Remember that meteorite from a few years back, that produced an endless back and forth of arguments about whether or not some microscopic structures contain convincing evidence of biological origin? Well, NASA just tipped that scale back to ‘probably yes’ with a new analysis using new and improved methods, claiming to rule out a non-biological explanation, and adding two new meteorites that supposedly also contain fossilized microbes.
I know that this is probably just the serve for another set of tennis of pro and contra, but still, for the moment, I’ll allow myself a little excitement.
Probably the aliens are the same. All that anal probing is sexual experimentation. They’re probably not all that concerned about actual gender – a hole is a hole,
My pessimistic/skeptical nature keeps bringing up the fact that although they ruled out one non-biological explanation, there could be many more possible non-biological explanations.
Scepticism is warranted, of course, but you could say the same about houses, cars, and computers – it’s just that at some point, the biological explanation becomes the more likely one (and besides, biology is just a complicated, self-organizing sort of chemistry, anyway, so things kind of depend on where you want to draw the line there). If we’re at that point, of course, I can’t say.
However, I think that with this, the discovery of methane/formaldehyde, the ‘dark dune spots’, some Viking data (which may have been debunked in the meantime, though), and some other, (even) more circumstantial bits of evidence (summarised on wiki), you can at least begin to build a case for either the past or present existence of life on Mars and move well within the limits of the possible, and perhaps even the probable or likely (besides, I think that if life once existed there, it probably still does – it exists on Earth even in the harshest niches, some of them quite comparable to Martian climes).
Oh sure, I’m not so skeptical that it’s not in the realm of possibility for me. My gut feel is telling me up to 50 fifty percent probability that it’s evidence of life.
I think that life exists not as a bizarre mathematical anomaly but because it is likely or perhaps even inevitable. In terms of whether there is any element of intention in or behind nature, I find it interesting that if earth was considered to be the only planet with life on it, for many that constitutes the great likelihood that there is no intention behind life’s existence, yet if life was found to come about easily and is abundant in the universe, that too would be proof that it’s no big deal because that’s just what chemicals do. In a way I think that if there really was no other life in the entire universe that could be seen as a case, among any so inclined, for earth as a miracle, and if there was life everywhere one could argue that well then perhaps that is an intent and purpose of nature.
