Yeah, I know - we've heard it before, but it's intriguing nonetheless. : http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_life_050216.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Exclusive: NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars By Brian Berger Space News Staff Writer posted: 16 February 2005 02:09 pm ET WASHINGTON -- A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water. The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed. What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth. Stoker and other researchers have long theorized that the Martian subsurface could harbor biological organisms that have developed unusual strategies for existing in extreme environments. That suspicion led Stoker and a team of U.S. and Spanish researchers in 2003 to southwestern Spain to search for subsurface life near the Rio Tinto river—so-called because of its reddish tint—the product of iron being dissolved in its highly acidic water. Stoker did not respond to messages left Tuesday on her voice mail at Ames. Stoker told SPACE.com in 2003, weeks before leading the expedition to southwestern Spain, that by studying the very acidic Rio Tinto, she and other scientists hoped to characterize the potential for a “chemical bioreactor” in the subsurface – an underground microbial ecosystem of sorts that might well control the chemistry of the surface environment. Making such a discovery at Rio Tinto, Stoker said in 2003, would mean uncovering a new, previously uncharacterized metabolic strategy for living in the subsurface. “For that reason, the search for life in the Rio Tinto is a good analog for searching for life on Mars,” she said. Stoker told her private audience Sunday evening that by comparing discoveries made at Rio Tinto with data collected by ground-based telescopes and orbiting spacecraft, including the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, she and Lemke have made a very a strong case that life exists below Mars’ surface. The two scientists, according to sources at the Sunday meeting, based their case in part on Mars’ fluctuating methane signatures that could be a sign of an active underground biosphere and nearby surface concentrations of the sulfate jarosite, a mineral salt found on Earth in hot springs and other acidic bodies of water like Rio Tinto that have been found to harbor life despite their inhospitable environments. One of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity, bolstered the case for water on Mars when it discovered jarosite and other mineral salts on a rocky outcropping in Merdiani Planum, the intrepid rover’s landing site chosen because scientists believe the area was once covered by salty sea. Stoker and Lemke’s research could lead the search for Martian biology underground, where standing water would help account for the curious methane signatures the two have been analyzing. “They are desperate to find out what could be producing the methane,” one attendee told Space News. “Their answer is drill, drill, drill.” NASA has no firm plans for sending a drill-equipped lander to Mars, but the agency is planning to launch a powerful new rover in 2009 that could help shed additional light on Stoker and Lemke’s intriguing findings. Dubbed the Mars Science Laboratory, the nuclear-powered rover will range farther than any of its predecessors and will be carrying an advanced mass spectrometer to sniff out methane with greater sensitivity than any instrument flown to date. In 1996 a team of NASA and Stanford University researchers created a stir when they published findings that meteorites recovered from the Allen Hills region of Antarctica contained evidence of possible past life on Mars. Those findings remain controversial, with many researchers unconvinced that those meteorites held even possible evidence that very primitive microbial life had once existed on Mars.
Didn't anyone watch "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome?" "Methane cometh from pigsh--." The answer is martian pigs.
I am completely fascinated by the possibility of life on Mars and elsewhere and want to thank Dr of Dunk for passing along these findings. Still, I can't help but wince at the 'science-speak' - "previously uncharacterized metabolic strategy for living in the subsurface". Good grief
If you want to read the best discussion of the topic I've ever seen, Astrobiology Magazine, which is published by NASA, had a roundtable debate on the subject with the following people: Greg Bear , author of such books as "Moving Mars" David Grinspoon , planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute James Kasting , geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University; Christopher McKay , planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center Lisa Pratt , biogeochemist at Indiana University Kim Stanley Robinson , author of the "Mars Trilogy" ("Red Mars," "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars") John Rummel , planetary protection officer for NASA; Moderated by: Donna Shirley , former manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So you have science fiction authors who've both written on terraforming mars, as well as planatary scientists who are both for and against the subject, and scientists interested in perhipheral problems, like preserving any existing life on Mars, if it exists. It's a long read, but teriffic. I've gone through all five pages several times. One of the interesting facts in there (which I can't find at the moment) is that while it is definately possible to raise the pressure in the atmosphere by converting things like methane into CO2, once you raised the barametric pressure to the point that you could go outside without your blood boiling, (which would cause the atmosphere to retain heat and become livable, incidentally) you'd have alot of CO2 in the atmosphere. So much so that you'd have to grow a plant or litchen, or algae that is more efffective by a factor of 100 when it comes to fixing carbon from CO2 into the ground and releasing O2. If you somehow did this, it'd take 10,000 years before you could think about breathing without air tanks. This in a world where the Soviet Union used be unable to continue beyond the third year of their famous "five year plans".
Yeah, there was a plan to seed Mars with carbon fixing plants and reap the benefits a hundred years later. But who can wait a hundred years to see hookers with 3 boobs?
Actually, it comes from the Archaea which live in the pig's intestines. The Archaea ruled the world, until the cyanobacteria came along and converted CH4 to CO2 which the plants converted to O2 for us.
"Hey look, the humans are collecting our crap. Damn. I thought there was intelligent life out there."
