Tanya Harrison has the story. As always, a reminder that people who want to settle Mars should hope that we don’t find life there.
8 thoughts on “Methane On Mars”
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Tanya Harrison has the story. As always, a reminder that people who want to settle Mars should hope that we don’t find life there.
Comments are closed.
Does this latest announcement about organic molecules mean the conclusions made about the Viking landers life science experiments, need to be revisited?
Gil Levin deserves the Nobel prize.
It has long been my fantasy that I would play and win a large Powerball jackpot and the first thing I would do is place a call to Gilbert Levin about placing his chiral labelled release experiment payload on Mars.
After confirming that there are living organisms in Mars, Levin would be remembered for the next 2000 years as the guy who discovered life off our planet, and I would be the forgotten schlump who gave away is Powerball winnings.
Of course I would have to purchase a ticket for any chance for this to take place, which hasn’t happened.
You can’t lose, if you don’t play.
I’m not sure that buying a ticket increases your odds much.
If anything, it makes the inference from Viking, that oxidants actively destroy organic matter in the martian regolith, more compelling.
Organic molecules seem to be common on comets and Mars is bombarded by comets and meteorites. Methane and other hydrocarbons are common in the outer solar system.
I have no idea why this discovery has anything to do with life on Mars. I think there isn’t any life in the solar system except on Earth and any other places we export it to. As a species that is our job. I can live with that.
I will be shocked if we don’t discover past evidence of life on Mars. Interplanetary dispersal of life by impact ejecta appears to be something that must have happened, so if conditions on Mars in the past had liquid water life must have been there, by contamination from Earth if from nothing else.
I have this pet idea that interstellar panspermia should be possible in the dense confines of natal star clusters, like the one the Sun was born in. With a density of as many as 10,000 stars per cubic light year, and the systems equipped with gas disks that might efficiently capture rocks ejected from other systems, if life was present early on then it might have been spread to all the other systems. If asteroids had wet interiors life could have become established there. I suggest looking inside Ceres, which may still be wet at depth.
(These ideas evade the Fermi paradox, since they don’t require origin of life to be common.)