More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/more-evidence-of-life-on-mars-but-still-no-life-1.7649645

by pseudolus • 25 days ago

112 134 25 days ago

raychis3• 24 days ago

The 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• 24 days ago

Let's use your sentence in place of the title above. Thanks!

fragmede• 24 days ago

Classic dang.

blamestross• 23 days ago

We 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.

raychis3• 23 days ago

The 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.

dvh• 24 days ago

Mineral 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• 24 days ago

Sending 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.

voakbasda2• 24 days ago

What reasons do you think exist that lead you to believe Earth is special for having evolved complex intelligent life?

nephihaha9• 24 days ago

There is a lot of abrasive dust on Mars as well, which poses a problem to any microscope.

el_io• 24 days ago

What mineral can only be formed by life?

neuroticnews25• 24 days ago

You know what they say, sufficiently advanced geological process is indistinguishable from life.

ceejayoz3• 24 days ago

Plutonium?

skirmish• 24 days ago

Coprolites.

hughw• 24 days ago

If they found actual life on Mars the NASA budget would multiply many times, so I don't understand your thinking.

sgt1014• 24 days ago

I think the opposite - unless the discovery of life was preceeded or coincidental with the discovery of some other hyper interesting thing (for example, if Martian life has some sort of utility for medicine, maybe) then I think that would be that for Mars exploration missions. Of course there would be many announcements and excited political agreements around "continuing to explore the new frontier" but I think that no more money would appear.

I suspect that NASA knows this full well, as do Mars scientists, and I suspect that they are being very careful to make sure that definitive proof does not appear until they understand all sorts of other stuff about the planet.

raychis3• 24 days ago

This is an odd comment. Any scientist or scientific organisation would love to be the first to discover life on another planet. It would catapult that organisation and individuals involved to legendary status with their discoveries being counted amongst the greatest of humankind. It would be an epoch defining moment. Funding for their work and personal riches would pour in. There would be movies made about it. Their names would be remembered thousands of years into the future.

To imply there would be a conspiracy to cover up such discoveries because you think the opposite would happen is such an odd way to think about things.

jorisw• 24 days ago

NASA doesn’t want

Citation needed

NASA will never

Citation needed

nkrisc5• 24 days ago

I’m curious why you seem to believe that all exploration of Mars would cease as soon as life is discovered there? It would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time and would open up a huge number of possible future missions, for the next few centuries at least. It would also make for good justification for missions to other worlds that could harbor life.

nephihaha9• 24 days ago

Scientists can string out things. It is a means of securing funding for long periods.

I think there has been evidence of life in the Venusian atmosphere since the 80s and on/in Mars since the 70s.

altern8• 24 days ago

A little far-fetched..?

Larrikin• 24 days ago

Do you really think that all the scientists view NASA as a make work program? That so many people spent years in schools getting advanced degrees and there is no one there who wants to make the most significant discovery in the history of humanity? That nobody wants the instant Nobel prize?

It also doesn't make sense from any kind of financial perspective. The budget for NASA would explode for all kinds of missions. They would have free reign to go wherever and do anything.

The discovery team would instantly create brand new fields of study and career paths, and anyone on the team that discovered life would become experts in the field with unlimited investment opportunities to continue their research.

dizhn• 24 days ago

At least one scientist close to retirement right? That would surely earn them more money: )

isomorphic_duck2• 24 days ago

Tangential, 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/

root-parent• 24 days ago

Too 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.

ceejayoz3• 24 days ago

Too much radiation for anything close to Jupiter.

Europa's water is an excellent radiation shield.

isomorphic_duck2• 24 days ago

I 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.

timmg2• 24 days ago

Tangential 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!

mbil2• 24 days ago

You might like Blindsight by Peter Watts

lelanthran2• 24 days ago

Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing.

Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.

rolph• 24 days ago

we may have found that AI a while back in roswell, along with some Nitanol foil and berylium "I" beams

kjkjadksj• 24 days ago

Some of the more out there UFO theories postulate on these lines. An idea that rather than say send an explorer of your own species to some planet with all the needed life support, you use genetic engineering to create a worker bee essentially, already tailored to perform whatever function under whatever environmental conditions are present at the target planet. You may even be able to build this species using genes already present at the host system in some reduced to essential components fashion like an engineered plasmid in the molecular biology lab. This would also double as camouflage keeping the worker bee genetics separate from genetics found in your own planet or star system, making them appear endogenous to the target planet instead.

protocolture3• 24 days ago

Charles Stross, Singularity Sky, sort of covers this.

nephihaha9• 24 days ago

Viking 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• 24 days 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

[2] https://badspacecomics.com/apostles-of-mercy

nephihaha9• 24 days ago

Yes, 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.

londons_explore• 24 days ago

It 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.

skulk• 24 days ago

there probably never was any there for a meaningful amount of time, but it's incredibly hard to prove a negative.

thegrim33• 24 days ago

NASA 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.

throwaway6767123• 24 days ago

It'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

bregma• 24 days ago

It's because the more important question of "how can I personally profit from this?" usually takes precedence.

remopulcini• 24 days ago

Io credo che possa essere come dici tu ma prima servono le prove

medvidek• 24 days ago

Wrong language?

x______________• 24 days ago

Italian. 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)?

gojomo4• 24 days ago

I 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'.

mapontosevenths4• 24 days ago

It 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• 24 days ago

Because honorary degrees are not credentials.

gojomo4• 23 days ago

Because I think readers should take this as an illustrative example of how often people/institutions draped in such quasi-credentials are carelessly wrong on basic things.

Even if some typo of 'malevolent' becoming 'benevolent' was how this error initially created – & I have my doubts! – how many people had to be asleep at the wheel for the truth-reversing error to get published, & persist for months? Does no one at the CBC – with pride in its work & any familiarity with these topics – read CBC's slop?

weemonger• 24 days ago

Maybe the author mixed it up, with another Martin invasion story called "Two Planets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets), which was released a bit earlier than War of the Worlds and according to Wikipedia, it "is the earliest known example of the theme of a Beneficial alien invasion".

If someone is interested in "historical" science fiction, I can recommend it.

But nonetheless, if the author is interested in Mars and science fiction, he should be able to keep them apart from another. Maybe an editor wasn't?

messe• 24 days ago

I can confidently say that nobody has ever confused The War of the Worlds with The Two Planets.

burnte• 24 days ago

I got so caught up in that phrase I went rereading the plot summary of WOTW to check my memory. After than I had no interest in the article, assuming it had been written by AI.

gojomo4• 23 days ago

War of the Worlds is culturally-prominent enough I doubt any commercial AI would make this same mistake (or let the error slip through, if they'd asked the AI to fact-check the article).

jpease• 24 days ago

Someone should look into the author and/or editor.

Probability seems high they are martians trying to whitewash fictional history.

jibal4• 24 days ago

It's hard to take seriously someone who dismisses the (factually correct) content of a popular science article just because of a typo that has no bearing on that content.

gojomo4• 23 days ago

Have you independently checked all the other allegedly "factually correct" info in this article, with other sources that are actually diligent in getting the details right? What's the incremental value of a news source where every detail that you don't already know might be very wrong?

didgetmaster• 24 days 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.

pigpop7• 24 days ago

Hopefully, that was a dictation error and Bob McDonald actually said "malevolent". Either that or the CBC editors got a hold of it.

grey-area• 24 days ago

They came to serve man.

protocolture3• 24 days ago

Brilliant.

IAmBroom• 22 days ago

Well done.

Ccecil• 24 days ago

Did AI write it? If so that is concerning...

sph• 24 days ago

No, Martians wrote it as counter propaganda

eleveriven3• 24 days ago

Maybe benevolent in the same way a heat-ray is a form of urban renewal

pfdietz8• 24 days ago

It 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.

stackghost2• 24 days 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?

alex_duf• 24 days ago

It's surprising but it's a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite

metalman• 24 days ago

chunks 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.

pfdietz8• 24 days ago

By what mechanism.

Impact spallation.

When the strong shock wave generated in rock by an impact hits a rock/atmosphere (or rock/vacuum) surface, it is reflected, producing strong tensile stress. This causes very large acceleration while not subjecting the spalled layer to extreme temperature or pressure.

This is the same process that HESH (High Explosive Squash Head) antitank rounds use to defeat tank armor without penetration. The explosive squashes against the armor before detonating, launching a shock through it causing material to spall off the inner surface at high speed. The shock here is weaker than in the impact case, however.

eleveriven3• 24 days ago

In some ways the more interesting question might become whether Martian life, if found, shares the same basic biochemistry as Earth life

pfdietz8• 24 days ago

That is the question, yes. But if lithopanspermia is a thing, we don't need to go to Mars to investigate that question: we can look for this variant biochemistry life right here on Earth. This sounds to me like a valuable and economical research effort.

pbgcp2026• 24 days ago

We 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

eleveriven3• 24 days ago

What 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• 24 days ago

lolz

More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

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