Test Equipment Finds Life In Mars-like Conditions 159
DIY News writes "In a test of equipment that might one day be used to search for biological activity on Mars, researchers discovered life tucked deep inside a frozen Norwegian volcano, a test region said to have geology similar to that of Mars. The test instruments discovered a rare and complex microbial community living in blue ice vents inside a frozen volcano, which is the kind of evidence scientists have been searching for on the Red Planet."
Cool. (Score:5, Insightful)
Other Lifeforms (Score:3, Insightful)
Anywhere at all there is liquid water... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cool. (Score:5, Insightful)
I gotta ask.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Two, if it does exist elsewhere, then what's so special about our planet?
Three, what's stopping it from evolving beyond the microbial stage? It opens the floodgates on "what is possible" in this universe.
I for one, welcome.... nm. I'm interested to know if mankind as a whole is ready to comprehend the fact that life is not indigenous to Earth...
not that easy ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mistake? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, I'd say it's optimism, not arrogance, that lets us hope that we will be able to recognize life on other worlds. Because if we can't recognize it, well for us, it might as well not exist. It would be great if there was life completely unlike we know it on another body (whether it be moon, jupiter or mars) and we did recognize it. That would be earth-shattering. But if we didn't recognize it, that isn't something I'm as interested in. Simply because even if I am interested in it, I'll never be able to know if it exists or not.
Reaching the wrong conclusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but its life that has evolved over millions of years on the Earth. Living creatures are extremely adaptable. Given time, you could expect some life form or the other to make it thru' in the worst of climates.
So it does not follow that you can extrapolate this to a conclusion that life of a similar sort could have existed in Mars. The toughie is finding out if life can start anywhere, and in what initial conditions. Natural selection will take care of the surviving.
Question is whether we choose to add life to Mars (Score:5, Insightful)
Long term colonisation of Mars would require locally grown food, and preferably not at the expense of shipping in from Earth all the resources they need to grow. Is this a step towards finding hardy life forms that can be mutated to grow in Mars, or in a hybrid Mars-Earth condition? (ie. giving plants some support but not having to create Earth conditions). Hence making the possibility of long term missions to Mars more achievable...
Re:Cool. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that this is going to be very difficult to prove. There is almost certainly a considerable amount of ongoing interplanetary transfer of microbial life (at least spores). There is plenty of experimental evidence that bacteria could survive the processes involved in such transfer (asteroid/comet collisions with planets, capture of debris by other planets, then entry into atmosphere).
I suspect that if we find life elsewhere in the Solar System it is going to be DNA or RNA based, and either be Earth-like microbes or evolved from them.
Re:not that easy ! (Score:2, Insightful)
Programming in the response to stimuli is easy. Creating hardware which can do all of that AND reproduce sustainably isn't. Even if you make something limited (out of Lego bricks, say) that can do all of the above, you'll have created a very rudimentary form of life.
> defining life is not that easy [...] consciousness may be?
About consciousness-- I'll say one thing, I'm not a big fan of the term. I refuse to get into the a/theist wars but to venerate what you don't understand is a primitive and very human trait (early man worshipped fire and lightning, for example). Today you see that very same idea played out as Intelligent Design -- because we can't understand the origin of life, it must be the handiwork of God. On a less obvious level, people who believe in consciousness and 'soul' are similar: we currently do not understand how massively interconnected neural systems work AND we don't believe in God BUT we still need a pole on which to stick our uncertainties; hence, 'consciousness'/'soul'.
In fact from your statements about everything possessing a soul I speculate you believe in the classical Gaia hypothesis: that the Earth is 'alive' and a living organism. Again, I say: Gaia and Soul are every bit as bunk as ID is. Gaia's adherents do not understand how truly complex large-scale non-linear systems work AND they don't believe in God BUT need a pole to stick their uncertainties on, hence it helps them to think that the planet is a live organism in itself.
The scale has changed since floods, famine and disease was thought of as divine retribution, but like those even allegedly modern men think nothing of invoking mystical mumbo jumbo as a prop for their fears. Plus ça change.
Re:Better things to focus on... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it is by no means a foregone conclusion that there is life elsewhere. Probable? Possibly, but we don't have much data to back it up. So far we know of only carbon based lifeforms, and we know of no planets outside the solar system even remotely likely to be able to sustain lifeforms like us. We don't have any data (as opposed to theories) that indicates that other types of lifeforms are even possible.
We don't even know if planets likely to harbour life will ever be found outside the solar system, or if our system is an aberration.
You say it's an overblown sense of how special we are, but that's not only it: IF there is only one planet with intelligent life in the universe, then if you are discussing the issue of whether or not there is life in the universe you will be on that planet.
In other words, the likelihood is 100% that in the case only one planet harbours intelligent life, and intelligent being will find itself on that planet.
So talking about the probabilities is meaningless: If the odds of life starting are high, then yes, the probability that we are alone is low. But we don't know that - we have never observed the evolution of life from precursors to life in any meaningful sense, and still do not understand the process very well.
And we certainly don't know if the conditions in which life arose on earth has ever existed anywhere else, nor if there are other conditions which are favorable enough for life to develop.
That is why finding life on Mars would be important - it would increase our number of data points from one to two, and possibly give us significantly better data on the range of conditions that life can survive in as well as the forms of life that exists.
Re:not that easy ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Erm... yes. Yes, it definitely is.
'A robotic factory programmed to replicate itself' is a really good definition of what a living thing actually is. It's something every living thing has in common. It takes in materials and energy from its environment, and uses them to maintain itself and to manufacture more like itself. Bacteria do it. Plants do it. Animals do it. And your robotic factory does it. That's life.
Re:Question is whether we choose to add life to Ma (Score:3, Insightful)
Anthropocentricity (Score:4, Insightful)
The simple fact is that to any reasonably educated scientist who understands roughly how the Earth fits into the universe, there is nothing unique or special about our position. As such, if life has evolved on Earth, it would be expected a priori to evolve anywhere else where suitable conditions existed. It will be very difficult to prove the falsifying hypothesis - that there is no life on Mars - but, given the existence of life on Earth, that is the hypothesis that needs to be proved. Anybody who lets their religion get in the way of their understanding of the universe deserves to be tied to a chair and lectured by Richard Dawkins for a few hours (now, sadly, Jay Gould is dead.) Unfortunately, like the animals in Animal Farm, I increasingly find myself looking from fundamentalist Muslim to fundamentalist Christian and being less and less sure of the difference.
Atmospheric Equilibrium (Score:4, Insightful)
The atmosphere of Mars, what there is of it, is in equilibrium. So, if there ever was life on Mars, it's dead now.
Re:Mistake? (Score:2, Insightful)