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Mars: Well, we’ve heard the case for life around volcanic glass, now let’s hear it for craters …

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Chesapeake Bay crater buried in hundreds of feet of sediment/ Nicolle Rager-Fuller, NSF

From “Asteroid Craters On Earth Give Clues in Search for Life On Mars” (ScienceDaily, Apr. 17, 2012), we learn,

Craters made by asteroid impacts may be the best place to look for signs of life on other planets, a study suggests. Tiny organisms have been discovered thriving deep underneath a site in the US where an asteroid crashed some 35 million years ago.

Have we some reason for believing they weren’t here already, and managed to adjust to the impact?

Scientists believe that the organisms are evidence that such craters provide refuge for microbes, sheltering them from the effects of the changing seasons and events such as global warming or ice ages.

Life forms

The study suggests that crater sites on Mars may also be hiding life, and that drilling beneath them could lead to evidence of similar life forms.

If we don’t know how life got started in the first place, we have no obvious reason to believe that Mars’ craters are hiding life.

That said, space agencies’ PR departments deserve full marks for not giving up in the face of massive budget cutbacks. If they ever do find life on Mars, it will be in spite of the level of support they are getting from government.

Volcanic glass theory here.

Comments
(The captcha asked me MULTIPLICATION! What are they going to do next, test my trigonometry skills? sin [ ] = 1/2. Don't laugh, soon no one will be able to comment on these sites except for educated trolls.) Did you notice that the NASA blurb about life in craters used a digital artist conception? Why not show the real data? And did you notice that they keep wanting money to look for life, but never announce what they found? Like its been 35 years since Viking landers found life, according to PI Gil Levin last week. What is this, a gravy train? And what was NASA Watch criticism of Levin? (a) he published in a journal that had a Korean editor. (b) he's been talking about this for 35 years. Hey, I have a Korean wife and a Korean brother-in-law that invented a way to make flat panel displays cheaply. I'm typing this on a laptop I bought for $500 because of his invention. If NASA hired more Koreans, we'd have a colony on Mars now. So not only is NASA unwilling to actually finish something they began 35 years ago, but they have racist reasons for excusing themselves. Furthermore, NASA funded the $1B 1976 Viking mission by saying they were going to look for life. So they've been saying that for 10 years longer than Gil Levin, so pot meet kettle. Oh, and in dismissing both Gil Levin and Richard Hoover, two men I count myself fortunate to call a friend, NASA Watch Astrobiology editor said that they weren't "astrobiologists" because they didn't have the degree, they were merely "engineers". Snort. They don't have degrees in astrobiology because the field didn't exist when they were getting their PhD, but they sure as heck created the field. And just what exactly does a degree confer? The authority to pontificate about data taken while said editor was still in training pants? The blatant racism, the nauseating condescension, the astonishing ignorance, the petty turf battling, the tawdry empire building, the clear aversion to science, the love of miniscule fame, the sheer avarice of the whole field is the reason NASA will never report life on Mars, and attack anyone who does. And that is the real crying shame about this article.Robert Sheldon
April 19, 2012
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