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Can Hitchhiking Earth Microbes Thrive on Mars?
New experiments indicate that three of the most hostile elements of the Martian environment are not insurmountable blockades for Earth organisms

Curiosity Drills Mars for Answers
NASA's Curiosity rover has now gotten some use from most of its science instruments, but not all of them are working

10 Comments

1. 1. N a g n o s t i c 12:29 PM 4/21/13

   Maybe we'll meet Mars life in person there, after we ask the Chinese for permission to land.

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2. 2. N a g n o s t i c 10:03 AM 4/22/13

   Our young have the time on their hands to produce abominations such as hyacinth, since they're not currently employed doing cool stuff like sending people to different planets.

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3. 3. geojellyroll 10:40 AM 4/22/13

   Possibility? Perhaps. As a geologist I'd wager Mars is lifelsess and has always been lifeless.
   
   The 'big issue' isn't life surviving tentatively in niche ecosystems but life beginning and reachig a stage where it can evolve to survive in 'those' conditions.
   
   Still worth exploring and I may be wrong...but there is a bit of wishful agenda driven science. There's most likely life on quintillions of planets in the Universe but unlikely any other than Earth in this solar system.

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4. 4. w.sanscrai 03:05 PM 4/22/13

   Probability analyses show that life on Mars or Earth could not have started and continued by chance. And it could not be caused by scientific law. That leaves design as the cause, which answers a much bigger question.

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5. 5. Yakety-Yak 07:21 PM 4/22/13

   .. "And it could not be caused by scientific law"
   
   Life is indeed unlikely to have arisen by "chance". But there seems no reason why it could not have arisen in response to a natural energy gradient (most likely an electrochemical one). Thermodynamics allows that possibility.
   
   

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6. 6. w.sanscrai 08:02 PM 4/22/13

   
   "...in response to a natural energy gradient" Science has yet to discover all the laws. They hope to discover the theory of every thing sometime in the future.Laws cannot distinguish between the life useful and non-life useful molecules. They cannot assemble the molecules in a life-useful sequence except by trial and error which is another form of chance.

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7. 7. nholt in reply to N a g n o s t i c 01:07 PM 4/25/13

   How's your tinfoil hat fitting today?

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8. 8. nholt in reply to w.sanscrai 01:08 PM 4/25/13

   Answers? I'd say continues to ask, no?

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9. 9. Happy Hal 12:17 AM 4/26/13

   With the relatively small area surveyed, perhaps there a intelligent Martians, just laughing about our primitive exploration.

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10. 10. w.sanscrai 03:21 PM 4/27/13

    reply to nholt: That life start and continuation are not the result of chance can be proven by probability analyses of available scientific data. The analyses use arithmetic; no higher mathematics are needed. Scientific law cannot explain life start and its continuation now and will not be able to do so in the future. All physical, Newtonian, events are caused by chance, scientific law, or by design or combinations of the three. With chance eliminated and law recognized as a contributing but not the controlling cause,the physical events that caused life and its continuation must be the result of design and a Designer Supreme Being.
    

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