wow

[Nathrael]

I mean, if it becomes clear that rather than being just blacks, whites.... whatevers.... on a cosmological scale where there is actual non-terrestrial life.... shouldn't it be clear that we all are just the one race?

Hopefully, yes. But I doubt it. There can be a metric fsckton of contradicting information, some people will still believe in utterly wrong things. Just look at all the Creationists or 9/11 truthers out there.

Re:Oh wow

[Rufty]

Black and white will seamlessly team together. And pick on green, 'coz why settle for racism when you've got specism! (Misquoted from Pratchett.)

Re:Oh wow

[hazydave]

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it (not as we know it, not as we know it)

Well

[Dunbal]

This would certainly widen the belt for what we consider to be the "habitable" range, in our search for habitable exoplanets.

Re:Well

[wizardforce]

As a iochemist, it was my understanding that the habitable zone was already known to extend out toward Mars. Although really, I'd say that the concept of a habitable zone needs to be expanded anyway considering the possibility of life in the Jupiter system. I believe that it is becoming increasingly clear that there isn't just a single habitable zone around a star like our sun but also pockets of habitable space underneath the surface of various moons and terrestrial planets like Mars.

Re:Well

[danlip]

I think Mars was already considered habitable range. We know that billions of years ago Mars was warmer and wetter, and if it was a little more massive, so it could better hold an atmosphere, it might still be. All this is true regardless of whether or not Mars once had life.

Re:Well

[MichaelSmith]

TFA talks about two other Martian meteorites which may have the same evidence inside. If this is shown to be the case we would have to assume that bacterial life on Mars is pervasive. This for me is evidence that low order life will be pervasive elsewhere, which makes me wonder why we haven't heard from the high order life forms?

Re:Well

[NoYob]

What's the quote from "Jurassic Park"? - Life will find a way.

Re:Well

[Kjella]

As a iochemist, it was my understanding that the habitable zone was already known to extend out toward Mars.

Well. there's a difference between being potentially habitable for a species, and finding remnants of actual life. Either life appear on both Earth and Mars independently, meaning there's actually a quite wide band of possible conditions - or life really transports across space. Either way is much more compelling arguments for the habitable zone actually being habitable than a theoretical zone based on temperature.

Re:Well

[wizardforce]

This for me is evidence that low order life will be pervasive elsewhere, which makes me wonder why we haven't heard from the high order life forms?

The conditions under which primitive life can exist are numerous. The same can't really be said of intelligent life. Bacteria can live in cracks over a km under the surface; animals and the like can't. Space is huge. 4.26 light years to Alpha Centauri alone. Signals degrade, civilizations collapse. There's a lot of things that likely make contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life a very rare occurrence.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Habitable in OUR sense of life. We only know life based on what happened on our planet. Maybe, there is another form of life out there that is build upon a few compounds common on that planet.

Re:Well

[khallow]

We have to find life on Mars first. The current evidence is still the weak evidence of a decade ago.

Re:Well

[fph il quozientatore]

As a iochemist,

Hey, we're talking about Mars here, not Io

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Mar's problem with habitability is that its atmosphere is constantly being eroded by the Solar wind. This is due to the magnetic fields and magnetosphere of Mars. If Mars had a core and thus magnetic fields protecting it that were the same as Earth's then the story could be quite different.

References:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_1.htm
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/21nov_plasmoids.htm

This also means that it will not be possible to change Mars into a planet that can be inhabited by humans in a fashion similar to what occurs here on Earth.

The gradual removal of the planet's atmosphere may be what meant that extremely primitive life is all that has had the chance - and will have the chance - to evolve naturally on Mars.

Re:Well

[lena_10326]

or life really transports across space

Humans are generally considered a form of advanced life and we've transported ourselves and microbes across space. The thing I don't understand is why it's such a wild and crazy concept to consider the possibility of advanced life traversing space from Mars to Earth millions or billions of years ago.

Either way is much more compelling arguments for the habitable zone actually being habitable than a theoretical zone based on temperature.

If it isn't already, the habitable zone should be stratified into layers indicating habitable for humans down to microbes. Some people are only interested in discussing habitable for humans while others think more expansively. Thinking in layers would clear up any confusion.

I propose using alphabetical labels. An "A" class for single cell organisms, "M" class for humans, "Z" class for .. hmm.. not sure yet.. maybe beings requiring hot conditions under high pressure.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is either

(a) we are the highest order of life (highly unlikely if we are assuming all pervasive life)

(b) they avoid our system due to the various asteroid and comet belts, ie. Kupier belt and Oort cloud, as such a system is seen as too unstable or dangerous to evolve life or bother exploring.

(c) we have already had first contact long ago and they do contact us but we mostly ignore it.

with (c) being my preferred option.

Re:Well

[Kjella]

Humans are generally considered a form of advanced life and we've transported ourselves and microbes across space. The thing I don't understand is why it's such a wild and crazy concept to consider the possibility of advanced life traversing space from Mars to Earth millions or billions of years ago.

Depending on how you guess the numbers of the Drake equation everything is possible, but the biggest question then is "where are they now?". I mean it's good for sci-fi and whatnot that there's lots of ancient and extinct and "let's stand aside and let younger races grow", but it'd be like asking humans to abandon most of Earth to give chimps a chance to evolve. There's very few places humanity has actually abandoned, on the other hand it could just be assuming too much. Who knows, maybe we were farmland that was seeded and later abandoned, and just left to grow wild. But that's all speculation, what we'd need is some evidence to suggest there was advanced life here before us and there's none to my knowledge.

Re:Well

[MichaelSmith]

(d) Distances between civilisations are too long, and the life of civilisations is too short for contact to happen. There may be evidence of alien activity far away in space but we don't recognise it as such.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

"Z" class for .. hmm..

Zombies. A planet populated entirely with zombies.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

As an iochemist, it was my understanding...

Corrected that for you

...maybe, from a probe....

[gadget junkie]

...NASA saw this!!!

Mars origin

[Velox_SwiftFox]

Can someone explain to me why the set of meteorites are considered more likely to have originated on Mars than from an impact on Earth itself?

Are there Earth-origin ones known to distinguish them from, since debris from such an earth impact would more likely have orbits intersecting earth's, or is some other evidence used? I'm having trouble finding it.

Re:Mars origin

[Monkeedude1212]

A Giant asteroid or Meteor supposedly Hit mars with such force that it sent Meteorites of Mars... umm... Rock? (I want to call it Mars Earth but that sounds ridiculous) hurtling towards Earth. The meteorites properties remain consistant with those of rocks we've observed on Mars, hence why we predict their origin.

The Bacteria is INSIDE the rock, not so much on the rock, so its believed the Bacteria was there before it hit Earth.

Re:Mars origin

[wizardforce]

Can someone explain to me why the set of meteorites are considered more likely to have originated on Mars than from an impact on Earth itself?

Gas bubbles found in the meteorite have a composition that is very much like the atmosphere on Mars. The gas inclusions don't resemble those of Earth.

Re:Mars origin

[MichaelSmith]

TFA:

Scientists were able to trace the meteorite back to Mars, as its chemical composition matched the relative proportions of various gases measured in observations of the atmosphere of Mars made by the Viking spacecraft in the 1970s.

Re:Mars origin

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain to me why the set of meteorites are considered more likely to have originated on Mars than from an impact on Earth itself?

Are there Earth-origin ones known to distinguish them from, since debris from such an earth impact would more likely have orbits intersecting earth's, or is some other evidence used? I'm having trouble finding it.

Got to actually read the articles. They explain the traces of atmosphere match Mars not the Earth. A number of other Mars meteors have been identified. The article even mentions two others with the same structures. Lots of good info if you read the articles. Once people throw in the towel and accept that there was or is life on Mars then the argument will be did it evolve there and is it part of the same evolutionary cycle as Earth? Those are the fights that will likely take decades and there may never be a clear answer. It's a massive question because if it did evolve independently then anywhere life could evolve it probably has evolved meaning there are millions of planets with life just in our Galaxy. I think within the next 20 years there will be a resolution to the question of life based on direct sampling but the second question of it's source will be a fight to the bitter end.

Re:Mars origin

[Anonymous Coward]

This unfortunately proves nothing really, and seems to be leading to further wild speculation based on past wild speculation.

Re:Mars origin

[tzot]

The word you were looking for is "soil": Mars soil. So, your native language has "earth" and "soil" as synonyms, and some strange capitalization rules?

Re:Mars origin

[c6gunner]

The word you were looking for is "soil": Mars soil.

No. Soil, by definition, is rock and minerals mixed with organic matter. Mars doesn't have soil. The proper word is "regolith", the same as the surface of the moon.

Re:Mars origin

[ascari]

Elementary: The scientists found an inscription in Martian on the meteorite. (By the way, it translates to "Dinosaurs - check. Coming up next: Bipeds."

Re:Mars origin

[hazydave]

It's a cookbook!

Damn..

[Anonymous Coward]

So how long till we get over there to dig up ancient temples that unleash hell!
I think I'll just get my chainsaw prepped.

So here we have spent huge amount of resources...

[bumby]

So here we have spent huge amount of resources constructing advanced technology to send robots to mars to investigate if there's life there, only to have the evidence flown to us with a piece of rock.

Only one way to find out for sure

[MichaelSmith]

Send a bunch of scientists to Mars for at least ten years. Give them vehicles for mobility and drilling equipment. Of course it is possible that bacteria were in samples collected by Phoenix, but it is more likely the answers will be in the rocks.

Re:Only one way to find out for sure

[tzot]

> Send a bunch of scientists to Mars for at least ten years.
Sit back and enjoy the ensuing war with the multinationals.

Re:Only one way to find out for sure

[MichaelSmith]

> Send a bunch of scientists to Mars for at least ten years.
Sit back and enjoy the ensuing war with the multinationals.

I want to be Coyote. The guy who takes care of himself regardless of what the others are up to.

Funding

[cameigons]

I wonder if these reports will get them the government funding they've been dying for so their engineering department can work towards the mars trip. If it doesn't I don't know what else will.

Re:Funding

[sznupi]

That might also depend whether or not the ones deciding, at that particular time, about the funding actually don't mind such discovery...

Re:So here we have spent huge amount of resources.

[wizardforce]

This is what we get for not sending the proper equipment necessary to excavate material from beneath the surface. An asteroid can dredge up material that is buried and send it out of the martian system; our simple robots can't yet.

Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[reporter]

The persistent reports of tantalizing evidence does not substitute for methodical research. It would involve going to Mars, collecting samples from various locations on the surface of the planet, and bringing the samples back to earth for analysis.

Under the present circumstances, such methodical research is not possible. A nuclear-powered spaceship, like the one proposed by Russia, would still take months to make the round-trip to and from Mars.

Humankind's only hope is the development of a hyper-drive (a. k. a. warp-drive) engine based on the science discovered by Burkhard Heim. The Pentagon is currently exploring the construction of such an engine.

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[MichaelSmith]

Humankind's only hope is the development of a hyper-drive

If so we are truly screwed so its a good thing you are talking crap. How did those pacific islanders get to New Zealand without 747s? Beats me.

You know, humans from Africa colonised the entire world several times over before 50000 years ago.

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[Beelzebud]

It's a 9 month journey to mars, and 9 months back. I don't think we'll need warp drives for that. The only thing that stops us is the will to do it.

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[khallow]

Humankind's only hope is the development of a hyper-drive (a. k. a. warp-drive) engine based on the science discovered by Burkhard Heim.

Nonsense. Such a drive would still take us too long to get to another world. It would take us minutes perhaps even hours which we don't have. We already know that's too long! We must use the power of sarcasm to move without moving! That way we don't have to consider anything remotely difficult at all.

More seriously, even with chemical propulsion, the worst case, you can get to Mars in about six months. Sure it's a hard problem, but that's all that it is. There's nothing impossible about getting to Mars. It would be nice to have some far faster means of getting there, but it's not necessary.

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[cameigons]

There's a whole lot of people with lots of will and wits to do it. It's just that the 'money people' doesn't seem to be an expressive crowd among them, and the government thinks it's better to spend our taxpayer's money giving it away to banks or killing and starving already dirt-poor people in the middle east. Also, It all sounds very exciting when some promising report such as this one comes out on the media. But there's a few engineering and life-sustaining problems to be overcome so the trip becomes reality, and research in that area is more often than not preceded by years of seemingly(or 'from a business perspective') fruitless research. Imo, that seems to have driven some potential investors away.

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[MoralHazard]

Heim wasn't exactly a crank, but your cheerleading of him is pretty crank-ish.

Just out of curiousity, what level of formal physics education did you complete?

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[Beelzebud]

Well that's sort of what I meant by the "will to do it". The people that can green light a project like that, won't, because of political fear, and short-sightedness.

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[cameigons]

More seriously, even with chemical propulsion, the worst case, you can get to Mars in about six months. Sure it's a hard problem, but that's all that it is. There's nothing impossible about getting to Mars. It would be nice to have some far faster means of getting there, but it's not necessary.

But, considering that's the way to go, can you estimate how much would that cost to assemble,test, launch, deploy, etc? Would the astronauts have canned food for a year or would have some sort of greenhouse to grow their own? Can they carry the necessary amount of fuel to be used in the years they'll spent on the trip? How much would the payload be.... How exactly would they avoid the martian windstorms(this might pose a problem specially to the launch back to Earth) and extreme temperature variations.. I'm just saying, we can't overlook the "details".

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[CrimsonAvenger]

You know, humans from Africa colonised the entire world several times over before 50000 years ago.

Nah, they didn't get to the Americas that long ago.

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, the last thing we need is our short-sighted and needlessly aggressive species spreading out amongst the stars!

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[khallow]

But, considering that's the way to go, can you estimate how much would that cost to assemble,test, launch, deploy, etc?

I can. But will you buy it? That's the real question. A simpler answer is to point to existing plans for Mars missions, particularly Mars Direct. The Wikipedia listed cost estimate for ten years of development is $55 billion in I assume some dollar more recent than 1990 (the original Zubrin plan claimed $10 billion dollars). Any significant innovation in propulsion technology would just make the plan cheaper. I'm not sure what the cost of an individual mission is, but I guess a few billion dollars per mission and these would fly every two years at Mars's conjunction to Earth.

It gets cheaper, if you don't have to return anything. Supposedly someone is claiming (near the end of the Wikipedia article) that you can reduce the cost by a factor of five, if you're going to Mars to stay. I doubt that, but there should be a hefty cost reduction. Even for a Mars program where humans would come back, most of the stuff you'll send (like nuclear reactors, habitats, tools, and instruments) won't come back. There are various tricks for reduce costs further. For example, Buzz Adrin has proposed a Martian "cycler" which is permanently in a transfer orbit between Mars and Earth. One would launch the crew to the cycler. The shielding mass and most supplies would be on the cycler. The savings come in not having to launch as much mass from the Martian surface (maybe a bit less from Earth as well).

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[arthurpaliden]

There will never be a government project to send people to Mars so long as there is the possibility of failure or even death. No sitting government wants their science minister to be grilled in a government inquiry or the media frenzy that would result. Even if the participants in the trip all signed papers that said "I know I am committing suicide". The only exception is the Chinese. Non democratic governments do have their benefits.

Re:Methodical Research Trumps Tantalizing Evidence

[khallow]

The only exception is the Chinese. Non democratic governments do have their benefits.

As long as the word doesn't get out. They won't risk losing face, if there's a good chance that the Chinese populace will hear about it. They're just as risk adverse as everyone else when it comes to publicity.

No wonder we look at Mars.

[cefek]

It is our genes that push our kind to the Space, and it is our genes that are calling home. Wonderful thing that somewhere in our DNA strands lies our extraterrestial legacy.

It could be the nature that put us here. It must be our civilizational effort to get outta here... before we shred this planet to pieces.

Re:No wonder we look at Mars.

[MichaelSmith]

A DNA sequence from Mars would certainly be something. My bet would be on building a DNA instrument into a probe, rather than on sample return.

Re:No wonder we look at Mars.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

I wonder if it'd be possible in this world to get all nations to give a portion of their wealth to ensuring that an open numbered and nationed group of scientists would get all the support it needs in order to get out of this planet before we run out of resources to do so, and to make it happen as soon as possible in order to avoid certain random extinction events, such a meteors or truly setbackking events, such as massive volcano eruptions. And if it's not possible, then what the hell is happening and how does one make it stop? Anyone?

Re:No wonder we look at Mars.

[Tablizer]

It is our genes that push our kind to the Space, and it is our genes that are calling home.

Martian babes in tight jeans? I can dig that
     

Re:So here we have spent huge amount of resources.

[ianare]

If it wasn't for the spacecrafts sent to Mars, it would not have been possible to identify the meteorite as coming from Mars. From the article : "Scientists were able to trace the meteorite back to Mars, as its chemical composition matched the relative proportions of various gases measured in observations of the atmosphere of Mars made by the Viking spacecraft in the 1970s."

As for the rovers sent later, they were not sent to investigate life but mainly to study the geology and climate.

Re:marsgate?

[cameigons]

You must be a troll, a very sad one. Cause if you're not I would object what are you even doing on this website.

Ancient Life on Mars? Big Deal.

[gyrogeerloose]

I found no shortage of ancient life when I was in Miami last year.

Wait a second..

[T Murphy]

These scientists are dead wrong. Men are from mars- not bacteria. Life probably started and spread from Jupiter, given how the guy loved to sleep around.

Re:Wait a second..

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, if you want to get mythological, Apollo slept around more than Zeus/Jupiter.

Punchline: Apollo is the sun.

Re:Wait a second..

[Culture20]

Men are from mars- not bacteria. Yeah, and some bacteria are definitely venereal.

Re:Wait a second..

[Monolith1]

Men are from mars

Exactly! Why the hell are they not focusing on Venus where women are?

Contamination Hypothesis

[Zobeid]

This one comment from the bacteria expert set off a red flag with me: "But it turns out that the magnetic bacteria make some very unique shapes of magnetite crystals. And one of the organisms we work with on Earth makes particles that look virtually identical to what we see from Mars in the meteorite."

Virtually identical? What are the odds?

OK, that's a rhetorical question. I have no idea what the odds are. But it would suggest going the extra mile in ruling out terrestrial contamination, before we declare life on Mars.

Re:Contamination Hypothesis

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are arguing that some bacteria were driving a car over Antarctica's icy surface 13000 ya, found a fallen rocky meteorite, assaulted it and inseminated with magnetite. Oh yeah, that sounds likely.

The meteorite came from outer space and had gas concentrations consistent with Mars.

The only alternative explanation for that is that it came from Earth many billion years ago when its atmosphere was presumably similar to Mars'. Only that there is no evidence for that Mars-like atmosphere.

In any case, the chances for an single species remaining unchanged for that long are about the same if life had always stayed on Earth as would be if it had been on Mars.

Re:marsgate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not a troll. You people who push this bullshit are.

Global warming has been PROVEN to be a hoax, and it just makes me wonder what other entire branches of science are hoaxes as well, with conspirator scientists forging data to guarantee themselves HUGE sums of funding. Space "science" is almost certainly a good candidate for another area where fraud is rampant. All of science needs an enema.

Re:Of course there is.

[JoshuaZ]

There is actual life on mars and other civilizations. Nasa's black space program hides this and the fact that the aryan race actually originated from Mars. Nasa and its illuminati controllers want to keep religion central to humanity so we can never be free.

Silly. You think posting as an Anonymous Coward prevents us from getting your IP address? We run Slashdot. The black helicopters will be with you shortly.

That would be the worst way to do it

[turkeyfish]

Humans carry microbes with them. Humans would likely contaminate Mars by bringing Earth bacteria with them. We already made that mistake on the moon and now may never know for sure. Better to send totally sterilized robots capable of doing TEM and STEM and beaming back the "evidence".

But first, I would like to see EVIDENCE that the "worm-like structures" really ARE bacteria. Even if they are on the inside of the rock, there is no reason necessarily to suppose that they got there when on Mars. Asserting this is so, is hardly evidence. No evidence, whatsoever of the lattice around the "worm" was presented or mentioned. The meteorite could have been relatively porous and earthlike bacteria evidently 13,000 years to get in. Also need to see some evidence that the "worms" are dividing. If they are bacteria they would likely have to "bud" or conjugate at some point. If that can be found, then maybe we are talking about something interesting here.

It matters what your notion of life is

[SMOKEING]

Given the astronomical timescale organic matter had been lingering on the young Earth before producing some more `life-competent' than just iridescent blotches of slime along the ebb-line, and given the rough times of the Hadean, it is fairly plausible such precursors to true life had existed on Mars as well (even more likely, in some nooks on the Moon), and continue to exist in this state without evolving. Whether these may find the time and suitable conditions before the Sun burns out, actually to achieve the stage of self-reproduction, develop adequate genetic machinery, proliferate into a variety of life forms and all, is quite uninteresting -- to NASA at least.

On a separate note, I am wondering nobody has so far in this thread, brought up the pretty obvious connection to Doom3. Looks rather appropriate on /.

I'm Just Rooting

[turkeyfish]

to actually see something that could pass for "fossil" evidence. Scientists find "worm like structure" inside of fractured rock? Thats it? Thats all there is? Where's the evidence? Just one "worm"? Only one? Bacteria don't usually come as singletons. Lets see more. Lets see a cross section under TEM. Fossilized bacteria retain microstructure. Lets see some EVIDENCE, not interpretation before we get carried away (like we did the last time this photo was published).

What is Panspermia?

[mahadiga]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Um...

[Tablizer]

While the new images do suggest life, they are otherwise not encouraging.

there's a better way

[pydev]

For less money, we can send hundreds of thousands of probes and get back much more data. And we can start doing that today, with today's technology.

There's no mystery

[warrax_666]

Species which "invade" a different ecosystem (by way of being transported by humans) often have radically different traits than the locals, but may exploit the same resources that locally evolved species. Thus, they may be able to out-compete the local species for resources (food, etc.) faster than the local species can adapt (given the usual slowness of evolutionary adaptation).

Re:There's no mystery

[Tablizer]

The reasons for speedy out-competition are generally not known. It may be that local predators have yet to adapt to them, but nobody really knows yet.