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Methane-Eating Bacteria May Presage ET Life
asukasoryu sends along an intriguing piece in light of our recent discussion of possible signs of life on Saturn's moon Titan. "Researchers have discovered that methane-eating bacteria survive in a unique spring located on Axel Heiberg Island in Canada's extreme north. The subzero water is so salty that it doesn't freeze despite the cold, and it has no consumable oxygen in it. There are, however, big bubbles of methane that come to the surface. Lyle Whyte, McGill University microbiologist, explains that the so-called Lost Hammer spring supports microbial life, that the spring is similar to possible past or present springs on Mars, and that therefore they too could support life."
Or, in fact, symbiotic organisms on Titan, along with ones which might well be methanogenic in nature if they exist, and at even lower temperatures. Life finds a way, ladies and gents.
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Can we transplant some of these methane-eating into the Gulf of Mexico? They're badly needed right now.
Organisms on Earth which live in extreme environments probably evolved from related species which live in less extreme environments. I have no doubt that there are Terrestrial organisms which could survive in certain environments on Mars, but if they have counterparts on Mars, where did they come from? If they evolved on Mars, there has to have been an environment in which such evolution could have taken place over some kind of condition gradient, from less hostile to more hostile. If they came from Earth, you need a hell of a story about how they got there -- not only are meteor strike ejecta a lot less likely to make it from Earth to Mars than the reverse, you have to envision one piece of rock that just happened to be carrying a viable population of (already rare, even here on Earth) extremophiles that were suited for certain (also very rare) Martian conditions, and landed in just the right place.
If we can ever confirm that Mars had a more life-friendly environment for a significant portion of its history, of course, then these objections can be disregarded. But until we have much more evidence of that than we currently do, I'd be very surprised to find native life on Mars. It's much more likely that if anything is living there, it was carried there by probes from Earth -- and even that seems like a one in a million shot.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The story intrigued me, so I browsed wikipedia searching for the history of the atmosphere and atmospheric methane. I find it very difficult to believe the idea of a chunk of Titan travelling all those years, carrying life and enough reserves of methane for the trip. And since methane used to be much more abundant in the atmosphere, isn't it possible that very old, earthy life forms lived off methane?
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Well that's the controversial part.. almost every instrument that has been sent to Mars to search for life, actually made it to the surface safely, and managed to turn on, has returned positive results of life on Mars. Every time this has happened there has been denials.. as there's always a malfunction or non-biological explanation that can be used to explain the data. Similarly, every instrument that has returned a negative result for life on Mars (and there's less than have returned positive results) have been shown to be unable to detect life in the extreme locations of Earth, whereas a microbiologist with a $5000 microscope and some plastic slides can find life in these same areas without any trouble. Which is why the question of life on Mars remains open.. and probably will remain open until a sample return mission gives a positive result, and maybe even then not until the first extraterrestrial genome has been sequenced.
As for multi-cellular organisms, for all we know there's plants, moss, or fungi in caves on Mars.. but we'd never know because we've never explored any of them.
How we know is more important than what we know.