New Evidence Presented For Ancient Fossils In Mars Rocks

azoblue passes along a story in the Washington Post, which begins: "NASA's Mars Meteorite Research Team reopened a 14-year-old controversy on extraterrestrial life last week, reaffirming and offering support for its widely challenged assertion that a 4-billion-year-old meteorite that landed thousands of years ago on Antarctica shows evidence of microscopic life on Mars. In addition to presenting research that they said disproved some of their critics, the scientists reported that additional Martian meteorites appear to house distinct and identifiable microbial fossils that point even more strongly to the existence of life. 'We feel more confident than ever that Mars probably once was, and maybe still is, home to life,' team leader David McKay said at a NASA-sponsored conference on astrobiology."

Comments

Wash Post Flame Wars

[poena.dare]

Y'know /. is pretty damn cool. Our flame wars are a joy to behold compared to the Wash Post flaming attached to the article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/30/AR2010043002000_Comments.html

I reject the notion that man isn't a cosmic entity

[mykos]

I feel that this notion ingrained in to our environmental education that anything and everything human beings do is bad and/or unnatural is just wrong.
The universe is a vast place. And in the big picture, we are all part of it. Nothing we could possibly do is out of the bounds of nature on a universal scale. We have as much right to explore, seed, and shape the cosmos as any other creature in the universe. If we disturb the habitat of any other planet, so be it. It's the laws of the universe at work.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan... The cosmos is within all of us. We are made of star stuff.

Re:Consequences of discovery

[Ginger Unicorn]

Vulcans and the Prime Directive are both human ideas.