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« Vegan Mint Fudge Brownies | Main | He is just putting it out there. Waaaay out there. »

I found some space in my wallet. Therefore i must have been a millionaire.

From the Jan/Feb issue of Discover, under a headline of "New Signs of Long-Gone Life on Mars":

In 2013, the rover Curiosity found the most convincing evidence yet that [Mars] was once habitable... The findings: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorous - key ingredients for life - plus chemicals such as sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide that could provide energy for microorganisms. All were found in a locale that was once wet, and neither too salty nor acidic.

The article is part of a review of the top significant events of last year, and my first thought on seeing the headline was that i missed the fact that we found evidence of life on Mars, which seemed like a pretty important and exciting thing that i missed! But on closer inspection that wasn't the case at all.

I am as lay a lay person as you can get, but i have at least two problems with this. The first is that just because you find the building blocks for life doesn't mean that life used to exist there. I think this is largely a problem set by the expectation in the headline. The article itself says "habitable", but the headline's "signs of long gone life" seems incredibly misleading. The article also speculates about "why life there might have died out" which further increases the impression that we actually found evidence of life as opposed to an environment that we think used to be habitable.

The second problem is my standard bugaboo that we seem to define "habitable" very narrowly based just on what we have on Earth. Now i grant that this is at least partially due to my having read too many science-lite science fiction and fantasy stories. I mean, i have no problem believing that we could find fire-based life forms in the sun! But even more realistically, the idea that the environment couldn't be a little more salty or acidic in order to support life seems too restrictive. It seems like we're only looking for conditions exactly like how life might have started on Earth.

Again, this is all coming from a lay person (reading a magazine designed for lay people, though!). And i'm sure the fact that we found carbon, hydrogen, etc.. on Mars is indeed one of the significant findings of 2013. It's just, there's no need to hype it up further than that and get me all excited about Martians! (Or even Martian bacteria...)

By fnord12 | March 17, 2014, 10:54 AM | Science