The Great Beyond

could other thing live ont the planey mars?

Hold on . Scientists are forgetting that Earth also had a salty-acidic oceans 4 billion years ago . Earth's oceans were green, so let's not judge the evidence that Mars is lifeless .

Mars is really a crappy planet for finding life. No atmosphere, no tectonics, no liquid water on the surface.
As shown also by the recent discoveries of new forms of life under the antarctica, it is much easier to find life forms in cold seas, so for example on planets as Europa... Although it is true that it will hard to make a hole in the ice and have look there inside, we should better reorient our research in that direction...

I think what we should be asking is not whether there IS life on Mars, but whether there ever WAS at any point it time. That's a much more interesting question, considering that finding and possibly culturing some extra-terrestrial organism could be super-dangerous in the first place.

It eliminates possibilities of many microorganisms to survive on Mars. But still chances of robust dormant forms of ancient bacteria capable of active DNA repair cannot be overlooked!!

"Is there life on Mars? No" Thats a pretty definitive statement. It ignores the fact that life on Earth is pretty tenacious and exists in all sorts of extreme environments.

There have been some indications of the possible presence of life, on Mars, such as the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere.

We will have to wait for the Phoenix lander later this year to hopefully give us a definitive answer.

If life were found on Mars, the big question it would answer is - Is life a rare occurrence or is it common, almost inevitable, in the universe?

NASA is trying to replenish its inflated budget with expansive, untenable, even nonsensical propaganda about "life on Mars," adding where there is or was water there was probably life," etc.

Such nonsense is laced with inaccuracies, hyperbole, and sheer fantasy--in fact, anything to bamboozle the public, Congress, even the White House about the "inevitability" or "likelihood" of extraterrestrial life.

Meanwhile, no one cares to ponder this hypothesis with any reflection or depth--say, by reading, e.g., Ward and Brownlee's excellent, sobering study, RARE EARTH. The two authors are not emloyees of NASA and in their book make a specialist's estimate that Earth might be unique in possessing a biosphere.

This idea, by the way, although unopular, is not new. The late, famous Russian astrophysicist Dr. Iosif Shklovsky wrote about this just before he died in the early 1980s.

Shklovsky argued the thesis of a "unique Earth" in possessing life. Sir James Jeans, Einstein, and other eminent scientists have also suspected Earth might be unique in this way.

As to frozen liquid--if it is that--on Mar: It is called by NASA PR "water ice." Haven't we all heard, though, that there are OTHER TYPES OF ICE of a kind that is poisonous and more likely is what lies beneath the surface of that airless, lifeless, clinker of a so-called "world" called Mars? (Water, as Ward and Brownlee point out, is evidently very rare outside of Earth.) There are many types of frozen, formerly liquid acids, for example, or a liquid compound resembling noxious "dry ice"?

Shklovsky, world renown as an astrophysicist, ventured to proipose that we adopt a new "neo-geocentric" point of view about our fragile, very special Planet Earth--meaning, he argued, cultivating an appreciation of the likelihood of Earth's uniqueness.

It's certainly time to critique the lame notion that if there are "billions of Sun-like stars" out there "must be" Earth-like planets orbiting them (Asimov's, Sagan's, Morison's, Shapiro's, SETI's, et al., argument).

This is like saying that if you had billions of chimpanzees pounding on computer keyboards for billions of years, sooner or later there would "inevitably" be some who would write a Shakespearean play or sonnet!

Obviously, this doesn't follow. There is such a thing in philosophy, science, and real life called UNIQUENESS. And that may well be what Earth is.

We hear sometimes that it is "arrogant" to posit Earth's uniqueness. On the contrary. It is the height of metaphysical arrogance to suppose humanoids grow like "cosmic weeds" Universewide. Projecting Earth;s experience throughout the whole Universe is hardly modest!

Anyway, there is no proof of this and much doubt that Earth's likely unique experience could be replicated. Even a World Series game or world soccer match cannot be replicated and theyt are uncomplex affairs compared to Earth's evolution! Each type of evolution, or series of events, is unique, just as each human personality is unique. (The game anaology is admittedly a simplistic example since Earth;s evolution over its 4.5 billion years is vastyly difference, more complex, and has seen far more contingencies, chance and fortuitous events that contribute to its overall likely uniqueness.

By the way, the argument for a unique Earth contains no religious connotations. On the contrary. It has been the religious argument going back to the Middle Ages--namely, that God "in all His plentitude" created many "worlds" populated with humans.

Albert L. Weeks