Life on Mars?

Debunked is not the proper term, more like put into perspective. They were not actually supposed to be fossilized bacteria, but fossils of things that bacteria leave behind... fossil traces.But even that is put into perspective that those kinds of traces can have other causes.So at this point it is inconclusive, though suggestive. More testing has to be done.And I guess this leads back to the question of the thread, which is what will we find on Mars itself. The fact that it may have had lots of water (at least in the area of that lander), means only that ONE material factor in life existing there has been found to have existed there.I don't think this shows for how long and what other conditions existed at the time.Given our abundant lack of knowledge regarding mechanisms of abiogenesis, the evidence of lots of water at some distant time in the past, does not really give me intellectual confidence in predicting if more evidence of life will be found.There were some fibrous objects seen in some photographs, that have not been ruled one way or the other as debris from the lander's balloons. If they turn out not to be debris, then maybe we already have found evidence of life.I'm going to have to wait for that kind of evidence/confirmation, before I let my emotional side regarding the possibility of life on Mars overcome my sceptical intellectual side.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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I think the idea is that at some point Mars had a much richer atmosphere not to unlike earth. I remember watching a documentary were they sugested that at some point in mars's history, it lost it's atmospheric pressure.

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To be honest this does not change anything. When you say atmosphere not "unlike earth", what does that mean? Like it is now, or like it was in earth's past when it is believed life arose?As it is atmosphere, including atmospheric pressure, may be meaningless to life, as long as water can exist in liquid form. In addition to recent ideas that anoxic environments were necessary for abiogenesis, other recent concepts have life originating at deep sea vents. That means if the martian atmosphere contained oxygen, or if the seas were shallow (even if numerous), or if there was little tectonic activity, there may never have been life of any kind.This is why I think knowing there is water doesn't do much for me. Yeah, it makes it more possible, but only by a teeny bit. We just don't know enough of what ELSE we need to be looking for, and if THOSE OTHER factors existed.That said, I would be excited if solid evidence of life was found... even microbial. That would be cool.Personally, I feel the most likely location for finding any life is on Europa, or perhaps moons of Jupiter or Saturn we haven't discovered yet, but have deep liquid oceans and tectonic activity.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Nosyned has already made the (correct) point that evolutionary theory does not cover abiogenesis, but let me address the concept of whether abiogenesis can be considered a theory without complete knowledge of mechanisms...As a scientist I would freely admit that those who say chemistry based abiogenesis DEFINITELY occured on this planet to form the life that exists here, would be making very UNscientific statements.However it is clear that at one time life did NOT exist on the planet, and then it did. That leaves us with two choices. Either life began/formed somewhere else and then came here, or it began/formed here. In either case abiogenesis occured, though the range of possible environments would be greater in the first one.It is also true that either case of abiogenesis could be chemistry based, or "other force" based. Given that we have absolutely NO evidence for any forces besides those described in chemistry, that pretty well leaves us with chemistry based abiogenesis, either on this planet or off this planet until more evidence comes in which might be a realistic competing theory.We currently cannot say what are the exact chemical environmental REQUIREMENTS for life, because we have not examined every single possible chemical environment. Nor have we then narrowed down geological theories regarding early possible earth environments.Does this act as some hindrance from accepting abiogenesis? Not really. As we see above some form of abiogenesis must have occured, whether chemistry was the mechanism cannot be ruled out because we don't know WHICH chemical mechanism was responsible.A good analogy is this... After visiting a friend in the US, you returned to NZ. A few weeks later that friend knocks on your door. How did he get there? You can't possibly know which mechanism your friend used to get to you, but that does not suddenly make a fiery chariot of god as or more likely than the normal physical mechanisms (plane or ship) we understand are available.It could be added that somehow you rule out plane or ship as the mechanism your friend used. Before jumping to fiery chariot of god, your more likely (credible) choice of mechanisms would involve normal physical laws... a super helicopter, or a submarine, or a large pontoon vessel. Even riding a dolphin would hold more credibility than the fiery chariot of god, which has absolutely no precedent for its existence and knowledge of how it would work.Thus, while it is true scientists cannot currently say where and how life originated, it is equally true that chemistry based abiogenesis remains the more likely theory.I might add that science is making some headway in narrowing down environments for greater possibility of chemical abiogenesis on earth.Hope this helps.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

The clarity of your post compels me to answer!

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your logic is a little off. Let me assume NOT GOD! You set it up correctly but once I try to think if this is an either or it MIGHT not be!!

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If I read you correctly, you are suggesting that I am making an assumption that there is no God. This is not true at all. But let me be more clear...I am saying that we know of chemical processes, and we know that our bodies (and all life right down to bacteria) are composed of specific chemical processes.It is not such a leap to imagine that these specific chemical processes were formed by other chemical processes, rather than by some unknown organizing force for which we have no direct evidence nor concept of how such a thing (if it existed) interacts with matter.I thought my analogy of the friend that came to visit was clear on this. I hope it did not come off as meaning that the friend could not possibly have used a chariot of the Gods, or been blinked there by a genie... certainly the friend may have used these alternative mechanisms... it is just that in a absence of evidence for any such FORCES (much less how they work as mechanisms), the mechanisms based on known physical forces (even if outlandish like riding a dolphin) will take precedence in science, until evidence arises for the alternative forces.This is not a cheat, but a valuable way of whittling down all POSSIBLE explanations, to those that are most PROBABLE for further inquiry.

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Namely a very very very smart civilization seeded life here and once we KNOW this it would be LIKE WHAT YOU MAY HEAR RELIGIONISTS SAY O F god but only THEN we would have knowledge that we did not think correctly but we can not know this LOGICALLY before this very fact"".

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I alluded to the "seeding of life" by mentioning the possibility of abiogenesis occuring outside of the earth. Whether sentient life sent seeds down, or unguided natural processes (microbes forming in asteroids) did the seeding is irrelevent. Both the sentient life and the microbes require abiogenesis of some kind.You are right that from the vantage point of earthlings today, sentient alien "life farming" in the past could look identical to the activities of Gods. Depending on the nature of alien abiogenesis such a differentiation might never be possible, leaving us with the only question of did earth life come from aliens or Gods?But that is taking several strides farther than we logically can or should right now. There is no necessary move off of earth, because there are still great potentials of organizing chemical environments that may have generated biological life.

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There may be NO other environement than this and yet whatever created the godLIKE intelligent thing created it provided these "gods" are able to communicate THAT to you or me!

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Unfortunately I did not quite understand this sentence, could you please rephrase it?

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)