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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!!
... so this Chilean desert has an atmosphere of 3 mBars of mainly CO2, does it?
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.
The "who cares" part of the function... really important... you get an undefined Var in return. :)
[($)]
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
the fact there is life in a desert today does not mean that life can arise in a desert
The argument for life in Mars is that in the past, maybe, it had regions that were not a desert. If at some point in the past there was water, a denser atmosphere and a source of heat like volcanoes, some simple life might have formed that could have survived when conditions become harsh.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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.
/s/Greenland/Cleveland/
So they found a desert that isn't protected by an atmosphere or magnetosphere and is being blasted with radiation? Wow!
Live came before free oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. It was life that put it there in the first place, in the great oxygenation event.
/s/Greenland/Cleveland/
You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this.
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
Gravity not "that different"... well, I wouldn't phrase it that way. For a microbe, gravity has no significant effects (although they don't understand why microbes on the ISS are more aggressive than the same strains on Earth). I do agree that invoking gravity as if the difference between here and there is significant is just plain ignorant. As far as Mars life, over geological time Mars environment has changed. Atmosphere and temperature were both greater in the past and we've clearly established that liquid water did exist there. The OP states some rubbish about "increased" near-surface water "events" which I assume is referring to the "mud-slides" which have alternate and more plausible explanations. So, if there is life on Mars (and I'd guestimate the odds to be worse than 50:50 but we really don't know) then it has evolved as the environment deteriorated there and so it is really difficult to say for sure what it needs. In point of fact, we are just beginning to understand our own world's sub-surface microbiome so extrapolating to Mars is not going to be solidly based in scientific fact (rather it will be 99% speculation).. Water exists below Mars surface. It is possible that liquid water (as some sort of brine) exists there rather than it simply being ice. No one, as far as I know, seriously believes life (as we know it) can exist without liquid water. Below the ground on Mars, the conditions are NOT known - but reasonable guesses are that it is NEARLY favorable for liquid water brines. So, the questions surround the twin issues: did life ever exist there and if so, has it been able to hide (survive)? The "ever" question is in a way more important because it addresses the question of how common life is elsewhere in our Galaxy. But in a way, it's a trick question since IF fossils are found, distinguishing between microbes transported FROM Earth and native microbes would probably be impossible. IOW, it basically would not tell us much - for sure - about life evolving "elsewhere". Which brings us back to the question of whether it could be still there. Dr. Malcolm in the sci-fi movie Jurassic Park said "life will find a way" and establishing the limits of where this is possible is an important (if philosophical) study, I think. Of course, the problem with that is that there aren't any great ways to prove that life isn't holding on somewhere below the surface. How many cores would you have to drill to establish that life doesn't exist there? A million would be a great start. IOW, all we can hope for is that either life is ubiquitous there or one of the "Hail Mary" locations we'll pick for sub-surface drilling (if we ever do) will "luck out". Our best current info is the trace analysis of the atmosphere. We guess that life will exhale organics and those would be detectable. We're NOT seeing them. So, I'd say the best assumption is that Mars is a dead planet but that is subject to further information as it becomes available. The fact is Mars is our ONLY "elsewhere" we have the technology (and budget) to explore. Even though several of the moons of the Gas Giants seem more promising, we just don't have the technology to tackle them (yet).
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".
Not to mention the temperature on Mars averages around 55 C.
minus 55 C, stupid /.
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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