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More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
- raychis 4mo agoThe article is good but the title is a bit too slippery a statement in my opinion. The article is saying more evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars. In astrobiology the massive problem is that geology can imitate biology. The presences of minerals formed by microbes on Earth does not prove microbes are involved in their production on Mars, it is a big jump to make.
- dang 4mo agoLet's use your sentence in place of the title above. Thanks!
- fragmede 4mo agoClassic dang.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- blamestross 4mo agoWe have long passed at least my owner personal "threshold of evidence" to assume that Mars had life. That bar is pretty low. I am not hard to convince. We don't have a baseline by which to contextualize the situation statistically. There is no p-value we can meaningfully satisfy. Worse than that, evidence required for a belief derives from the risk of being wrong. Is there a discussion of what evidence WOULD be enough for the scientific community to say loudly "There was life on mars". Because right now it seems all risk and no utility, so the evidence bar would be really high.
- raychis 4mo agoThe bar for scientific discoveries is generally incredibly high and rightly so. In particle physics for example for a discovery to be confirmed it must be independently verified by a second experiment and both the discovering experiment and confirming experiment must be within five standard deviations (or a roughly 1 in 3.5 million) chance of not being a discovery. Its not a perfect comparison because astrobiology is messier but it is useful to see how high the bar is. For a discovery of the magnitude of life outside our planet the scientific community would probably need something like: a real and well-characterised signal, multiple independent lines of evidence, strong geological context, replication by independent teams, and a serious failure of plausible alternate explanations. Until then, “potential biosignature” is probably the right phrase. To be clear, I think like you that there probably was life at some point on Mars. I am pretty convinced. But, you and I being pretty convinced does not come close to the threshold of a scientific discovery.
- microgpt 4mo agoWe can say we discovered signs there might've once been life on Mars
- dvh 4mo agoMineral that can be only formed by life, or under special conditions when water flows over rock, has been found on Mars, where water had been known to flow over rock. NASA doesn't want to find life on Mars. They want to find evidence, so that the next probe can be more complex and more expensive than the previous one. NASA will never send wet microscope to Mars, you know, the kind you used in school to show bacteria in dirty water. As that would instantly prove life on Mars and make ever more expensive probes hard to justify.
- api 4mo agoSending a microscope is easier said than done. Many natural structures can look like bacteria, and vice versa. If there's more complex single celled life then we might see stuff swimming around but that's considered unlikely close to the surface where there's a decent amount of solar and cosmic radiation. If complex life does exist it's probably deep underground or in caves and lava tubes where we can't reach it yet. The other reason is planetary protection. The best places to send a microscope are low lying areas where there may be brines near the surface. Those specific areas have been designated high on the list of protection sites. Earth microbes are really resilient, so even with intense sterilization procedures we can't be 100% sure. We don't want to contaminate the most valuable scientific find ever, and so we're approaching it carefully. But I think the first reason I gave is the most significant one. It's technically pretty hard and not definitive. The surface of Mars is probably mostly sterile even if there is life. If it survives, it's probably underground. I also disagree that NASA would not want to find life. If anything, finding life would make their budget explode. They could suddenly make a strong case for a Europa submersible, a submarine to visit Titan's methane lakes, huge space-based SETI radio telescope arrays, huge space telescopes to try to find more exoplanets and characterize their atmospheres, all kinds of things, since we'd know for a fact there's life out there. If life emerged in two places in one solar system, we'd know that the universe is teeming with it. Maybe not complex intelligent life -- there's still reasons to think Earth may be kind of special for that. But life, certainly.
- voakbasda 4mo agoWhat reasons do you think exist that lead you to believe Earth is special for having evolved complex intelligent life?
- isomorphic_duck 4mo agoTangential, but really looking forward to what Europa Clipper[0] finds in its flybys. The delay in communication makes ambitious manoeuvres challenging - perhaps advances in AI (and by extension robotics) helps build much more autonomous space rovers. This could enable us, for example, to evaluate the samples by sending wet microscopes with the rover itself. [0]: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/
- root-parent 4mo agoToo much radiation for anything close to Jupiter. You will find life on Venus clouds and in Titan.... Everybody looking at the wrong targets. Mars is a dead, radiation cooked, burned, poisonous place. Forget about it, leave it to the trillionaires.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> Too much radiation for anything close to Jupiter. Europa's water is an excellent radiation shield.
- isomorphic_duck 4mo agoI am not an astrophysicist, but I have read that the thick layer of ice is supposed to protect the miles-deep ocean against radiation, which might harbour life.
- timmg 4mo agoTangential to your tangential: The era of AI makes me realize that if we ever get visited by aliens: it will probably not be actual aliens -- just an AI probe. And the idea of it really intrigues me. Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. And it would likely be better at figuring out how to communicate with us (than the human-equivalent might). We need some new sci fi movies like that!
- mbil 4mo ago
- nephihaha 4mo agoViking 1 & 2 returned positive results in the seventies but these have been played down or hand waved. I think there is good evidence of microbial life in the soil or underground. We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species.
- Qem 4mo ago> We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species. They could even already have invaded in the past, and we descended of them[1]. Earth as Mars ancient lifeboat[2]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23872765 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23872765 [2] https://badspacecomics.com/apostles-of-mercy https://badspacecomics.com/apostles-of-mercy
- nephihaha 4mo agoYes, that is perfectly possible. There could be some transfer, but there is a scenario where Martian microbes breed on Earth and have no natural controls. An Australia type scenario on a planetary scale.
- hmokiguess 4mo ago[dead]
- londons_explore 4mo agoIt is quite remarkable that the question of life on mars (or not) hasn't been answered conclusively despite a lot of human effort to get an answer.
- bregma 4mo agoIt's because the more important question of "how can I personally profit from this?" usually takes precedence.
- skulk 4mo agothere probably never was any there for a meaningful amount of time, but it's incredibly hard to prove a negative.
- thegrim33 4mo agoNASA intentionally completely gave up on trying to answer the Mars life question for multiple decades and only very recently has come back around to the idea of doing life finding missions.
- throwaway676712 4mo agoIt's a touchy subject because scientists are afraid of looking like cranks. Just like cognition in other nonhuman species was historically dismissed because no one wants to be seen as someone who think plants talk to each other
- remopulcini 4mo agoIo credo che possa essere come dici tu ma prima servono le prove
- medvidek 4mo agoWrong language?
- x______________ 4mo agoItalian. Maybe their browser auto translates English to Italian and expects everyone else to have a browser functioning that way (translating any to their native language)?
- gojomo 4mo agoI see this author has "12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada". And CBC is Canada's government-funded national public broadcaster. But it's hard to take them seriously on any particular details given that their article, up for 8+ months (!), mis-describes H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds as a story of the Earth "invaded by benevolent Martians". [emphasis mine] It's a seminal work of scifi, which popularized the "alien invasion" genre and term "Martians' (both for literal creatures from Mars and also a metonym for any alien visitors/invaders). It's been adapted to film many times. And the Martians in it - with their disintegrating heat-rays & death-clouds, consuming human blood – are far from 'benevolent'.
- jpease 4mo agoSomeone should look into the author and/or editor. Probability seems high they are martians trying to whitewash fictional history.
- mapontosevenths 4mo agoIt was obviously meant to read 'malevolent' and got spell checked to death. That sort of thing happens to everyone, and I'm not sure why you mention the authors credentials like they're a bad thing?
- gilrain 4mo agoBecause honorary degrees are not credentials.
- jibal 4mo agoBut that's obviously not a reason to treat them as a bad thing. It's also not entirely true ... he was awarded those honors because of the quality of his science journalism. FWIW, I think @mapontosevenths is wrong to say that @gojomo's mention of the honorary degrees and being an OOC was "like they're a bad thing" ... their "But it's hard ..." indicates a conflict between those "credentials" and the typo that gojomo makes way too much a deal of.
- didgetmaster 4mo ago>..War of the Worlds, where Earth is invaded by benevolent Martians. I don't think I have heard the word benevolent used in that context before.
- pigpop 4mo agoHopefully, that was a dictation error and Bob McDonald actually said "malevolent". Either that or the CBC editors got a hold of it.
- grey-area 4mo agoThey came to serve man.
- protocolture 4mo agoBrilliant.
- IAmBroom 4mo agoWell done.
- Ccecil 4mo agoDid AI write it? If so that is concerning...
- sph 4mo agoNo, Martians wrote it as counter propaganda
- eleveriven 4mo agoMaybe benevolent in the same way a heat-ray is a form of urban renewal
- pfdietz 4mo agoIt would not be surprising if ancient life did exist on Mars, since impacts would likely have sent life back and forth between Earth and Mars (and possibly Venus). For the same reason, the existence of ancient life on Mars would not show that life is likely to arise on Earth-like worlds, since one could not conclude it was an independent event.
- stackghost 4mo ago>impacts would likely have sent life back and forth between Earth and Mars By what mechanism is an impact giving some debris on Mars enough delta-V to reach Earth, without obliterating Mars and also sterilizing the debris due to heat and plasma?
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- alex_duf 4mo agoIt's surprising but it's a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite
- metalman 4mo agochunks get blasted off essentialy whole and unmodified, as they are contained in bigger chunks that act asl launch shields, though will exerience truely massive acceleration and then renentry on earth and other bodies. The evidence for life on mars is based on carbon nodules in rock, and things like CO² and methane gas,and some other chemistry and mineralology. The main one are the carbon nodules, which are ubiquitous in many sedimentary rocks on earth, though in the samples that I have of earth rocks, there are very often macro fossils that are naked eye identifiable There are countless miles of cliff here where everything has a fossil, but complete specimins, and soft tissue fossils remain rare, here, so the chances of such a thing making it to earth from mars, schould it exist in the first place are almost zero, though the martian ice caps could concievably hold meteors with earth life fossils that are naked eye visible and identifiable.
- pbgcp2026 4mo agoWe all came from Mars, don't you know it? There was a series of "extreme weather events" and we had to escape. Now there is some guy dreaming to get back home. /s
- eleveriven 4mo agoWhat I like about Mars stories like this is that they are a good antidote to both extremes: "we found life!" and "there is nothing interesting here"
- rimworld 4mo agololz