Subscription Center
New observations by NASA's Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past
See what we're tweeting about
JenLucPiquant Of mice and men: "genes do vary, and they vary subtly. There is no one crystal ball, not even for mice" http://t.co/bmm4WeCXNi
BoraZ RT @kprengaman: Although it does want to make me do more bird watching when I travel.... http://t.co/YGlrQcyXut via @slate
sciencegoddess Avoid doing a favor by a) politely declining or b) passively aggressively insulting a mother's children which had zero relation to the favor
Deadline: Jun 30 2013
Reward: $1,000,000 USD
This is a Reduction-to-Practice Challenge that requires written documentation and&
Deadline: Aug 31 2013
Reward: $100,000 USD
The Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative (GBFAI) is launching the 2013 Geoffrey Beene Global NeuroDiscovery Challenge whose
Powered By: 
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
7 Comments
Add CommentHighly speculative stuff, as you say in the article, but it adds credence to Fred Hoyle's Panspermia hypothesis. I wonder what else he got right? Continuous Creation, perhaps? I read recently that electron/positron pairs can emerge spontaneously out of vacuum - why not hydrogen ions?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wonder if a Martian rock contained fossils of microscopic organisms with shells (similar to terrestrial diatoms), would Curiosity be able to see them?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisApriori it seems our biosphere is indigenous.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fastest presented chemical evolution pathways results in biologically evolving cells within ~ 30 000 years (in alkaline hydrothermal vents, either Lane's & Martin's metabolic theory, or thermodynamic RNA replicator crystallization).
Crude estimates of survival rates during late bombardment doesn't quite make up for that IMO.
@BobWalton: Local transpermia would reject Hoyle's cosmological such, which was dead with the acceptance of Big Bang cosmologies anyway. (It assumed an infinitely old universe.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for continuous creation, the observation of the Higgs field regardless of exact Higgs mechanism completes the Standard Model, which safeguards physics up to ~ 100 GeV. So hydrogen creation, which is ~ mass of 1 proton or ~ 1 GeV, is not ongoing.
@ErkkiRuohtula: I imagine so, some species becomes ~ 2 mm in length. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom ; I assume not the colonial ones. ] Curiosity has something like 0.1 mm resolution in some of its microscopes, IIRC.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI forgot: We don't expect such though. They are eukaryotes, such large and energetic (shell building) cells evolved first with the oxygenation of the atmosphere. That didn't happen on Mars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTend to forget what we have, and Mars has not, namely a Core, and a Electrical one as well, which, by the way, surports, or, destroys Life. You see, without a vibrant, active Core, were DEAD MEAT, JUST LIKE MARS!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this