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Scientists Find Life In 'Mars-Like' Chilean Desert (wsu.edu)
An anonymous reader writes: In 1938, CBS radio aired Orson Welles' dramatization of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds ; the broadcast was livened up by periodic "news bulletins" reporting strange activity on Mars and in New Jersey. There may or may have not been men on Mars at the time, and later opinions also differ on whether the broadcast caused widespread panic across the U.S. Eighty years later, scientists are again claiming to have found evidence on earth of Martian life. Well, not exactly Martian life... Washington State University reports: "For the first time, researchers have seen life rebounding in the world's driest desert, demonstrating that it could also be lurking in the soils of Mars. Led by Washington State University planetary scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an international team studied the driest corner of South America's Atacama Desert, where decades pass without any rain. Scientists have long wondered whether microbes in the soil of this hyperarid environment, the most similar place on Earth to the Martian surface, are permanent residents or merely dying vestiges of life, blown in by the weather. Billions of years ago, Mars had small oceans and lakes where early lifeforms may have thrived. As the planet dried up and grew colder, these organisms could have evolved many of the adaptations lifeforms in the Atacama soil use to survive on Earth, Schulze-Makuch said. 'We know there is water frozen in the Martian soil and recent research strongly suggests nightly snowfalls and other increased moisture events near the surface,' he said. 'If life ever evolved on Mars, our research suggests it could have found a subsurface niche beneath today's severely hyper-arid surface.'" The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Love it!!
There may or may have not been men on Mars at the time
Nope, I'm fairly certain there weren't.
Who wrote this garbage?
Ya we know there probably is this type of life on many of our planets. If we look hard enough ya Im sure find something. This was important in the 50's because we felt so alone... we didn't know any better. Now with the Hubble, ect. We know that life is abundant... rejoice... now where are the damn aliens. :)
[($)]
... so this Chilean desert has an atmosphere of 3 mBars of mainly CO2, does it?
I always have a problem with moving from "we found life on Earth in pretty harsh environment" to "This means there could be life on Mars or Europa or somewhere else similar".
Life ADAPTS, that's what it does, some offsprings will always wonder where their "parents" didn't, and they will adapt to places that were unhabitable before.
But something tells me life needs a nurturing environment FIRST, to appear, solidify and survive past a point of no return, where it can't be wiped out that easily by the next storm or the next frost.
But that doesn't mean life necessarly FORMS in harsh conditions. So the fact that you find life here on Earth, in various inhospitable conditions only proves life ADAPTS and not that life FORMS there.
The "who cares" part of the function... really important... you get an undefined Var in return. :)
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With all that oxygen around, you can hardly call it "Mars.like"
An apostrophe and an 'e' that would make your post meaningful. (See how I used "your" there?)
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Come on, you know the drill. Any time there is some atmosphere-related news story, especially when it was warm and now it's cold or it was cold and now it's warm, you ALWAYS need to mention Climate Change and how we need to be afraid for the consequences to our children.
So they found a desert that isn't protected by an atmosphere or magnetosphere and is being blasted with radiation? Wow!
And scientist believe in the phony global warming, in evolution, in salt is bad for you, in the lie detector. Go ahead people, suck it up! You deserve to chase lies all you foolish life.
other increased moisture events near the surface.
That doesn't mean liquid water or Martian humidity anywhere near Terran humidity. The water temperature needs to be in a rather narrow band for life to evolve, which also requires a healthy dose of sunlight. It is unlikely that life, as we know it, exists on arid frozen Mars.
There's life thriving in the boiling temperatures of volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea of all places. One of the most inhatible places on the planet. Haven't we already established that life thrives in places we never thought possible?
Since when is Earth a good approximation for Mars? Sure, if you ignore everything else, dry is dry. If you want to study Mars, do that. Don't be such a planet bigot and say "they all look the same to me".
Life found on planet covered with life!
This means that other planets might also have life on them perhaps some people believe.
Get that man a research grant.
You're all missing the main point here. What would be more likely to generate funding?
1. Study of microbiological life in the Atacama Desert.
2. The possibility of life on Mars explored by studying Mars like conditions on Earth.
Take your pick.
You could well believe that the place is utterly sterile; if you pick up a handful of dirt it'll have no visible or olfactory signs of life in it. To the naked senses it's just like opening the pack of desiccant silica that came with your camera. In the Atatcama trash and even toilet paper from hikers blows around for years -- archaeologists have even found pre-Columbian textiles there still intact after half a millenium. The only life visible there is within a few hundred meters of the ocean, fed by morning sea mists. The ranger stations put up mist nets there to collect precious drinking water.
But a few months after I was there, they had their first rain in over years. The friend I was visiting there told me that every square inch of the desert as far as the eye could see was carpeted in tiny flowers -- the floral scent was so intense it made her retch. If you want to see what it looks look at this Smithsonian article. Now imagine looking at a single square meter of that and finding thousands of tiny pollinating insects...
Life in the northern Atacama is adapted to periods of dry quiescence lasting for years, punctuated by brief, intense bouts of rain-triggered reproduction lasting only for days. But there's a huge difference between getting rain every five or six years and having no rain for hundreds of millions of years.
Even the driest desert on Earth is far from dry.
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