--- Edmund Cramp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It doesn't imply that life *does* exist but it > makes it *a lot* more > likely that life could exist, or could have once > existed. I don't think > that Mars has much of a magnetic field so it's > unlikely that there's any > huge sub-surface community of organisms now - but > there may well have > been in the past before the core cooled down. > Where this is going is that if life did once exist > on Mars then we > would have to consider the strong probability that > some forms of life on > Earth are probably related to Mars life-forms ...
Interesting, but how would non-sentient life forms travel from Mars to Earth (or vice versa)? I guess debris could be ejected from one planet to another via impact of a large extraplanetary object, but would hitch hiking organism survive the ride? I find an exciting prospect to be that we _might_ discover organisms or even fossils of Martian organisms that developed under very different conditions than Earth. Even if we don't, we will still learn much about the prospects for life developing on other planets by closer analysis. But the most exciting prospect is that this discovery makes a trip to Mars, or even colonization of Mars a much stronger possibility. John Hebert __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
