New Evidence Presented For Ancient Fossils In Mars Rocks

azoblue passes along a story in the Washington Post, which begins: "NASA's Mars Meteorite Research Team reopened a 14-year-old controversy on extraterrestrial life last week, reaffirming and offering support for its widely challenged assertion that a 4-billion-year-old meteorite that landed thousands of years ago on Antarctica shows evidence of microscopic life on Mars. In addition to presenting research that they said disproved some of their critics, the scientists reported that additional Martian meteorites appear to house distinct and identifiable microbial fossils that point even more strongly to the existence of life. 'We feel more confident than ever that Mars probably once was, and maybe still is, home to life,' team leader David McKay said at a NASA-sponsored conference on astrobiology."

still has the same problems

[khallow]

There's no smoking gun, that is, some direct evidence of these organisms. And frankly, I don't find the current claim of relatively pure magnetite to be compelling. This is part of why I've bet against the discovery of alien life by 2050 [ideosphere.com] since 1996.

Re:Skeptical

[sznupi]

How could a fossil that is few billion years old be of Earth origin, if the meteorite is here for only a very short time?

Anyway, if we would rely mostly on comparing things like nucleotides (not that they actually can)...well, that bit of information doesn't have to provide us with definite answer at all. With life that is so old, we aren't certain at all that Earth life relied on "the same four nucleotides" back then. Heck, it might have been that, while Earth life was different, the one on Mars was by a random chance similar to our current "model"...

Re:Skeptical

[VanGarrett]

Beyond that, if they are the same, then it may not be coincidence at all. One planet's life may have been seeded by the other, or both come from another common origin, whether deliberately by intelligent beings, or indeliberately by chance.

Wash Post Flame Wars

[poena.dare]

Y'know /. is pretty damn cool. Our flame wars are a joy to behold compared to the Wash Post flaming attached to the article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/30/AR2010043002000_Comments.html [washingtonpost.com]

I reject the notion that man isn't a cosmic entity

[mykos]

I feel that this notion ingrained in to our environmental education that anything and everything human beings do is bad and/or unnatural is just wrong.
The universe is a vast place. And in the big picture, we are all part of it. Nothing we could possibly do is out of the bounds of nature on a universal scale. We have as much right to explore, seed, and shape the cosmos as any other creature in the universe. If we disturb the habitat of any other planet, so be it. It's the laws of the universe at work.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan... The cosmos is within all of us. We are made of star stuff.

Re:Skeptical

[lena_10326]

then it is far more likely that the fossils are from Earth and have contaminated the sample

First, meteors are easily identifiable as coming from outer space due to the structure of the rock i.e. melted exterior but not interior, material composition matching Mars, and carbon dating. Second, this particular meteor [wikipedia.org] was found embedded in ice in Antarctica as many meteors are found. How did it get there? (Antarctica is a great place find intact meteors because the ice buffers the landing and then protects the meteor from erosion.) Third, the structure and size of the possible organisms do not match known Earth organisms. How do you explain that?

I invoke Occam's Razor [wikipedia.org]. The simplest explanation is these meteors landed on Earth after travelling from Mars through space. The determination that these contain samples of fossilized life is a separate matter.

Re:Skeptical

[Clueless Nick]

The featured article talks about magnetite possibly formed by microbes. There is no mention of nucleotides. How can organic molecules from microbes survive fossilization for billions of years, form part of a meteorite, survive its journey through our atmosphere and yet be analyzed?

After all, it would be an extremely rare chance to find surviving DNA from even dinosaur fossils here on earth. The scientific method followed for studying genetic evolution happens mostly by triangulation of molecular information in present-day genes of surviving species, to form a bit of a speculative idea about the genetic makeup of its ancestor of millions of years ago.

If probably you mean that one day, we may find active microbial life on Mars, that indeed would be a great breakthrough, as it will allow us to compare its origin and evolution with ours, and thereby provide us better tools to understand how it arises in the first place. You know, the spark that ignited it all.

Re:Consequences of discovery

[Ginger Unicorn]

Vulcans and the Prime Directive are both human ideas.