Mars methane discovery hints at presence of life

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/4243321/Mars-methane-discovery-hints-at-presence-of-life.html

by gibsonf1 • 18 years ago

24 14 18 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

rms• 18 years ago

This source is a little less sensational: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/scie...

pg• 18 years ago

Thanks. I swapped it in. That Sun story was ridiculous.

tower10• 18 years ago

No offence but I'm not even going to read a scientific news story on The Sun :)

froo2• 18 years ago

So NASA is hinting at life on Mars because they may have discovered the presence of alien farts?

A big win for science.

henning• 18 years ago

I fully expect us to find organic life on another planets sooner or later. However, I have my doubts about intelligent life. They could very well be less technologically sophisticated, in which case it might do more harm than good to interact with them (cf. Prime Directive).

utnick• 18 years ago

the odds are in your favor

out of the millions of species on earth, only one is technologically sophisticated. And the others aren't even close to being there.

A crazy long series of luck or intelligent design got us to where we are.

stcredzero• 18 years ago

Intelligent species tend to kill each other off. Note that we aren't the only hominids. Note what we are doing to the most intelligent of our cousins. Note what we did to the Neanderthals.

thamer2• 18 years ago

From the article: “Methane is a product of biology. For methane to be in Mars' atmosphere, there has to be a replenishable source”.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_of_Titan : The lakes of Titan, a moon of Saturn, are bodies of liquid methane that have been detected by the Cassini space probe, and had been suspected long before.

Why would methane be a product of life on one body and not on another? What is special about Titan?

froo2• 18 years ago

I thought scientists had already been arguing about the existance of life on Titan?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)

or more specifically

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7716

rbanffy2• 18 years ago

There is no amount of life that could generate those, forgive me, titanic amounts of methane ;-)

If there is some life there, it must be either very efficient in generating methane or very good at hiding itself ;-)

Allocator2008• 18 years ago

Seems this comes from either:

1) Volcanoes 2) Methanogen microbes

Since no active volcanoes are around, the article posits the more likely explanation is the microbe one. Not sure the half life on methane. Could this methane be lingering from whenever volcanoes were last active? If so, the more parsimonious explanation is the volcano one. If the half-life of methane is too fast for the methane detected to be left-over methane from ancient volcanoes, and if further we are quite certain there are no active volcanoes there now, then perhaps the most parsimonious explanation for the methane would be methanogens living beneath underground ice. If we can rule out the volcano theory, then the next step would be to send Bruce Willis over there to drill for methane and the methanogens that produced it.

ngvrnd• 18 years ago

Methane doesn't come from volcanoes, or from organic life; it comes from primordial deposits of hydrocarbons from the formation of the planet, released by heating of the deposits or sublimation, or whatnot. If there is life, and it is carbon based, then it subsists on these deposits and the evolved methane might be a waste product. I think the speculation is way off in the stratosphere here. I think further analysis is called for before drawing any conclusions.

Further, there is always this to consider: http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf

Mars methane discovery hints at presence of life

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