Life on Mars?

While life trudges on for me, going to work everyday and getting irritated by the public transport, scientists are having a fun time playing around with Mars rovers and theories that life may be possible on Mars. If life is really found on Mars, then I think the billions of dollars spent sending probes, rovers and satelites to Mars would be worthwhile. Although I wish they'd donate some to improving life here on Earth (eg by improving our public transport...)

Anyway, I'm too tired to type more so I'll just post the quote and the link to the article. :)

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.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

Stoker and other researchers have long theorized that the Martian subsurface could harbor biological organisms that have developed unusual strategies for existing in extreme environments. That suspicion led Stoker and a team of U.S. and Spanish researchers in 2003 to southwestern Spain to search for subsurface life near the Rio Tinto river—so-called because of its reddish tint—the product of iron being dissolved in its highly acidic water.

Click here for the full article.