Comments on: NASA announces that “organic” does not mean life

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 05:57:02 +0000

It’s always like that, PAO protectiveness plus the educational agenda, making each scientist give a mini-tutorial in her area of expertise. The journalists who cover this stuff know to filter out the fluff and report the grist.

I’m confident too that there’s life somewhere on Mars, and elsewhere in the universe. Mars is too big a petri dish to not have provided shelter to some ambitious organic molecules, somewhere, some time. And for the universe in general, from first principles it just seems inevitable that physics begets chemistry begets biology. Life happens. It doesn’t actually have a choice.

By: RL

RL — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 00:29:08 +0000

I am fairly confident that IF there was ever life on Mars, then it is still there- maybe living in rocks kilometers under the surface, but it is still there.

And right now I think it is quite possible that life did exist there… probably nothing more than single celled organisms, but that would be an amazing discovery with huge implications.

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 23:41:06 +0000

I just find the pattern amusing, teasing big announcements that are then presented like “move along, move along, nothing to see here, move along…”. Sure, and the cordons and SWAT vans mean nothing at all….

By: RL

RL — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 22:19:45 +0000

I guarantee you that even with their careful statement there will be headlines screaming “Life found on Mars!!”

By: ER

ER — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 21:48:31 +0000

But if the source of this chemistry on Mars is biological, this could be the biggest science news of the century. I don’t blame the PR people for being REAL cautious. Remember the infamous Martian Meteorite Microbes?