Life on Mars?

[Mysterion]

From drudgereport.com, quoted here in it's entirety:

"Martian soil may contain life
Thu Aug 23 2007 11:30:10 ET

The soil on Mars may contain microbial life!

Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, will declare on Friday the Viking spacecraft may have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface.

His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin.

That is roughly comparable to biomass levels found in some Antarctic permafrost, home to a range of hardy bacteria and lichen.

Developing.... "

This could be interesting if true, huh?

 

[flux_29]

Mabye a million yeas ago, but the best we'll find is frozen bactieria.

 

[Baba101]

Cool

 

[Spider]

Baba101 said:
Cool

In more ways than one, huh Baba

It wouldn't suprise me at all to find some currently living biomass of some sort on Mars. It's why I'm against a sample return mission or a manned mission to Mars until we know for sure. And if it's true, we meed to determine if such life is a threat to our biosphere before we bring it back.

 

[Baba101]

Spider I suppose we can bring exotic species to mars. We have to mess up mars the way we messed up earth. Humans trashing planets like no one has done before.

 

[Neopeius]

Mysterion said:


This could be interesting if true, huh?

I could be interesting if it might be true because of the possibility that there may be life on Mars.

Lowell's legacy lives on.

 

[Mysterion]

Neopeius said:

Mysterion said:


This could be interesting if true, huh?

I could be interesting if it might be true because of the possibility that there may be life on Mars.

So, you might be saying that perhaps there could be the interesting possibility of a possible probability of a report of life on Mars that, perhaps, might be true?

 

[TerriO]

Since the story isn't on Drudge Report's main page, I did a search and found this article in the UK Telegraph.

For those like me who want to know how it took 30 years to make this discovery. Curious.

 

[Mysterion]

TerriO said:
Since the story isn't on Drudge Report's main page, I did a search and found this article in the UK Telegraph.

For those like me who want to know how it took 30 years to make this discovery. Curious.

Thanks for providing the link. (Sorry to have not thought to look for it myself.)

 

[PlixTixiplik]

It's certainly an interesting idea - hopefully future missions will be able to test this. Although right now it's just speculation based on a hypothetical microbe with hydrogen peroxide in its cellular fluid. It is somewhat plausible given the ever-increasing menagerie of extremophiles on Earth, and it also reflects the growing recognition that astrobiology needs to broaden its concept of life to beyond Earth-like life forms, while the Viking experiments were designed only to detect very Earth-like life. That's totally understandable, as it's the logical and simplest test to do first, but future missions will likely be able to test for a broader spectrum of life.

-MEC

 

[scotthm]

Mysterion said:
This could be interesting if true, huh?

For another, more balanced account:

For Pace and many other scientists, the definitive experiment performed by the Viking landers was the gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) test, which was capable of identifying substances by their chemical makeup. That test failed to turn up evidence of organic compounds. "That's the interesting experiment. Everything else can be explained chemically," Pace said.

LINK

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[Neopeius]

Mysterion said:

Neopeius said:

Mysterion said:


This could be interesting if true, huh?

I could be interesting if it might be true because of the possibility that there may be life on Mars.

So, you might be saying that perhaps there could be the interesting possibility of a possible probability of a report of life on Mars that, perhaps, might be true?

Oh, I wouldn't go that far..