Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Evidence Presented For Ancient Fossils In Mars Rocks

Posted by Soulskill on from the hope-the-protectors-leave-them-alone dept.

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."

9 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Skeptical by Misanthrope · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually I'd be a little surprised if the nucleotides were different, current studies seem to suggest that the nucleotides had selective pressure. Here's a video that summarizes some current work on abiogenesis by Dr. Jack Szostak. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

  2. Consequences of discovery by Larson2042 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While it may be cool to find life on Mars, it would present some additional problems for future colonization (or even just future missions, robotic or otherwise). If we do find life, do we quarantine Mars so that we don't contaminate the native life there? Do we bar ourselves from any terraforming efforts whatsoever so that we don't disrupt possible existing life? You all must realize that that would be the position of at least some people; what percentage of the public that might be, and the influence they would have is another question.

    Generally, I think it would be much simpler if we never found life on Mars, and could in fact say with a fair amount of certainty that it is completely dead. That would remove a (possibly significant) reason to oppose human colonization and terraforming.

    1. Re:Consequences of discovery by Thinboy00 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What are you talking about? The prime directive was the Vulcans' idea, not ours.

      --
      $ make available
    2. Re:Consequences of discovery by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I used to be naive and idealistic like you, then I learned about panspermia. It is fairly certain by now that all planets are being bombarded by asteroids filled with random organisms. Earth and Mars have almost certainly been recipients of foreign material. Any bacteria, etc. that we might transfer to Mars should cause us no worries. Organisms from Earth should be just as valid as random organisms from panspermia. In fact the very organisms that we might take there could have been derived from our own exposure to panspermia.

      I would suggest that we should enact our own panspermia missions. We can drop our own organisms on planets and moons. Imagine in only a few hundred years that Mars could have large areas covered with many varieties of lichens, including those nifty ones that blow around in the wind. We could start with extremophiles, and work our way up from there. I would guess that the lunar missions left human biological material on the moon as they would want to reduce weight as much as possible before returning to Earth. What is NASA's answer to this? And now ice has been found on the surface of the moon. My high school science teacher lied to me, I was told it was impossible due to sublimation.

    3. Re:Consequences of discovery by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Vulcans and the Prime Directive are both human ideas.

      --
      (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
  3. Re:still has the same problems by khallow · · Score: 4, Funny

    Earth gets disintegrated to make way for a galactic hyperbypass.

  4. Wash Post Flame Wars by poena.dare · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  5. Panspermia by sdo1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If it's true, it's actually not a huge deal. I could mean that life spontaneously started on both Earth and Mars (Panspermia). But it's probably more likely (Occam's razor and such) that life started on either Earth or Mars and was transported via meteor to the other planet. I would be very cool if life on Earth actually started on Mars, but it's not clear to me how we could prove which came first. -S

    --
    --- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
  6. I reject the notion that man isn't a cosmic entity by mykos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.