Life on Mars!
This is VERY exciting! It seems so obvious that something like the panspermia or exogenesis theory must be true. With all the cosmic mayhem that has transpired just within our solar system, the various planetary bodies must have exchanged materials fromt their crusts more promiscuously than a 1970s era Baghdad-by-the-Bay fudge packer.
Surely we will find the same basic biological mechanisms and living organisms on many bodies within our solar system.
January 16th, 2009 at 2:45 am
If we do find life on Mars that’s not evidence for panspermia…it’s just as likely that life evolved there independently. Some heavy duty DNA sequencing will be needed to prove one theory or the other…assuming Martian microbes have DNA.
January 16th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Granted that just the presence of life is not conclusive. But are both explanations really equally likely? Interplanetary space is not as empty as popular imagination has it, and the timescales for infection to move planet to planet are very long, and make a small chance of infection very likely to turn up.