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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.
Ya we know there probably is this type of life on many of our planets.
There probably isn't, you mean. In fact no place on Earth is Mars-like, atmosphere and gravity are totally different. Besides, the fact there is life in a desert today does not mean that life can arise in a desert: you can find humans in Greenland nowadays, but Greenland is not a place where the human race could have arisen.
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.