Methane Survey Reveals Mars Is Far From 'Dead'

astroengine writes "The first planet-wide studies of methane on Mars — incorporating billions of measurements made by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft — shows gas concentrations peak in autumn and plummet in winter. Scientists have found significantly higher methane concentrations in the Tharsis, Elysium and Arabia Terrae regions. Tharsis and Elysium are home to Mars' most massive volcanoes and Arabia Terrae has large quantities of subterranean frozen water. This indicates the gas could be generated by geological or biological activity. 'It could be geology or biology, but it is not coming from another source. There is a seasonal pattern, so it could only be a local origin,' Sergio Fonti, with Italy's Universita del Salento, told Discovery News."

Re:OH COME ON

[MightyMartian]

I think the unspoken belief in the scientific community is that it's pointing very heavily towards life on Mars, but the rule of thumb in science is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and claims don't get much more extraordinary than the claim that life has been found on another world. Necessity and prudence require that the experts couch their language and manage expectations until we can gather that extraordinary evidence. Since there are other ways that the methane could be formed, in particular geological activity (which in its own way is pretty extraordinary considering Mars' lack of a magnetic field has long been seen as a sign that it is a geologically dead world, lacking a molten or semi-molten core), until incontrovertible evidence has been gathered there will always be the need to list alternative explanations, no matter how much they piss on the parade.

Quite frankly we're not going to know until we find some Martian life, and that's going to take a good deal of time. We're decades away from being able to gather direct evidence, unless we get very lucky.

Re:Time to mine it!

[canajin56]

We have tons of methane mined daily right on Earth. We burn it off at the source because we can't be arsed to pipe it anywhere. If you can't even be bothered piping it from an oil rig, why would you fly it through interplanetary space? I know, bad form, serious reply to non-serious post ;)

Re:OH COME ON

[MightyMartian]

You start by not defining living systems as any specific type of chemistry, but rather certain activities; ie. metabolism, reproduction/replication, respiration, excretion. While the only systems we know of that do that from observation is carbon-based life on Earth, we can conceive of alternatives, whether simply using other forms of carbon chemistry, or even possible silicon-based life.

The risk, of course, of very generalized definitions is that you could catch chemical activity that isn't life, but I think the above tests would be close enough to be highly suggestive that the chemical interactions you're seeing are biotic in nature, regardless of the precise form the chemistry itself takes. I think we're sufficiently good enough of recognizing this things to not confuse even simply living systems with more mundane chemical processes like crystallization, oxidization, etc.

Re:OH COME ON

[Smidge204]

What kind of badass microbial life have you been dreaming up that ignores extreme heat, extreme cold, doesn't breathe anything, survives in a vacuum, and doesn't eat? ;p

Ignoring the factual errors in your description... Tardigrades [wikipedia.org] seem to fit those requirements quite nicely:

- Survive temperatures from -273C to +151C

- Survive decades without water

- Survive radiation doses thousands of times higher than what would kill other organisms

- Survive when exposed to the vacuum of space
=Smidge=