CNN: NASA Discovery Reveals There May Have Been Life on Mars (cnn.com) 100
"News from Mars," CNN reported Friday. "Not just that water was there, perhaps millions of years ago, but also these organic compounds."
In an interview with the head of Earth Sciences collections at the UK's Natural History Musem, CNN asked the million-dollar question. "How much more likely, if you believe so, that that makes it that there was life on Mars at some time." A: So what we've found with data that's come back from the Rover and has been studied over the last few months is that we see igneous rocks -- so these are rocks that have been formed through volcanic processes -- which have also been affected by the action of liquid water.
And that's really really interesting and exciting, because liquid water is one of the key ingredients you need for life to start. So if you've got the chances of life ever being on Mars, you'd need to have somewhere that had liquid water for at least a period of time. And we've got good evidence for that.
Now that's combined with the fact that we're seeing, using instruments like SHERLOCK, which is an instrument that I'm involved with, also the presence of organic molecules. And organic molecules are chemical molecules made of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sometimes bits of sulfur, sometimes bits of phosphorous, and maybe some added-up things. And those are really really important, because you need organic molecules for life to start.
And the other thing that's really interesting about organic molecules is they can actually be sort of fossil chemical evidence of potential past life.
In an interview with the head of Earth Sciences collections at the UK's Natural History Musem, CNN asked the million-dollar question. "How much more likely, if you believe so, that that makes it that there was life on Mars at some time." A: So what we've found with data that's come back from the Rover and has been studied over the last few months is that we see igneous rocks -- so these are rocks that have been formed through volcanic processes -- which have also been affected by the action of liquid water.
And that's really really interesting and exciting, because liquid water is one of the key ingredients you need for life to start. So if you've got the chances of life ever being on Mars, you'd need to have somewhere that had liquid water for at least a period of time. And we've got good evidence for that.
Now that's combined with the fact that we're seeing, using instruments like SHERLOCK, which is an instrument that I'm involved with, also the presence of organic molecules. And organic molecules are chemical molecules made of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sometimes bits of sulfur, sometimes bits of phosphorous, and maybe some added-up things. And those are really really important, because you need organic molecules for life to start.
And the other thing that's really interesting about organic molecules is they can actually be sort of fossil chemical evidence of potential past life.
Next Question: (Score:1)
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Next up, will they join our free trade association or will we have to go to war?
Re: Next Question:panspermia is a bit like saying. (Score:2)
"God made it'. Because it doesnt actually answer the question of how life started, it just hand waves the question away to some mysterious unknowable location. Unless panspermia advocates think there might be a more conducive crucible of life than than a large warm ocean full of organic soup then I dont get their reasoning.
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It's simple; we want to know everything we can know.
If the everyone who ever found a meteoric rock looked at it and said "well, it's here so it must have originated here" there would be a whole lot that we would never have learned.
We contemplate ideas like panspermia because it's interesting and finding the answers will provide us with a greater understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Article is interesting, headline is hyperbole (Score:2)
Read the article, ignore the headline. Fascinating scientific findings, but NOT really new findings about life on Mars.
the headline needs to continue the sentence "...or maybe not, we don't know".
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abio [Re:Article is interesting, headline is hype] (Score:2)
I don't know of any scientists, NASA or not, who credit the "abiotic theory of oil production." It's a pretty fringe theory, since the geology of hydrocarbons is probably the single most intensely-studied and well-understood subfield of geology.
Hydrocarbons are, of course, abundant in the outer solar system. But that's outside the frost line. In the inner solar system, where it's warm, hydrocarbons are too volatile to stick around.
Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Maybe... (Score:2)
Yup, could have avoided all the looting and pillaging. Even the probing, for crying out loud
Viking did the wrong experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
The Viking results didn't show life. We now know that they were entirely based on a wrong guess about what the environment of Mars was like and what might live there.
An experiment "let's add water with nutrients in it, and see if microorganisms eat it and produce carbon dioxide" is turns out to be useless when the soil contains strong oxidizing compounds that react with the soil and produce carbon dioxide.
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Bloody Vikings! (and their Spam)
CNN: NASA Discovery Reveals There May Have Been Li (Score:2)
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Upon reading other more legitimate science and space news sources, CNN was caught click baiting
Anyone with a basic understanding of science or logic will translate that clickbait to
"Scientists once again fail to conclusively rule out past life on Mars."
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*yawns*
The whole thing feels like a dead horse. Intelligent life on Mars was interesting... these last little hiccups about the possibility of some microbes once upon a time are just wasted efforts to populate new jeopardy questions and trivial pursuit cards. The answer has no potential practical value. Finding some sort of alien life is neat in a feather in our caps manner but nobody really believes alien life of some sort doesn't or hasn't existed anymore so it doesn't really answer any questions.
At this
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lol RIP Bowie.
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Upon reading other more legitimate science and space news sources, CNN was caught click baiting
I was interested and almost clicked on this article, then I realized it was a CNN link. CNN stopped being a reliable news source years ago.
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I don't think CNN lies or is "unreliable" but, while Trump is a total shit, CNN just went at him ALL. THE. TIME. and became unwatchable because of it.
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CNN has been caught in a number of half truths and lies over the past few years. Truth be told there isn't any "news" service that hasn't been caught but CNN and MSNBC seem to be the worse.
CNN's new owners seem to be dedicated to returning the news service to former glory. They already fired one of the biggest liars and demoted the other one to "weather" man on a low rated morning show.
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One where you could not tell by watching it if the production staff and presenters were Republican or woke or whatever.
Too much to hope for ?
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Too much to hope for ?
Actually, there is. It's called foreign news outlets. Two that I pull up are Aljazeera and France 24. Both have 24-hour youtube channels with a English feed. France 24 is a little more progressive but not enough make you sick of it. Aljazeera is probably a little more conservative of the two, and seems to focus a little more on the middle east, which I'm fine with.
I watched the Oakland California shooting on Aljazeera and it was just the reporting. No spin. I found a CNN clip on the same event, an
Re: CNN: NASA Discovery Reveals There May Have Bee (Score:1)
Just a word of caution: Al Jazeera is owned by Qatar (who took over operations when BBC was forced to pull out). Historically it's had a pretty good reputation for its foreign coverage, but it's an absolute monarchy with a terrible human rights record so that could change at anytime.
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Weird. Why would you call out trolling when you are an 'Anonymous Coward'? It takes all the force out of your accusation.
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True.
Now you're just trolling.
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Now you're just trolling.
No one is trolling any one here. Trust me, if I were trolling you, you wouldn't even know about it.
Both CNN and MSNBC have been listed, along with Vox and Huffypost as some of the most left leaning news services in the country. This makes them completely unreliable as a trustworthy news service. Of course, the action swings the other way. Foxnews, Newsmax, and OAM are among the most right leaning news services. This also makes them invalid as a reliable news service.
Just because someone says som
Life is a ultra low-probability event (Score:5, Informative)
It might have only happened on Earth, in the whole universe. The reason I am skeptical that life can occur in other places like Mars is that it seems to have only happened once here on Earth -- with apparent perfect conditions. There is no evidence of any lifeforms that are not descendent from the original cell we all descended from, so-called LUCA (Last universal common ancestor.) All life uses a version of the same same damn ribosome. It's barely deviated from its encoding sequence/architecture even between bacteria (80S) and eukaryotes (70S - all nucleated cell life - fungi, humans, insects etc.) Now, why is there no life that has a different ribosomal architecture/sequence? And that's not even asking the question as to why there is no non-DNA-based life. We all use the same amino acid encoding scheme, which is very similar. It's fishy that there is no niche .. anywhere .. for lifeforms that have a different ribosomal architecture.
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One caveat: It could also be that we're not good at looking. I mean, many years ago, I did try to look, actually. Basically, we got some soil and other types of environmental samples .. tried to grow samples from in the presence of a chemical that interferes with DNA. Nothing seemed to grow. Note: 99% of things found in the environment can't be grown in the lab anyway .. so it wasn't the most valid way to rule it out. Still, I feel like others would have found something by now if it was out there.
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Given how rapidly life evolved [wikipedia.org] after conditions were right (eg liquid water on the planet) I suspect that there is quite a lot of life out there.
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Given how rapidly life evolved [wikipedia.org] after conditions were right (eg liquid water on the planet) I suspect that there is quite a lot of life out there.
Yes, the galaxy may be teeming with planets having primitive bacteria-like life. But complex life, such as algae or mould, may still be unique to this plant within a 100-billion light-year radius.
While crude life appeared quickly, it took an unimaginable timescale for some freak event (or several) to create eukaryotes.
Re: Life is a ultra low-probability event (Score:3)
Eukaryote, not to be confused with karaoke, life that occurs on Friday or Saturday nights, and with the infusion of the correct amount of chemicals, commonly above the legal limit in most jurisdictions
Re: Life is a ultra low-probability event (Score:2)
That's the trouble with a sample of size 1.
You have absolutely no idea if it's a fluke or the norm. Eukaryotes aren't exactly "rare" in this sample; they're everywhere and you're one of them.
But but but time! Yeah. The same billions of years that elapsed here elapsed everywhere else too. Sometimes even more out there around older stars.
The bottom line is that there is zero information out there about how rare or common complex life may be.
Our solar system looks fairly dead outside of Earth, but we have zero
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Not quite zero. As I said, we have one hint: life appeared very rapidly once conditions allowed, but complex life took a long time - a big chunk of the planet's age. This suggests that the latter is more likely to be a great filter.
Re: Life is a ultra low-probability event (Score:3)
Maybe we were just exceptionally slow.
Like I said: the same amount of time elapsed everywhere else. And we have no idea what is going on out there.
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the same amount of time elapsed everywhere else
Are you absolutely certain of that claim? Time moves differently depending on how much mass you are near. The Earth is a relatively small body of mass, so time moves faster than it would on larger bodies. The sun is relatively small too, so time in our star system is moving faster than it is is in larger star systems. Our galaxy is not exactly small, but there are galaxies that are incredibly more massive... so again, time is faster here than there.
Re: Life is a ultra low-probability event (Score:2)
Unless you're right on top of a black hole or moving at a large fraction of the speed of light, time ticks along at close enough to the same rate.
The rate is something like V - (v/c)**2 where V is the gravitational potential and v is your speed relative to an observer at the average velocity of the universe (defined in terms of no doppler shift in the cmb). And there's some constants I probably left out.
The point is that almost everywhere we can see, that number is close to 1.
So yeah the same amount of time
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Thing is, those billions of years require stability. The Earth has been, other then oxygen, basically habitable since things calmed down after the beginning. With oxygen you could live outside naked or at least with clothing and maybe goggles over most of the Earths history.
Here we have Venus and Mars, both which may have been habitable for a billion or two years before they went to shit.
Such stability for billions of years is likely to be rare, especially if the Moon played a big part in that stability. Yo
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Okay, I'll bite. WHY is it "likely to be rare"? What evidence do you have, one way or the other?
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Stars are not stable, they get hotter as they age due to having more helium, which makes them denser. Some are variable like small stars flaring. There are parts of the galaxy that aren't stable, the core, various nebula for some examples. Need a galactic orbit that avoids that. Planetary orbits don't seem stable over the long term with planets migrating to different orbits. See all the hot Jupiter's that seem to have spiraled towards their stars
Then we get the planets themselves, need stability or the rig
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Having one LUCA is not evidence that life only arose once. Resources are scarce, and early life radically transformed the environment. One instance of life arising was clearly more successful than the others and caused their extinction.
Life could've arisen a hundred times, for all we know -- but one of those times it happened to arise in a place especially suitable that allowed it to thrive and out-compete the other life for resources or alter the environment in a way the other life couldn't adapt to.
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There was also things like asteroid strikes and volcano-ism that may have wiped out the first types of life. A hundred mile asteroid is likely big enough to sterilize the Earth by melting the crust and smaller ones were hitting the earth regularly early on. A bit of bad luck and that new life form gets wiped out.
Re:Life is a ultra low-probability event (Score:5, Interesting)
There is postulation that life may have started up several times on earth, and we're only seeing the very last successful result.
https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
It could very well be that, given roughly similar conditions, the spontaneous generation of life may be practically inevitable. The evidence that supports this theory is that life appeared on Earth almost as soon as the conditions were remotely viable. If it were a very rare occurrence, one would perhaps expect it to have taken a while longer to occur.
You say life happened only once, but I'm not sure that's necessarily evidence of rarity either. Life, by it's very nature, only has to occur once successfully, and it may tend to crowd out other attempts to start up by filling in ecological niches with it's exponential growth and immediate potential for evolution. So it doesn't seem surprising to me that we see signs of only one common, universal ancestor. By it's very nature, only the most successful types of life survive. I'd imagine there is a definite first-evolution advantage to life.
Personally, I tend to believe that life is, on a cosmic scale at least, is probably a relatively common occurrence. Even if it were just one in a million odds per planet, that means there could be around 10,000 planets in the Milky Way alone containing life. And of course, that's one out of several hundred billions galaxies in the observable universe. I suspect the universe is just too big for there to realistically be one-off events.
Likewise, I tend to view the notion of asteroid-borne life hitching rides with skepticism. The need for such an extraordinary origin simple goes away if we assume life isn't all that hard to kickstart from a planet full of common organic chemicals, water, an energy source, and a few million years to brew.
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Likewise, I tend to view the notion of asteroid-borne life hitching rides with skepticism. The need for such an extraordinary origin simple goes away if we assume life isn't all that hard to kickstart
Francis Crick suggested Pamspermia based on his calculations that creating the DNA replication mechanisms (etc) from random mutations would take much longer than the existence of the earth.
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Francis Crick suggested Pamspermia based on his calculations that creating the DNA replication mechanisms (etc) from random mutations would take much longer than the existence of the earth.
Not if you have a parallel computer. i.e with billions of earth-like worlds, one of them can be expected to get "lucky".
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Unless the odds are 1/trillion, then you have to be lucky even with a billion earth-like worlds.
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It could very well be that, given roughly similar conditions, the spontaneous generation of life may be practically inevitable.
This would also means that we fundamentally don't understand laws of physics. Spontaneous generation of life would be antientropic event, repeated occurrences of this would be potentially violating second law of thermodynamics. A universe full of life, especially full of sentient life, would trend to order.
Thermodynamics: it's the law we live by (Score:4, Insightful)
It could very well be that, given roughly similar conditions, the spontaneous generation of life may be practically inevitable.
This would also means that we fundamentally don't understand laws of physics. Spontaneous generation of life would be antientropic event,
No.
Life increases entropy. You are alive because plants take sunlight, 6000 Kelvin blackbody radiation, and reject waste heat at 300 Kelvin.
You yourself take highly energetic organic molecules as input and produce shit and carbon dioxide as output.
Living things produce vast increases in entropy.
repeated occurrences of this would be potentially violating second law of thermodynamics.
It's only a violation of the second law of thermodynaics if you can do it without producing waste heat.
A universe full of life, especially full of sentient life, would trend to order.
If you could manage to produce a form of life that doesn't eat and doesn't shit, yes.
Re: Life is a ultra low-probability event (Score:2)
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I think that the probability of intelligent life on another planet, or moon, in the Universe is close to certainty.
However, I strongly suspect that the probability of communicating with intelligent life originating from elsewhere in the Universe is close to zero.
Whether we find any definitive signs of intelligent life elsewhere is probably extremely small.
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The first life form that evolves to eat other life forms wins.
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Frankly, the math is too difficult for me to figure out (or rather, the bio-mathematical modeling).
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It might have only happened on Earth, in the whole universe. The reason I am skeptical that life can occur in other places like Mars is that it seems to have only happened once here on Earth
There's no conclusive evidence that life as we know it even originated on earth. For all we know, life as we know it could have originated on Mars billions of years ago, and then spread to Earth by meteor impact / panspermia. Or from some extra-solar origin, for that matter. We literally have a sample size of "one" so far, and barely started looking at our own cosmic back yard. For all we know the vast majority of extrasolar planets could be crawling with alien microbes.
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...and thus returning the topic of the previous thread, panspermia
Panspermia doesn't solve the question of how life originated, only moves it somewhere else. No good reason to think abiogenesis was easier to initiate on Mars than Earth.
(Maybe) Life is a ultra low-probability event (Score:2)
It might have only happened on Earth, in the whole universe. The reason I am skeptical that life can occur in other places like Mars is that it seems to have only happened once here on Earth -- with apparent perfect conditions. .
The obvious explanation of this is evolution: there may or may not have been multiple starts, but today's life is descended from the one that outcompeted the other sources.
(think of it as "first mover advantage").
The argument that starting life is not a low probability event is how quickly the first evidence of life shows up after the Earth cools enough to have oceans.
As yet, the whole answer is "we don't know".
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Seems they've modified life in the laboratory to use different letters in DNA.
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Silicon is nowhere as good as carbon for forming complex molecules but who knows. If it eats, grows, reproduces, responds to stimuli and has waste products and we observe it doing it, after much arguing, we might recognize it.
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So, and what evidence do you have the "life is an ultra-low probability event?
As of now, we've looked at two planets. This one seems to have life, though not necessarily intelligent life.
Mars, we've looked at a little. A year or two, with VERY limited equipment.
When we've looked at, say, 50 planets orbitting as many stars, we might be in position to say "life is an ultra-low probability event" with some scientific basis for the statement.
Note, by the by, that 50 planets is a remarkably small dataset f
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Now, why is there no life that has a different ribosomal architecture/sequence?
One possible explanation is that the first life to succeed rapidly evolved to the point where it could easily outcompete (and _eat_) any other form of life that might have a chance. Basically, the evolution of new life might rapidly make the environment extremely hostile to the evolution of any other brand new form of life.
Who cares (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm not much of a pay-per-view user, but... I'd pay to watch that!
Re: Who cares (Score:2)
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It's silly that we're bothered that proven violent insurrectionists are allowed back on. We silly paranoid lefties.
Dick.
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There are, it's called "Twitter".
Day of the week that ends in "y" (Score:2)
Everyone on Slashdot should be old enough to have heard at least half a dozen of these announcements. It seems every few years NASA scientists schedule a big announcement, gather legacy media into the room, approach the podium in hushed reverence, and announce: "ladies and gentlemen, we have it. Evidence there may or may not have been a high chance that there was at one point life or water on Mars, or that there may be even now."
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Everyone on Slashdot should be old enough to have heard at least half a dozen of these announcements.
old guy here, I've heard we will have humans on Mars 20 years from now since the 1960s.
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old guy here, I've heard we will have humans on Mars 20 years from now since the 1960s.
We could have had humans on Mars in the 1960s, except for the bleeding-heart lefties who insisted we had to get them back again.
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Someone missed the humour in your post. That is a shame as it is really funny. No mod points today, so you will have to settle for this reply as an upvote. Well played sir, well played.
(You are correct, we did not have the technology to bring them back alive once they were on the surface)
Life != Sentience (Score:2)
In as much as we have a single data point life emerged early and has been very resilient.
That said, we homo-sapiens like to call ourselves sentient. Another factor in the Drake Equation I guess...
Another breathless article (Score:2)
telling us there might be life on Mars. How many of those do we see in a year? About a dozen? And every time, it turns out they've discovered exactly nothing new.
Get back to us when you actually know something. The constant hyperventilating over hypothetical Martians that never materialize is getting really annoying.
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How many of those do we see in a year? About a dozen?
More like a dozen a month. These postulating "life may have existed on Mars" articles are saying nothing more than what has been theorized during the last 50 years.
Unfortunately and sadly, almost all science articles are like this now and have become essentially just opinion pieces. A catchy attention grabbing headline containing the words "may,could, might, suggests" and the content is filled with little more than conjecture, assumptions, hypothesis,
So, are we alone in the Universe? (Score:2)
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C. Clarke
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He is correct. They are both terrification quotient zero.
Honest-o-god, this is the last time I want to hear (Score:3)
It's just like those damn battery stories.
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Weren't the canals proof enough for you?
And on the 7th day (Score:2)
...god made water on Mars.
No wait actually when the big flood came it flooded all the planets. So that was god too.
So yeah. God did it...and whatever life may or may not have existed on MArs it believed in God too! That's the answer in case you ask the question.
Assembly theory can decipher scant evidence life (Score:2)
May have (Score:2)
Probability: 0.0% +- 10^-40
Need humans there (Score:2)
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I suspect that fossils will be found. Almost certainly, they will be microbial
Hm. Have we found fossilized remains of microbial life on Earth? I know we have found structures that we know were created by microbial life, but I am not aware of any fossils of actual microbes themselves.