> Organic molecules, which contain carbon and usually hydrogen, are chemical building blocks of life, although they can exist without the presence of life. Curiosity's findings from analyzing samples of atmosphere and rock powder do not reveal whether Mars has ever harbored living microbes, but the findings do shed light on a chemically active modern Mars and on favorable conditions for life on ancient Mars.
Shame. I for one am looking forward to reading about actual life on Mars within my lifetime. Hopefully active life. We shall see.
The conclusion is we better start working on colonization techniques, because chances are that the future of life in our galaxy is in our hands.
Intelligent life doesn't want to be found - at least by us.
Intelligent life tends towards simulation, rather than expansion.
Further to the above, we are the only intelligent life in the simulation in which we reside.
Intelligent life is far more of an aberration than we realise.
Intelligent life is actually very dumb on a macro scale, and falls prey to Malthusian collapse, either by falling into a significant energy gap or by destroying their biosphere.
Intelligent life tends to succumb to dysgenic fertility, and ceases to be intelligent.
Therefore the discovery of life on other worlds means little for the Fermi paradox, as our model may grossly oversimplify or overlook one or more variables which lead to us, now.
Personally I think we're in a sim and we're about to lose the game, as we're staring down an energy deficit Malthusian collapse, uh, right now.
Beyond our solar system the best data we have are shadows blocking star light that indicate an exoplanet sometimes they are false alarms being just star (sun) spots, radio waves are something we use at this point in our very young civilization, there is no indication that this is a standard or efficient way of communication to associate missing radio data to absence of other civilizations.
In conclusion we have no data about life in the universe to jump to such conclusions or any conclusion, the only thing we can do is continue exploring and speculate on the question if there are advanced civilization capable of contact why aren't they contacting us?
The great filter is very likely the evolution of multicelluar life and animals, which are unlikely to be found on mars. If we found living animals on mars I would be very concerned about the future of the human race.
Poor word choice. There's no shame in being careful about the science and trying to represent it carefully in your press releases.
Many non-science types do not know that organic molecules can exist without life and will already be jumping to conclusions.
'Shame' as used here is shorthand for 'that's a shame,' which used colloquially to express disappointment colored with sympathy and understanding, does not imply that any of the nominal subjects is being criticized.
Source: I'm a native English speaker.
We should go boldly where man has not gone before. Fly by the comets, visit asteroids, visit the moon of Mars. There’s a monolith there. A very unusual structure on this potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in seven hours. When people find out about that they’re going to say ‘Who put that there? Who put that there?’ The universe put it there. If you choose, God put it there..
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_%28moon%29#Proposed_miss...
Meanwhile, here on Earth, we thought until recently that deep sea vents were sterile. If we didn't know life's limits here, we certainly can't claim to know them on Mars.
(Never is an an acceptable answer for all 3, but please state why you hold your position)
Intelligent life, though...that's tricky. Given the size of the universe, it is almost certain that there is other intelligent life but who knows whether or not it survives long enough to come into contact? Discovering another civilization would be one of the most incredible experiences I can imagine, so I certainly hope it happens (peacefully) within my lifetime.
To be clear, microbial life in no way entails higher life. It's only by the insanely chance event of the eurkaryotic cell emerging that sophisticated multicellular life became possible on earth. Even if life is common in the universe, sophisticated multicellular life is extremely rare.
The selective pressures on bacterial life favors small size and rapid reproduction, jettisoning any unnecessary genetic material.
Mitochondrial ancestors relieved those pressures in a couple ways. Once the eukaryotic cell developed, multicellularity has evolved several times. All the cool things (multicellularity, eyes, flight) have evolved independently a bunch of times, and the eukaryote has happened only fucking once. Here's a deeper explanation of why it's so rare: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1622/2012...
Even if life is common in the universe, multicellular life is extremely rare because the evolution of eukaryote-esque organisms is extraordinarily rare and chance.
Edit: That is to say, there's a strong case that step 4 is the Great Filter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#The_Great_Filter
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/120413-nasa-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_experi...
A future mission should definitely include a biologically-useful microscope, as suggested by USC neurobiologist Joseph Miller in the National Geograhic article linked above. Miller, also a former NASA space shuttle program director, is one of the proponents of the idea that the 1976 Viking results already demonstrated life.
I think it's unlikely that we will find life anywhere else in our solar system. It's possible that we'll evidence of past life on Mars, but not current. Basically, it's just way too cold or way too hot everywhere but Earth.
edit to add: I hope we do not discover intelligent life until we travel to distant star systems ourselves. If it discovers us here, the outcome will almost certainly be terrible for us, based on the long Earth history of species encountering species.
This isn't as big of a concern as it once might have been. See extremophiles.
> It's possible that we'll evidence of past life on Mars, but not current.
If life takes hold anywhere and has any amount of (geologic) time to spread, I'm guessing only an extremely powerful gamma ray burst or other high energy event could completely exterminate it. It might be impossible to sterilize the earth at this point without completely destroying it, and even then there'd probably be microbes in the resulting meteors, etc (until our sun dies at least).
That's not really true. Only a thin layer of Earth's crust and atmosphere are great for life. Such Goldilocks layers aren't that uncommon if we look at all boundary climates on each body (subsurface sea boundaries, polar boundaries, higher atmosphere boundaries, etc), and not just the boundary analog to Earth's.
Even Mercury has free standing water ice. Somewhere between that ice and the scorched plains there's going to be a somewhat comfy place.
I think the outlook for intelligent life in the solar system, other than us, is very bleak for them. If there are whales on Europa, Titan, or Enceladus then it would seem easier for us to damage their ecosystem than the other way around. Unless, of course, they've infiltrated our political systems and are steering us towards self destruction.
Or it finds us.
If they will find us and this only means more advanced intelligent life then this obviously can happen any time or might already happened and can be delayed by us not being considered ready/worthy for contact or according to many conspiracy theories our governments considers we are not ready.
I don't think we'll ever go beyond the solar system and that the only place with complex life in the solar system is the Earth.
> The ratio that Curiosity found in the Cumberland sample is about one-half the ratio in water vapor in today's Martian atmosphere
> suggesting much of the planet's water loss occurred since that rock formed
> However, the measured ratio is about three times higher than the ratio in the original water supply of Mars, based on the assumption that supply had a ratio similar to that measured in Earth's oceans
> This suggests much of Mars' original water was lost before the rock formed.
So I guess a lot of water was lost both before and after the formation of the rock, and they only have ballpark figures for the hypothetical amounts?
Obviously neither of our planet's life has evolved to be very fit in surviving in the other's environment. But evolution often has "arms races" where organisms evolve highly optimized weapons and defenses against them. It's possible one planet has evolved something the other has no defenses against which would give it an advantage.
E.g. on Earth, the cane toad produces a poison that no Australian predators can survive, and so they all die and the toad overpopulates. Same with many invasive species, like plants that produce poison that kill all the other plants nearby, and take over fields and native ecosystems. Or predators introduced on islands that are much better than the native predators and kill all the native life.
A long time ago (billions of years), our ancestors lived on Mars. The climate was changing due to human activity and shrinking of the Sun. Shit was getting serious and humanity needed a way to escape. The third planet from the Sun was chosen for seeding life into, due to it's proximity to the star and life-supporting characteristics.
A ball of DNA was sent here to seed the planet. It contained the code for all living things, including humans with the source code for a consciousness able to evolve until it finds out the truth of creation. And here we are, close to finding that out and able to continue what our ancestors left behind billions of years ago, before going extinct. But that is only Step 1. Step 2 is finding out who seeded Mars and the Sun and the Universe. Might just be that it was us all along forever. Good night world ;)
