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Mars Rover Opportunity Finds Life-Friendly Niche
astroengine writes "Gale Crater, the region being explored by NASA's Curiosity rover, isn't the only place on Mars where ancient microbes may have thrived. New evidence from NASA's senior robotic Mars scout, Opportunity, shows life-friendly water once mixed with telltale, clay-bearing rocks that now lie on the broken rim of Endeavour Crater, an ancient 14-mile wide basin on the other side of the planet from Gale. 'If I were to go Mars early in time and wanted to do a well, I'd do it there,' planetary scientist Ray Arvidson, with Washington University in St. Louis, told Discovery News. 'It's like drinking water. This would have been a niche for whatever life at the time existed.'"
It has to be said. We all know the atheists are crowded around their web browsers, breathlessly waiting for the announcement confirming life on another planet because they believe that will be the final triumph of science over God.
It won't be.
God is extra-terrestrial life by definition. There is life on other planets/in other dimensions, and that life is possibly many many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us. That life may choose to communicate with us less primitively than with uttered sound or magnetic storage or ink on a page. That life may have answers to questions that we don't.
Meanwhile, our narcissistic belief that our discovery of the metaphorical light switch and how it works entitles us to stand before the universe and claim "knowledge" is probably looked upon by extra-terrestrial intelligence as the equivalent of a toddler parading around the house wearing a salad bowl as a hat.
Every great discovery in man's history has only made the universe bigger, not smaller, nor easier to understand. We have made a lot of progress, but we also must have the humility to recognize that scarcely 500 years ago, the overwhelming majority of the population was completely illiterate, and that science was the purview of a vanishingly small number of people.
In cosmic terms, we only very recently learned how to wipe our ass and we are just now starting to grapple with the problem of feeding ourselves.
We must have the humility to understand the limits of our intellect, and that without wisdom and the human soul, the world is nothing but a very complex spreadsheet.