As many of you probably saw in the news NASA announced significant new evidence that microbial life exists on Mars. The evidence is methane plumes. There are some rare abiotic mechanisms which can produce methane but the probability that those account for it are slim. For those who follow such things you might also recall that a meteor from Mars found in Antarctica bore what looked like fossilized bacteria. Along with the recent discovery by Mars surface explorers of water and minerals which only form in the presence of water it’s looking like a pretty strong case when all this is taken together.
So what does this mean for ID? Well, it means that those ID supporters who put stock in the notion of panspermia and directed panspermia are looking good. ID supporters like myself, UD author Doctor (MD) David Cook, and NASA physicist Rob Sheldon (see papers 45 and 46), are some of those. And of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the discoverers of the DNA double helix Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel who authored articles and a book about directed panspermia.
I will now make a prediction from an ID perspective. Any living organisms found on Mars will be based on DNA and ribosomes essentially identical to what all life on earth utilizes. This is because life, even the simplest forms, is too complex to have originated in our solar system very early in its history. Wherever it came from, and however it got here, it was the same basic structural form that landed in all places – Earth, Mars, and wherever else in our solar system it may have found suitable conditions.