Methane on Mars

[Rocket Pooch]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3577551.stm

[spendrey]

They state that there could be 2 possible explanations: volcanoes or microbes.
However they fail to consider a third possibility.... cows.
They produce a lot of methane.

[Mike]

So do drunken astronomers sitting around in a cold muddy field in February!

If it is cows then that will explain where the aliens have been taking all of those abducted cows to!

[ This Message was edited by: Mike on 2004-03-29 13:33 ]

[Rocket Pooch]

Typical, one of the first serious post I put here and it gets taken down to Cows (as in farting gags) and alien abduction

Nice to see the weather forecasters have it right again.

[Rick]

The way the media's been reporting it, about the only sane response is to take the mickey.

Just imagine how many cows there must be on Jupiter!

[Mike]

My god ! I never thought of that !! Let's hope no-one lights up near it !!

[Mike]

Seriously though, this is looking very interesting. The scientists are saying it is more likely the methane is produced by organisms than by geological activity. The only way they can say for sure that it is life is to send another Beagle 2 type mission or a sample return mission. But so far the evidence looks promising !!

[Rick]

...but so far I've not seen reports of them saying that organisms are a genuinely likely source for it. It's as if the media, fixated on the life on Mars idea, has decided to ignore all likely explanations in favour of the ones with 0.0000000000000001% (insert more zeros according to taste) probablilty. Me, cynical? Skeptical? You bet.

[Mike]

Oh indeed the chances of it being generated by organic methods are extremely slim, but there are pointers towards that theory. It may well turn out to be a geological source, but I personally hope the scientists and media are right!

[Rick]

The media loves to speculate, and these days it's very prone to completely ignore all the facts that would counter the path of speculation it has chosen. That does not lead to good reporting when the subject is a matter of science. My guess is that, if there's ever been life on Mars, then it arrived on Mars from Earth recently aboard Viking or one of the other landers....

[Delphine]

what about life arriving on earth via meteorites from Mars.

[Rick]

I figure that's another 0.0000000000000000001% chance, myself. We know that microbes can survive in a dormant state in space (having got there nicely protected inside a spacecraft), but the firey explosion that'd be necessary to get a chunk of rock off a planet is another matter, and much less easy to survive....