Life on Mars?

It's hard enough to identify fossilized microbes on

Earth. How would we ever recognize them on Mars?
By Carl Zimmer
Smithsonian Magazine
May 2005
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90 21 0 80 33 3.1K
On August 7, 1996, reporters, photographers and television camera operators surged
into NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The crowd focused not on the row of
seated scientists in NASAs auditorium but on a small, clear plastic box on the table
in front of them. Inside the box was a velvet pillow, and nestled on it like a crown
jewel was a rockfrom Mars. The scientists announced that theyd found signs of life
inside the meteorite. NASA administrator Daniel Goldin gleefully said it was an
unbelievable day. He was more accurate than he knew.
The rock, the researchers explained, had formed 4.5 billion years ago on Mars, where
it remained until 16 million years ago, when it was launched into space, probably by
the impact of an asteroid. The rock wandered the inner solar system until 13,000 years
ago, when it fell to Antarctica. It sat on the ice near AllanHills until 1984, when
snowmobiling geologists scooped it up.
Scientists headed by David McKay of the JohnsonSpaceCenter in Houston found that
the rock, called ALH84001, had a peculiar chemical makeup. It contained a
combination of minerals and carbon compounds that on Earth are created by
microbes. It also had crystals of magnetic iron oxide, called magnetite, which some
bacteria produce. Moreover, McKay presented to the crowd an electron microscope
view of the rock showing chains of globules that bore a striking resemblance to chains
that some bacteria form on Earth. We believe that these are indeed microfossils from
Mars, McKay said, adding that the evidence wasnt absolute proof of past Martian
life but rather pointers in that direction.
Among the last to speak that day was J. William Schopf, a University of California at
Los Angeles paleobiologist, who specializes in early Earth fossils. Ill show you the
oldest evidence of life on this planet, Schopf said to the audience, and displayed a
slide of a 3.465 billion-year-old fossilized chain of microscopic globules that he had
found in Australia. These are demonstrably fossils, Schopf said, implying that
NASAs Martian pictures were not. He closed by quoting the astronomer Carl Sagan:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Despite Schopfs note of skepticism, the NASA announcement was trumpeted
worldwide. Mars lived, rock shows Meteorite holds evidence of life on another
world, said the New York Times. Fossil from the red planet may prove that we are
not alone, declared The Independent of London.

Over the past nine years, scientists have taken Sagans words very much to heart.
Theyve scrutinized the Martian meteorite (which is now on view at the
Smithsonians National Museum of Natural History), and today few believe that it
harbored Martian microbes.
The controversy has prompted scientists to ask how they can know whether some
blob, crystal or chemical oddity is a sign of lifeeven on Earth. Adebate has flared
up over some of the oldest evidence for life on Earth, including the fossils that Schopf
proudly displayed in 1996. Major questions are at stake in this debate, including how
life first evolved on Earth. Some scientists propose that for the first few hundred
million years that life existed, it bore little resemblance to life as we know it today.
NASA researchers are taking lessons from the debate about life on Earth to Mars. If
all goes as planned, a new generation of rovers will arrive on Mars within the next
decade. These missions will incorporate cutting-edge biotechnology designed to
detect individual molecules made by Martian organisms, either living or long dead.
The search for life on Mars has become more urgent thanks in part to probes by the
two rovers now roaming Mars surface and another spaceship that is orbiting the
planet. In recent months, theyve made a series of astonishing discoveries that, once
again, tempt scientists to believe that Mars harbors lifeor did so in the past. At a
February conference in the Netherlands, an audience of Mars experts was surveyed
about Martian life. Some 75 percent of the scientists said they thought life once
existed there, and of them, 25 percent think that Mars harbors life today.
The search for the fossil remains of primitive single- celled organisms like bacteria
took off in 1953, when Stanley Tyler, an economic geologist at the University of
Wisconsin, puzzled over some 2.1 billion-year-old rocks hed gathered in Ontario,
Canada. His glassy black rocks known as cherts were loaded with strange,
microscopic filaments and hollow balls. Working with Harvard paleobotonist Elso
Barghoorn, Tyler proposed that the shapes were actually fossils, left behind by ancient
life-forms such as algae. Before Tyler and Barghoorns work, few fossils had been
found that predated the Cambrian Period, which began about 540 million years ago.
Now the two scientists were positing that life was present much earlier in the 4.55
billion-year history of our planet. How much further back it went remained for later
scientists to discover.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/life-on-mars78138144/#6bDKtbUQPJwrhrGK.99

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