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."
Re:This may sound dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it even possible for water-based life to exist at such a low pressure? And I don't mean dormant spores waiting around for better conditions.
Mistake? (Score:4, Interesting)
The detail is amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
These Earth-borne creatures are red because of the propensity of life on Earth to use iron as a key component in blood. I would expect that Martian creatures would have copper coursing through their veins.
Re:Cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, spores which could survive for thousands of years inside pyramids or for several years in cold vacuum on the Moon didn't actually grow or thrive there, but we do have extremophiles [wikipedia.org] which feel happy in only a notch more moderate conditions.
And if pressure is a problem, you can go under the ground -- you can get as high pressure as you want there.
Re:Mistake? (Score:5, Interesting)
Psychological? (Score:1, Interesting)
Search for/Finding out that indigenous life exists is merely a psychological boost to set that up than to find little green (wo)men.
A.
What is life? (Score:3, Interesting)
The point is that we know too little about life, Universe and everything to do something resembling a real search for life.
I recall Cristoforo Colombo that knew too little about India to understand that it was not India at all!
Re:Better things to focus on... (Score:2, Interesting)
No. Because we currently have no means to examine any planet outside of our own solar system closely enough to determine if such things are present. It's hard enough to determine at this distance if there even are any earth-like planets out there. And any telescope capable of seeing that clearly at that distance is more than a few years off. (Read: not in our lifetime)
If we are going to find any life with the tools we have, it will be in our own solar system.
Re:This may sound dumb (Score:1, Interesting)
what happens if life from earth is being found on mars and keeps surviving.
that would be interesting.
Not the first time we see it (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, we know life rises in unthinkable places, but it is the final time now to go to Mars and stop doing experiments about where life would grow in Earth even if we think it is not possible.
We could be wondering and experimenting thounsands or maybe millions of possibilities, that wont bring the fact that there is life in Mars. Going there and check, that will.
Re:not that easy ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I gotta ask.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, this is tough to answer, largely because we don't really have an understanding of how life here on earth went from single-cellular to multi-cellular. In fact, the only thing that we can say for sure about this is that it took a really long time (read: 100's of millions of years).
Now, although this is pure speculation on my part, I would suspect that in the universe as a whole, life is probably fairly common. The steps of creating simple, self-replicating molecules are actually pretty straitforward (and the early stages of organic compounds are easy to make with a bit of methane), so finding populations of these kinds of biomolecules (and even cells) wouldn't be very suprising.
What I would expect to be much more rare would be intelligent life. Look at earth. Hundreds of million years to make multi-cellular life, followed by hundreds of millions of years to make humans. To my mind, that says that it is difficult for all of these steps to happen, and that conditions probably need to be just right.
Then again, if it is simply a matter of getting the ball rolling and then looking for a series of low-probability events, the law of large numbers tells us that given enough time, it will happen.
Who knows? It's too bad that we will likely never really have any solid idea (at least in our lifetimes), given how just plain BIG space is and how little of it we have the ability to visit.
Re:Cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, collisions are probably a minor portion of the Earthly source of bacteria on other planets.
Various astronomers have written about the Earth's "dust tail", similar to a comet's dust tail, but blown off from Earth's atmosphere by the solar wind. This tail is thin, and mostly molecular. But it is known to contain fine dust, up to and including particles the size of bacterial spores. There aren't many such spores in the outer atmosphere, but there are a few, and this is a much gentler way to escape the planet than being blown off in a collision strong enough to toss you into space.
Astronomers have dealt with this because the planet's dust tail is thick enough to interfere somewhat with some astronomical observations in some frequencies. So it's useful to know about it before you aim your telescope.
Anyway, chances are that our planet has been contaminating the outer planets, and the rest of the galaxy, with bacterial spores for 3 to 4 billion years. We don't really know how well they can survive in space. Probably well enough to reach the rest of the Solar System. Whether they'd actually survive the trip to other stars and their planets is pure conjecture.
But it's an interesting idea. Definitely good for occasional sci-fi use. And it's something that people interested in ultimate origins should consider. It's not easy to collect actual data on the topic, though.