Proof of Martians 'to come this year'
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Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth.
David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.
He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.
The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our understanding of life in the universe.
Two of the meteorites - ALH84001 and Yamato 593 - were found in the Antarctic by American and Japanese scientists after they lay in the icy desert for thousands of years.
But of special interest is a meteorite that fell in many chunks at Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911. Most of the fragments ended up in London's Natural History Museum.
The stones are known to be from Mars because gases trapped inside them match those in rocks examined by probes on the red planet. They were blasted out of its surface by asteroid impacts and then drifted around the solar system for millions of years before falling to earth.
One of the new instruments that will analyse the meteorite will bombard it with a stream of ions to check whether features are geological or biological.
The NASA team believes a planet-wide network of micro-organisms came to life underground on Mars 3.6 billion years ago when the planet was much warmer and wetter with a much thicker atmosphere. Simple life was developing on Earth around the same time.
McKay says it is remarkable that some of the most striking new evidence for life on Mars has been sitting in London for nearly 100 years.
He told the website Spaceflight Now that if British researchers had examined their Nakhla meteorite with readily available electron microscopes and other tools like those used by the U.S. team, the new evidence for life on Mars could have been a British discovery, rather than an American one.
He added: "We do not yet believe that we have rigorously proven there is - or was - life on Mars. But we do believe that we are very, very close to proving there is or has been life there."
Compelling evidence that life may still survive today on Mars was revealed a year ago after NASA detected plumes of methane in the planet's atmosphere.
Picture: A close-up of the "colony of martian bacteria" revealed though a microscope in the Nakhla meteorite. (NASA)
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19 Comments
Add CommentStill abundant questions remain to be asked and answered: for example, life on Mars might have originated on Earth due to having been blasted out of Earth's surface by asteroid impacts and then drifting around the solar system for millions of years before landing on Mars. What could be true one way, could be true the other way. Still, there's great excitement at this impending discovery. What is obvious is that life can/could develop and/or exist on innumerable planets throughout the universe. Thanks, Galileo. Wish you could be here now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStill abundant questions remain to be asked and answered: for example, life on Mars might have originated on Earth due to having been blasted out of Earth's surface by asteroid impacts and then drifting around the solar system for millions of years before landing on Mars. What could be true one way, could be true the other way. Still, there's great excitement at this impending discovery. What is obvious is that life can/could develop and/or exist on innumerable planets throughout the universe. Thanks, Galileo. Wish you could be here now. You'd be having quite a "trip"!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis idea has been developing for almost 40 years, ever since the Labeled Release experiment on the Viking landers gave very convincing, if not conclusive, evidence for microbial life in the Martian soil. At that time, the results were dismissed because of the "Dry Mars" theory; scientists at the time believed Mars to have been entirely waterless throughout its history. Now, thanks to the rovers, we know that Mars was once "warm, wet, an habitable" in the ancient past.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe next exciting question will be to determine if Martian life has DNA, and if it does, are we related? All Earth-based life shares some genetic material - do we share any with hypothetical Martian bacteria? If life arose independently on Mars; this idea coupled with the explosive growth in the discovery of exoplanets have profound implications for the abundance of life in the galaxy, and in the larger Universe.
it's a god awful small affair to the girl with the mousy hair
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what is this saying, if we find microbial fossil life in a (supposed) Martian meteorite here on Earth that's proof that life existed on Mars, even though we cannot find the same evidence on Mars itself? Couldn't those microbes have gown after the rocks landed on the Earth?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe on the surface of the meteorite, but I feel it kinda unlikely that they grew inside after impacting earth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a Photo from the rovers that appears to have some type of shrimp in it...I have examined it after getting it from the NASA Site over the years since the rovers,It appears to me to have an eye and a tail it may be a fish
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf this turns out to be true, then one other thing will be just as true, they will be illegal immigrants without papers and must be sent back immediately to prevent more of their lazy and shiftless kind from hitching their fat bacterial butts on outgoing debris from meteor impacts and heading our way to make a new home for themselves living the high life supported completely by our much more expansive and generous Earth Biome. If we don't stop them a few million hear hence, the once proud human race could be reduced to beggars on their own planet whose survival depends on the generosity of extremely small but highly organized imperialistic bacterial organism from Mars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyou have answered your own question. what does "liberal" or "not liberal" have to do with your postulate?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe proof of Martian life arrived a while back. Not only are there Martians, they're believers: http://www.weeklyworldinquisitor.com/bible_on_mars.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is a pretty weak attempt at loading a question.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://vimeo.com/7761485
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExpertly shot & edited. Done with so much insight & attention to detail that most women who see it can't believe it was created by a man.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0033811/
jeff, great job on your short.
> very clean. i am impressed
> peace
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1843310/
Does this have some meaning of which I am unaware?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://vimeo.com/7761485
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExpertly shot & edited. Done with so much insight & attention to detail that most women who see it can't believe it was created by a man.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0033811/
jeff, great job on your short.
> very clean. i am impressed
> peace
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1843310/
Since this story has been around for 20 years or more, and since Scientifc American has itself described nanobacteria as something other than living, I reaming skeptic that this story has any merit whatsoever.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBear the following in mind:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMars was habitable before Earth so it unlikely that Earth seeded Mars with life. On the other hand we know that Martian rocks occasionally arrive on Earth and that recent experiments have shown that life can survive the journey to Earth's surface. Thus when Earth became habitable, life could develop here. It follows that we are probably derived from Martians. That we Earthlings and Martians have the same origin would be proved if it turns out that we have the same genetic code. I can't wait to find out!
Speculating further, since life is resilient to the rigors of space, and is continuously leaking from our upper atmosphere as well as from material thrown up from occasional asteroid impacts we could well be distributing it in our solar system - and perhaps beyond. Moreover, this could have happened beforehand in other solar systems before ours formed. Perhaps primitive life is thus scattered in our universe, so it would not be long after a planet becomes habitable before it is colonised by life (that could have originated from anywhere previously). It is like Pandora's Box: life is messy stuff - once it has formed, it leaks elsewhere.
Remember, life started on Earth as soon as it became habitable. Our planet started out as a flaming fireball 4.5bn years ago; research indicates that life probably started 3.9bn years ago (and definitely by 3.5bn years ago) - when it first became habitable.
Thus we Earthlings are not just composed of atoms from supernova stardust; our life may have even have come from another solar system of 'long long ago'!
I remain extremely skeptical that there has ever been life on Mars. The more I learn about the complexity of even very simple life forms, the more I believe that what we have on earth is probably extremely rare if not unique in the universe. As far as I know, scientists have not been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation of how life began on earth. If life can get started on any planet that has the basic preconditions then I would assume that new life forms have formed on earth continuously over the last billion years or so. Pardon my descent from skeptical to cynical but could this report from NASA be manipulation to keep the Mars money flowing?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReply to abyssalmystery at 04:24 PM on 01/21/10
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou do not understand how life develops. Conditions on Earth 4bn years ago when life took hold were different from now. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere but instead there was 80% water vapor, 10% carbon dioxide, 5 % hydrogen sulfide, and smaller amounts of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, methane and inert gases. The first organisms consumed the carbon dioxide and made oxygen, a useless waste product produced in such huge quantities over eons of time so that today it now makes up 21% of air. It is only later life that evolved to use oxygen. It is a very reactive gas and would be toxic to any new life starting.
Another reason why new life can't continuously arise is that the present life is so aggressive to other life. Excepting plants, life exists by killing other life; the remaining organisms eat life's waste products or dead life. (Even tough molecules like keratin (hair, horns, hooves etc.) or cellulose gets eaten - otherwise the world would now be overflowing with the stuff.)
Remember too that life has had the time to fill all the ecological niches available, so as soon as a new primitive life form arose it would be on an existing organism's menu!
As an analogy, think of the arms race. Would a new, primitive group of humans that suddenly arose, armed only with clubs as weapons, succeed against modern humans armed with today's weapons?
Do support NASA in its quest for life on Mars. Perhaps in the future you will remember these words: that life will be found on Mars.
"As far as I know, scientists have not been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation of how life began on earth."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere's a pretty good explanation...
http://asimovsoriginoflife.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html