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Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mars is big, fossils are small.
There are areas on earth where fossils are abundantly available at the surface. If there was macroscopic life on Mars at some point, there's likely to be some rocky outcrops with them. Layered sedimentary rocks like the ones pictured in https://www.kqed.org/science/24828/nasas-curiosity-rover-fin... are probably good candiates.
We just don't enough machines exploring Mars to do it right now.
Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points
I'm not opposed to the idea that life began on Mars, and, I don't know, through some mass ejection a chunk of lifelike stuff landed on earth and seeded it. But it seems like a much harder path to take than to just form life on Earth from the start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are areas on earth where fossils are abundantly available at the surface. If there was macroscopic life on Mars at some point, there's likely to be some rocky outcrops with them. Layered sedimentary rocks like the ones pictured in https://www.kqed.org/science/24828/nasas-curiosity-rover-fin... are probably good candiates.
The trouble is that while common, we still had to explore our whole planet pretty thoroughly to find them. We just don't enough machines exploring Mars to do it right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are areas on earth where fossils are abundantly available at the surface. If there was macroscopic life on Mars at some point, there's likely to be some rocky outcrops with them. Layered sedimentary rocks like the ones pictured in https://www.kqed.org/science/24828/nasas-curiosity-rover-fin... are probably good candiates.
The trouble is that while common, we still had to explore our whole planet pretty thoroughly to find them. We just don't enough machines exploring Mars to do it right now.
Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001#:~:text=In%2....
Now is this a positive detection of life? No because other possible factors can not be ruled out. But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life? After the Viking missions we never conducted any further experiments that could rule out any other possible chemical reactions to get closer to confirming the presence of microbial life.
So I would say with the Labeled Release experiments coupled with the seasonal Methane detections strongly imply that there is still microbial extremophiles on Mars.
yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points
I bet there's some non-life explanation, probably having to do with weird chemistry that happens on Mars over long periods, but is not so significant on Earth.
The article says the Earth-chemistry that creates these minerals involves the oxygen in the atmosphere, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that Mars's atmosphere was ever oxygenated. It took billions of years for the Earth's atmosphere to become oxygenated, and it sounds like Mars lost most of its atmosphere fairly quickly.
Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
For half the history of life on Earth there were no multicellular animals at all[1]. Given how quickly life on Earth arrived I wouldn't be surprised if there were bacteria on Mars. But given how long it took Earth life to develop Eukaryotic cells I'd be surprised if Mars ever developed something as sophisticated as an amoeba. Still, Bacteria do leave fossils like stromatolites and some scientists even think some Mars…