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."

Re:Nutrients

[Tyler-Durden255]

You are so not a biologist.

Neither am I but you do not need a chemically balanced life cycle to have life. As a matter of fact oxygen production on earth origionallly was not a balanced chemical process, meaning origionally plants produced oxygen and nothing used that oxygen for almost a billion years!

Why are you assuming it has to be a balanced process or a complicated life cycle?

Why can't life on mars be a simple lichen like life form (though lichen is a symbiont on earth) that slowly photosynthisies energy and leeched it trace elements out of rock. If it's a slow process or there is only a small amount of life they can go on doing what they are doing on mars without dispoiling there environment for as long as the sun literally shines.

Re:Life on other planets too

[Goonie]

Not necessarily. Maybe life got started on Earth and got carried to Mars by a big meteorite impact stirring up chunks of bacteria-containing rock, which then drifted their way to Mars.

Or, possibly, things went the other way from Mars to Earth . . .

Life on Mars would be an amazing find, but if we can show that it most likely came from the same source as Earth it won't say that much about the possibility of life on other solar systems. However, if we can show it evolved independently it would suggest that life will be *really* common wherever you get approximately the right planets in the right climatactic zones (and those climactic zones aren't as precise as some people think).

Re:Nutrients

[dgroskind]

If there was photosynthesis there should be measurable amounts of oxygen. However, the fact [nasa.gov] is that the Martian atmosphere contains about 95.3% carbon dioxide and 2.7% nitrogen, with the remainder a mixture of trace gases.

Even if the life processes were quite different from those on earth, you would expect a different mix of gasses than this one.

Life based on what we know.

[yzquxnet]

Based on what we know about life what you say is fairly true. However, it is what we don't know about how life is formed and in what forms it may take that will be clincher in discovering life other than our own. We know that for life to exist in a form that we know it, we need conditions that are similar to what we find on earth. However, there is no evidence to support a conclusive claim that life cannot exist in environments that are dissimilar from where we exist. Life may very well exist on mars, but it may be in a form we have yet to discover. Scientist are always looking for water as signs to point to the possibility for life elsewhere. Maybe there is another ideal chemical combination that may also harvest life.

Re:Nutrients

[archen]

that would assume that these things would produce a lot of oxygen. Seems to me that if there is life on Mars; it's pretty sparce at best. Besides which Mars has a fairly eliptical orbit - making for a very long and cold winter, which I would guess means that life would probably hybernate for the majority of the martian year. It's possible that the small ammount of oxygen life would make during it's breif season could wind up being absorbed or dissappated the rest of the year.

Well

[Hobobo]

Don't be so quick to judge -- in such a short article I wouldn't expect them to go into an indepth discussion, so we really can't know what they did and didn't take into consideration.

Re:What about the girl with the mousy hair?

[fr2asbury]

Hmmmm. The last time I checked, we were pretty dependant on other life to survive ourselves.
So, unless we want to spend our entire lives sealed up in some grounded space capsule, while we try and wait for imported Earth life to thrive on a lifeless rock, we are going to need to settle on a planet that has life. Earthlike life. Ideally we'd find green plants that both produce oxygen and food.
I know the likely hood of this is small, but so does the idea of colonizing a rock that is incapable of supporting life.
Think about it. . . if there's NO life there, there's probably a reason.

Jonathan

Someone else mentioned Star Trek, presumably concerning the "Prime Directive." Ever notice that obviously no such "ideal" existed in the Star Wars universe. Civilizations seem to have gotten the space flight, weapon, and heavy sliding automatic door technology whereever they were in their development.

Re:check out these ...

[Ektanoor]

Well on what concerns the moc picture. This is a very general view of the place but it shows one of the main features of the dark spots. These formations seem to love craters, specially in the equator. From the equator to the poles they tend to cover the craters, and sometimes one can see, mostly at latitudes above 45 degrees, craters that have a completely dark surface.

In a regional basis, these formations possess frequently a direction, probably dependent on winds. However, it seems the are also dependent on light or something else as there is a weirdness on their location. Northern craters and southern craters tend to have these spots located in opposite directions and seem to avoid the most intensive sunlight. Besides they "rotate" over the craters from equator to the poles. In the equator they are small and not so frequent, tending to be located over the edges of the craters. Going to the poles they start to cover a weider part of the crater. In a very very weird form. Like clocks...

It is difficult to explain this but I'll try. Imagine a nearly equatorial crater with very thin dark strips over the section where sunlight is less intensive. Now "move" that crater up to the pole. You will see that the dark patches start to cover more and more of the crater and most times over the direction of less intensive sunlight. Near the poles the crater becomes completely dark. Features inside the crater become smooth.

Now this happens over both hemispheres, North and South. But if ones compares south and north craters they look mostly symmetrical. However there are serious exceptions. Craters in a place called Acydalia Planitia seem likely to those seen on Shoutern Hemisphere. Apart of this widepsread "rule violation", other places seem to conform to this rule...

Re:What about the girl with the mousy hair?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not at all convinced that the presence of life would deter settlement, though I hope it would. But colonizing planets is a waste of time anyway. Why escape one gravity well just to sink into another? Why put up with marsquakes, dust storms, potentially virulent alien biology, and all the other rot one has to face on a planetary surface? Just build space colonies and have done with it.

Failing that, if you really insist on living on a dirtball, there are lots of available bodies in the Solar System which are guaranteed lifeless. We don't need Mars for that.

The rewards of discovering an intact alien ecosystem -- an entire new empire of life -- are far greater than any we could get from colonization.

Re:A fable about people who find evidence of life

[Ektanoor]

There is another story with another moral. The story is called the search for Life in Mars and is more real and much more tragic. Real because it does not recur to fables, tales and pseudo-scientific BS. It is the story of thousands of people, scientists, engineers, technicians and amateurs who tried to make a real and true search. Tragic because, at least there is already one casualty on it: Professor Wolf Vishniac. This man was the first to think on a true scientific search for alien forms. He invented the first apparatus to achive this goal, the Wolf Trap. By the time of Viking project, it was considered as one of the more reliable to test for the search. However it was removed from the Vikings due to "lack of funds".

But that's half of the story. After this event, Professor Vishniac was faced with a campaign to devaluate his work and abilities. However, he didn't gave up. To prove that his experiment worked, he went to Antarctida, to a place his opposers considered completely void of any native lifeforms. There he died in weird circumstances. However his collegues managed to recover some of the apparatus he left there. Today this region, the Dry Valleys, are considered to possess indigenous microorganisms due to the work of Professor Vishniac.

However this didn't demove his opposers from keeping their negative campaign on him. On 1986 a very well professor of exobiology, published a work where Professor Vishniac was not even mentioned as being member of the exobiology team and where his Antarctida expedition was seen as an extravagant attempt to analyse problems on sterilisation of spacecraft... This Professor is known as Norman Horowitz... For those who dont know him, he was one of the opponents to the sterilisation of martian probes and one of the leaders of one of the exobiology experiments that went on the Vikings. The one that seemed to prove that there is no life in Mars...

The moral of the story is:
If you try hard then you may prove that Life only exists on Earth...

If you wanna check up this try to read some of Horowitz works...

Re:Life on Mars

[Vintermann]

"Martians" are certainly not still around as they would need to exist in a biological context, an ecosystem. That this doesn't exist on Mars today is apparent. There are microorganisms that can survive great cold, and there are anaerobic life-forms, but can there exist microorganisms that are both and in addition get along happily without an ecosystem? You would have to ask a microbiologist, but I suspect no.