NASA discovery on Mars "For the history books"
- Thread starter Hero in a half shell
- Start date
My honest guess is some sort of composition of dirt that will mean nothing to non-scientific people.
My hope is something proving extra-terrestrial life.
My hope is something proving extra-terrestrial life.
That's been said a few times. Microbial life includes bacteria as well as simpler organisms. We already have the bacteria and archaea, which means there seems to be more than one way to be a single-celled non-eukaryote organism.Negatempest said:
That would be an incredible discovery. Speculating about something is merely making a hypothesis. The observation also is an incredibly important event. Discovering life which originated outside of earth's biome would be difficult to overstate the importance of, no matter how trivial it is to speculate about. Microbial life outside our biome implies strongly life anywhere it can exist, and since the logic of evolutionary competition remains the same outside our own small world, the existence of complex beings wherever their habitat can support them.viranimus said:
Any form of life indeed would also raise immediate questions about how it functions, what are the means by which it stores its genome, metabolizes for energy, etc. What solutions to the needs of life have arisen outside our own world. How much does it converge on terrestrial solutions based on the stability of particular organic compounds and how much does it deviate from them?
Those have already been found in comets Comets can contain ice made of glycine [http://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/691/analytical/PDF/Elsila2009.pdf]. Unfortunately, amino acids are pretty stable themselves and arise without any living process. I'd love for it to be better "smoking gun" for biochemical processes rather than just organic ones, though organic molecular residues would be interesting as well.Quaxar said:
We can hope. For anyone interested. [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49664054/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/curiosity-finds-no-methane-mars-not-yet-anyway/]Cowabungaa said:
Best case scenario it's a Prothean beacon which vastly pushes forward human technology to reaching interstellar travel within our lifetimes. Worst scenario we find a portal to hell which may make for a cool teleportation device at first but will eventually result in Hell destroying and taking over Earth.
PLACE YOUR BETS!
PLACE YOUR BETS!
jthm said:
If they wait that long. Never underestimate our American ability to cross the vast expanses of space in the noble quest to find oil. We're kinda of obsessed with it.
