It amazes me that these Mars Rovers are still working. Damn fine bit of engineering wern't they?

This from the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7248062.stm

BBC NEWS
Early Mars 'too salty' for life
By Helen Briggs
BBC science reporter, Boston

The Red Planet was too salty to sustain life for much of its history, according to the latest evidence gathered by one of the US rovers on Mars' surface.

High concentration of minerals in water on early Mars would have made it inhospitable to even the toughest microbes, a leading Nasa expert says.

Clues preserved in rocks that were once awash with water suggest the environment was both acidic and briny.

The observations were made by the US space agency's Opportunity rover.

It has spent months examining rocks on an ancient Martian plain.

'Ghost of a chance'

Dr Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team, and a biologist at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, said the finding "tightens the noose on the possibility of life".

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, he said conditions on Mars in the past four billion years would have been very challenging for life.

"It was really salty - in fact, it was salty enough that only a handful of known terrestrial organisms would have a ghost of a chance of surviving there when conditions were at their best," he explained.

The US Mars rovers - Opportunity and its twin, Spirit - have now spent more than 1,400 days on the Martian surface.

As their work comes to an end, Nasa has its hopes set on the Phoenix lander, which is due to reach Mars on 25 May.

The Phoenix mission will land near the planet's north pole, and aim to dig under the frozen surface in search of signs of microbial life, past or present.

The next-generation rover, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), is set to leave Earth in 2009, and land in 2010.

Twice as long and three times as heavy as Spirit and Opportunity, it will collect Martian soil and rock samples, and analyse them for organic compounds.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/7248062.stm

Published: 2008/02/15 22:27:26 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

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So they are pretty much dismissing the possibility of life having been on Mars at one point??

Obviously they never paid any attention when being taught about evolution. Life adapts to it's surroundings.

These folks are making the same mistakes that everyone makes in comparing any life that may have been there to any life found here.

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And of course the old argument:
What if an alien probe had landed on the salt flats here on Earth?

"Too darned salty to support life" might have been the conclusion.

Personally, I'd have thought a concentration of water-soluble salts would have indicated the existence of seas or even oceans at some point in the past, but I'm sure the scientists would have thought of that...

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Obviously they never paid any attention when being taught about evolution. Life adapts to it's surroundings.

Thats the thing. Here on Earth there are millions of different types of life, from Humans down to bacteria. Humans have a really small temperature band in which we could live without clothing or shelter, but that is not necessarily true of the animal kingdom, and even more so when you get down into more basic lifeforms

Bacteria & other small lifeforms grow in humid & hot climates, cold climates, under the sea in hugely ranging pressures & temperatures, and probably in the air as well. Just because a planet somewhere else is beyond the extremes of temperature, salinity, pressure, Gas levels etc that we had on Earth does not mean life could not have existed - it means that life that we have there on Earth would not have existed there

I dont expect any life elsewhere in the universe to look like us - I believe there will be similarities, but thats about all. Why could ET not have adapted to a hotter dryer climate, or a totally different relation of carbon and other elements. Life adapts to the surroundings, so if salt levels rose, some of the lifeforms would not die, thus creating a more salt-resistant strain that becomes the dominant life on the planet at that stage in evolution.

Obvious observation's tell obvious stories of evolution regarding tollerance x exposure = species duration, cultivation and development. Futhering the subject I shall indicate that the identity of 'species' is not hidden with dna and element composition, it is a frequency operating that drives the organism to its origin.

Thus, the state of any composition is a frequency which is returning to its original cause. Anthropoids have the thought process of an upward mobile development {which is the reason we're such a threat to other species, though the very same attribute is a danger to us because of other more advanced frequency signiture organisms}.

The more serious question to astrobiology isn't which species may/may of not existed, but, the more alarming consideration is that if another species has evolved more advanced technology and knowledge {alchemy}, they may be exterminating all anthropoid species.

That may be one of the reasons that anthropoids will not contact us, and if any other race does it will be to attack us. That is a much more realistic consideration.

We may be at the start of astrobiology but, perhaps thats the reason {we're finished when they identify us}.


However, some races who have learnt that those particular wars may exist may be changing form, that is when we start to learn the intricacies pros/and cons of genetic manipulation.


Hence, the monkeys may have been upright to start with and crouched to survive knowledge of a more advanced regime. So the consideration is, were they coming or going?

I can see how this could apply to known organisms, but we are making too many assumptions about what an alien life form could survive. A few years ago we would have thought it impossible for life to exist around the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, but we now know that life flourishes around these vents. We have no way of knowing what is and what isn't too salty for an alien civilization to survive. We make the same assumptions with things such as water and oxygen. If another world doesn't contain water we almost immediately dismiss the possibility of life on that planet. Just because all living things on Earth needs water doesn't mean that all living things need water. The truth is that an alien life form is probably completely different in its biological makeup than anything we could ever imagine. The reason for this is that it would be on a completely different world with a different environment and would thus have a different evolutionary cycle. In my opinion it is completely immature of us to make these premature decisions and is also irresponsible of us.

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That BBC article is dumb.

The Dead Sea has life in it. It's the 2nd saltiest body of water in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea#Flora_and_fauna ::
"The sea is called "dead" because its high salinity means no macroscopic aquatic
organisms such as fish or water plants can live in it, though minuscule quantities
of bacteria and microbial fungi are present."

Good luck to the Phoenix lander!