On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 10:09:46PM +0900, Michael Turner wrote: > Belief that there's life on Mars is currently faith-based. Belief that > there isn't is equally faith-based. Hoffman appears to be a hopeful > agnostic on this point. And that stance wins a lot of points with me.
Faith = absence of data. While we don't have direct data, we have plenty of evidence for a plausible transfer mechanism (crosscontamination of impact ejecta). Life on Earth is old, and impacts were more frequent back than. Crosscontamination appears very probable (it doesn't matter where exactly the origin has been). Barring very rapid changes life would have persisted long enough to evolve to go underground (see lithobacteria). Hence, it is very possible that Mars is still bearing life, as are most other places in the solar system which have liquid water (or ammonia, for all what we know), and chemical gradients which can be used to drive life. None of above is faith based, though it's difficult to tell how probable the entire event chain is. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net
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