[Flipside]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=Science&cat=Mars_Exploration

'A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water. The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed'

[ShadowWolf_IH]

well isn't that interesting.

[BlackDove]

Yay, cousins.

[Corsair]

Quite.

[Carl]

life on mars would be the win.

[übermetroid]

Time for intersteller space battles!

[StratComm]

No, no battles!

I want to pay them a visit though

[MatthewPapa]

Originally posted by übermetroid
Time for intersteller space battles!

Where we get our ass PWND by a superior race......

[StratComm]

I for some reason am not particularly concerned about potential single-celled microbes from Mars bringing a superior military force against humanity anytime soon.

[Flipside]

Aha! That's the plan you see, it's revenge for the last time they tried to invade, these microbobes are actually genetically created by the Tripods to take down mankind

[Hippo]

Interesting...

[StratComm]

I should have qualified that a little more... potential single-celled microbes living in a cave on mars.  Sounds funnier.

EDIT: TIMEWARP!  I moved the thread down the forum listing.  Guess that makes this an un-bump.

[Carl]

Originally posted by StratComm
Guess that makes this an un-bump.

an anti-bump, or a de-bump, but not an un-bump.

[Thrilla]

Everybody always talks about humans as being new comers, but what if in all reality we are like the first ones.  What if we are the or one of the oldest intelligent life forms in the galaxy.  We might just be.

Though until they go a dig up some of these microbes I'm going to be skeptical.  People have been trying to say their has or is life on Mars for years.

[StratComm]

Actually it wouldn't suprise me at all if there were a few bacterial colonies scattered in the 5 feet or so around the Viking landers.  Not native of course, but life, just the same.  And Thrilla, I'd agree with you except that Earth's global ecosystem has suffered at least 1 cataclysmic disaster since the rise of higher animals.  I don't know if the line that were dinosaurs would have evolved into intelligent life ultimately, but we are about 80 million years behind where we could have been as a planet.  If life is as common as it would seem, then the possibility exists that it could have developed somewhere where no global extinctions  happened.

Then again, western civilization needed the Dark ages to take a fresh look at advanced mechanics and science in general, so maybe one has to go back in order to go forwards, so to speak.

[ShadowWolf_IH]

you are right strat, about 1800 years ago wqe had the dark ages, and today we have the Derek Ages.  which is to say...not so Smart.

[neo_hermes]

[Ford Prefect]

Let's kill them.

[Thrilla]

But we don't know how common life really is.  Yeah it is common on Earth, but we really don't know how common Earth is either.  I'm not going to get into one of these debates, but I just personally have never been optimistic life the whole life on Mars issue.

[Carl]

I have had cautious optimism. it would be really cool to find bacteria on mars, but even if it is there, we may not find it, and since a mars mission is planned for 2030, we'll have to wait some time before any real thorough testing is done.