Another 'life on Mars' rock?

Here's a link to a story I spotted on the Beeb's website this morning: news.bbc.co.uk...
Apparently they've cut open a meteorite of Martian origin and discovered carbon inside. This looks interesting for all those theories that some form of life emerged on Mars.

Nice find

Wonder how long this one will be debated within the scientific community like ALH84001 was years ago...

I just saw that and thought it was good news


"London's Natural History Museum, which holds several intact chunks of the meteorite, agreed for Nasa researchers to break one open, providing fresh samples."

Hopfully this will at least give future Mars missions a target to aim for.

Good find. I wish well to their studies. Not many natural occurances produce carbon-14 like that (the whole ore-vein of carbon). As they said, the crux is to make sure it's not a contaminated sample. If it is contaminated, then this gets shuffled back under the rock so to say.

Of course, if it's not contaminated, as the current report seems to imply, then it's strong support for the possibility that life did exist on Mars - and of course the possibility that life actually started on Mars, and made its way to earth by means of a meteorite such as this.

Speaking of Mars rocks:

this one snapped by Spirit many Sols ago is of interest.

of course, it in no way resembles this earthly form:

Jaguar, you're finding images that aren't there again . It took a double check for me to see it. Just because something looks like it, when views a certain way, doesn't mean it is it. I mean, look at all those potatoes, tree-stumps, and moldy pieces of bread that people see the Virgin Mary in. We're automattically looking for these image similarities in our brains - but we gotta be careful not to confuse them.

It's easy to mistake pictures, because a picture is 2-d, and so we're missing a portion of "depth" to the picture, which creates many optical illusions. Also, the lighting in that picture ends up highlighting the rock that forms the eye of the cuddle-fish looking rock.

Finally, if it was a dead cuddle-fish, we wouldn't see it. Cuddle-fish have no bones in their bodies except their beaks - and so if something died, it would not leave a pile of bones, but would completely decompose. Only a flash-fossilization (can be caused by pyrocastic flows, for example) would preserve the shape of something like this. And then we would only discover the fossil after we dug it out.

It seems retarded to me to assume graphite would be organically deposited, next thing these idiots will say that Diamonds are compressed people.

The origins can be organic, but most likely are not; if they are off the Earth.

I was just having fun, yarium.

It is an interesting form, nonetheless, no?