Still More Evidence of Life of Mars

dirtyhank writes: "According to this article a group of Hungarian scientists have found another potential evidence of life on Mars. Apparently some groups of dark spots spread every martian spring. They say this could be caused by photosynthetic organisms."

check out the image

[matrix0040]

an high resolution view of defrosting dunes in the southern polar region of Mars used in this study is available on discovery.com [discovery.com] here [discovery.com]

Re:This was previously hypothesized

[RoninM]

No, no, no. That's a complete and utter apocryphal tale. The real story goes like this: Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli
observed canali (that's Italian) on Mars. The word "canali" means either "channels" or "canals." There's an obvious difference: a canal is man-made, a channel need not be. There were no dark blotches. They were lines across Mars.
An American astronomer named Percival Lowell went well overboard with the canali, stating that they were, in fact canals and inventing an entire Martian ecology. He wasn't some rich guy with a telescope. Lowell predicted the existence of Pluto and founded the observatory where it was later discovered.
What Giovanni and, to a lesser extent, Lowell observed on Mars is real. They were seeing huge surface features (like Valles Marineris) and the planet's covering of natural channels.

Lowell popularized the observations by turning them into, basically, science fiction of the worst sort. That's a bad deal, indeed, but some of the canali were there.
The important lesson in this story--which is highly relevant given this story--is that Occam's Razor exists for a good reason. Go with the simpler explanation (that these are naturally carved channels) until something comes along that says something wierder is true (that aliens are out farming on Mars).
Simpler: seasonal changes over more complex: alien plant-life.

Original JPL images

[Anonymous Coward]

JPL has Mars Global Surveyor images online, and this particular can be found at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/du ne_defrost_6_2001/index.html . Also included is a *truly* high resolution image. JPL's image commentary says that the features are defrosting and not life.

Re:CarbonBased Life Forms

[Graymalkin]

Just because silicon has a similar valence shell to carbon does not make it a suitable basis for living organisms. Silicon oxides behave very differently from carbon oxides in fact IIRC Silicon Monoxide isn't even a stable compound. The fact DNA even exists is due to the chemical properties of carbon based compounds, similar structures are not possible using a silicon base. The postulate that silicon based organisms could even exist was formed in a period when organic chemistry was a fairly young science and some engineer somewhere got ahold of a periodic table and concluded that a similar valence shell means that two completely unalike elements might be the basis for some form of life. Indeed maybe somewhere some sentient clay feeds off the UV radiation of a blue giant star but we'd have so very little in common with such an organism we probably couldn't event recognize it as an organism. Learn to trust chemistry a little bit more when theorizing about the existance of extra terrestrial life. We're a not terribly unique planet around a not terribly unique star. Earth has probably a fairly broad spectrum of indiginous life forms compared to the rest of the universe.