Friday, January 09, 2015

Fact Follows Fiction

I wrote Martian Rhapsody (on Amazon for 99 cents in the e-book edition) to include plenty of science and scientific speculation.  A new article by Johnny Bontemps gives credence to one of the speculations.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0108/Are-there-fossils-on-Mars

This article not only suggests the possibility of life existing on Mars billions of years ago but also implies that life began on Mars, if it began, at least 200 million years earlier than it did on Earth.

The scientist quoted, Nora Noffke, has spent 20 years studying very ancient, over 3 billion years old, formations on Earth that were formed by bacteria.  She spent weeks analyzing images from Mars to determine whether they matched those on Earth and how closely.  While she cannot absolutely rule out non-biological origins, she thinks that the likelihood is small.

Scientists cannot simply state things such as "life on Mars" without overwhelming evidence, but now the evidence is very strong indeed.

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