"Similarities in morphology are not proof of life. It is possible that all the specimens presented here
are abiotic. We cannot completely rule out minerals, weathering, and unknown geological forces that are
unique to Mars and unknown and alien to Earth. However, growth, movement, alterations in location and
shape, constitute behavior, and coupled with life-like morphology, strongly support the hypothesis there
is life on Mars."
They really should put more focus on the first sentence. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary data, which they don't have. They should have phrased it otherwise around. While abiotic phenomenons are more likely, we can not rule out a biological background. Further investigation should be undertaken.
That depends on the expertise as well. Extraordinary claims need that proof, of course, but it seems they took a lot of factors into account that seems to skew it towards their hypothesis.
Did you read the paper or at the very least examine all of the photo sequences in the full text article? The examination of the spheres in the rover treads and their reappearance is significant, as is the positional analysis of various spheres as they grow in size over a 3 day period. It isn't just morphology, there are some dynamics at work that point to a fungal-like growth as the simplest explanation.
No, they point to growth as an explanation, and the authors dismiss one possible geological process known from earth. There is no reason to dismiss unknown geological and chemical processes that can happen at the extremes of low pressure and temperature found on the Martian surface.
Jumping straight to multicellular life, one of the most complex structures that we've ever seen in the universe, is absurd.
NASA itself investigated similar spherules [0] they called "blueberries" and determined they were hematite-rich "mineral concretions" [1]. Evidence of water in the environment long ago, but not of life. This ResearchGate paper has only one reference to "spherules" and none of "blueberries".
I guess my point is that they are, at minimum, not in the mainstream in discussing this phenomena. That is not a refutation of their research or logic but gives context to what other serious scientists have concluded. Even this article [1] on NASA's astrobiology site (a.k.a. "Life in the universe") concurs that they are hematite mineral concretions and that the only real implication to life is the ancient presence of a large volume of water.
You know what is really mind blowing ? I remember Kim Stanley Robinson's character(s) discussing spherical, shell(?)-looking volcanic pebbles first mistaken for fossils in his book The Martians. Which came out 5 years before this study !!
The paper discusses hematite and NASA's conclusions directly. I don't know the paper's reasoning is sound, but it's not right to suggest they don't consider this explanation.
Is "life on mars", really an extraordinary claim? I guess I have a hard time seeing a solar system where Earth is so unique that biological life only happened here. I agree more proof is needed of Martian life, but what we're imagining here is bacteria/fungus like life, not green spacemen.
Yes it is an extraordinary claim. All prior evidence shows that life is nonexistent on all planets that are not Earth. So to suggest that the planet closest to us has life is far out side the norms of our current beliefs about how frequently life appears.
Attempting to extrapolate off a sample size of n=1 is dangerous. I think that puts this in the “requires extraordinary proof” bucket. Especially when considering how many times we’ve looked but failed to find proof of extraterrestrial life.
But the Earth is entirely unique in the solar system for almost everything we know is important for life - especially liquid water (maybe with some exceptions on a few moons of Jupiter) and temperatures above freezing.
The Earth is not only unique in the solar system. We are located in a radioactively calm corner of the Milky Way, in a single-star system (not that common) with planets rotating in stable, non-intersecting orbits. And that's just the beginning of the factors that make the Earth so unique.
So the next time you take that sip of coffee in the morning, just know that you can't do that for millions of light years around you - or maybe anywhere.
All previous evidence of life on Mars (which there have been a lot of claims about) have proven false. (Including similar claims about potential evidence based on rovers). That is what makes this an extraordinary claim.
No, it's very clear that life on Mars is the extraordinary claim. We don't know of any abiotic structure that would be even half as complex as bacteria, and multicellular life is an absurdly complex possibility to take as 'the simpler one'
There are pieces of Mars on Earth. Possibly there are pieces of Earth on Mars. If they didn't contain spores, that would be unusual.
So if its possible for fungi to grow in a Mars environment, it seems the more likely outcome. That's the question - can they grow there? Then, they are likely growing there.
There is no reason to expect life to survive an asteroid impact. The sheer force would likely be enough to crush delicate cells, and the heat of the impact would likely sterilize any remnants.
Also, there are no fungi living off frozen water at -50 to -70 C or below on Earth, and an asteroid impact doesn't really provide time for evolution to work its magic. Perhaps extremeophiles could be found that would survive, though even that is shaky without some form of liquid water, and they would be extremely unlikely to evolve to something approaching fungi (remeber that extremeophiles are prokaryotes, while fungi are eukaryotes, and as far as we can tell eukaryotes arose from prokaryotes only once in the history of life on Earth, so it was literally a once in 2 billion years event).
Edit to add: Mars' surface is also extremely toxic to essentially all Earth-based life.
Overall, it is very hard to imagine that any form of Earth-based life would have survived the series of events you suggest: an asteroid impact with Earth which propelled a chunk of rock to space, being exposed to space, then burning through the Martian atmosphere, crashing into Mars, then encountering the extreme cold, low pressure, missing oxygen and CO2, high radiation, the toxic soil of Mars, and not just surviving, but growing and thriving from this.
Thank you for the study, I was surprised to find that (though I will note that it seems the impact speed on Mars can be larger than on Earth, depending on the size of chunk - I found antoher study that gave an upper bound of 8.52 km/s for large meteors with mass > 10^10 kg).
A lot of this just makes me think of precipitate. I’m sure there are papers on the Mars environment, I.e. low temperature low pressure geology and physics, but I didn’t immediately see any references.
I recall reading another paper indicating there is an unresolved increase and decrease of methane ? in the Martian atmosphere as well. But I’m still inclined to think this is geological not biological.
Interesting. To a layman like me the pictures are pretty convincing, but I know nothing about geology and very little about fungi.
It would be really neat if we had humans on Mars that could just walk over, pick something up and put it under a microscope and in a test tube. The paper itself cites several other authors that provide abiotic explanations. I wish we could just test it instead of speculating.
I agree with the cool-factor of having people on mars. And with that said: for this specific task, we could get remote robots to do this task with zero threat to well educated, trained, and physically fit human life. People on mars would be AMAZING... and, NOT having people on mars is amazing too: it gives us such a great moment where "Hey, we NEED to solve this with technology.", and I see that leading to benefits across the board.
Yeah sure we can build robots that can do a lot of specific things. But robot iterations are really long. You can tell a human to do a completely novel task with a twenty minute or so delay. I bet you'd find thousands of well educated, fit humans who would be willing to play robot on a one-way trip to Mars.
Humans probably could do in a week what all rovers have done over decades.
We are a long ways away from having robots that are advanced and flexible enough to replace people.
Well trained, educed people die every year in the thousands from completely unnecessary activities like wing suit jumping. Many millions if you include things like smoking and drinking.
I don't see anything wrong with a few astronauts willingly risking their lives on new frontiers.
And I'm sure this will happen once we have the capability. I think the primary reason why we haven't sent anyone to Mars is the lack of public interest and funding. We don't even have the rockets to launch any considerable payloads to Mars, without incurring insane cost.
Starship (the new rocket from SpaceX) makes me optimistic that things might actually happen in the next 1-2 decades.
The issue with a person doing a week of science on Mars is keeping them alive for the journey there, healthy enough (and alive) during the ground mission, and getting them back alive. Even if your astronaut is interested in a suicide mission that's still the trip there and ground mission. You also can't just send one, NASA figured out three is the minimum for best effectiveness.
So before any scientific equipment you've got literal tons of life support to get to Mars. For robotic probes they can be mostly scientific instruments. They also aren't really limited by consumables like astronauts.
It's not like astronauts wouldn't be cool or useful but for the same cost as one manned mission we can spam Mars with robotic probes. There's also the added benefit of an unexpected lithobraking not leading to some flag draped coffins and a total halt to the program for years.
Agree that robots make the most sense for space. But the robot route seems to lack the ability to push people to fund science. I’d be happier with the robot route if it compelled people the same way as sending people does. People are seemingly going to give a person being there a lot more attention than robots.
Or we need to retool and try to get robots to mine the asteroids for us-cus money.
Landing humans places doesn't do much to inspire science spending either. Congress lost interest in manned spaceflight after Apollo 11 landed. The public at large lost interest until the drama around Apollo 13 and then lost it again after they landed successfully. In the eyes of Congress the Space Shuttle was a multi-state jobs program and the public at large mostly ignored it unless some astronauts died.
I'm not against manned spaceflight at all but I think it's important to recognize it is very expensive per quanta of scientific data. In a world where money for pure science can be hard to come by it's often better to get more science bang for your space bucks.
This is the thoughtful and thorough post I wish I had made in my original comment. The efficiency of sending so much more robotic stuff seems as if it would certainly outweigh the benefits of "I'm just going to quickly get a sample".
> Humans probably could do in a week what all rovers have done over decades.
This seems highly unlikely at first glance, given the fact that Curiosity has been able to explore 25km and has been performing experiments and observations for 8 years and counting. A human on an exploratory Mars mission would not be able to venture any significant distance from the landing site (unless you also send a vehicle down), and they would definitely not survive for 8 years of soil-level observations.
Toy helicopters that can peek over rocks and take short trips to locate potential sites like the article describes without having to commit the entire rover in that direction. Kind of like toys.
To that end, I know that the science itinerary of the rovers is typically planned years in advance. What process exists for sending new experiments to the "top of the stack" in a situation of serious significance?
As much as I want to believe but half of these phenomena look either like something venting from the ground (fig. 1, assuming a prevailing wind direction), flowing down a hill (fig. 4, linear structures) or things previously covered (by dust) being layed open (fig. 22). The most interesting images were the spherical things that appeared or grew during a few sols (e.g. fig. 8).
Discovery of fungi or bacteria growing on Mars would be absolutely shattering science. The claim of fungus-like growth didn't seem to be supported by the photographic evidence, though.
edit: After looking through all the photos again, I admit that I am feeling pretty compelled by the evidence. If these photos are unaltered, the processes producing the phenomena are absolutely worth studying.
The photographs are incredibly interesting. What colours my excitement about them, however, is the knowledge of how ignorant I am of non-biological processes that may produce similar results. Two examples that come to mind are stalagmites/stalactites and large crystals. Crystals, especially, exhibit behaviour that - were I unfamiliar with the phenomena that produce them - appear biological, such as growing upwards.
In other words, when I excitedly ask myself the question, "What, other than biology, could possibly create those 'puffballs'?" I have to be honest that there is probably a long list of things that I've never heard of.
But still - this is the most interesting thing I've stumbled across in a long time!
The only abiotic explanation of those puffbals I could come with is recrystallization of dry ice. I've many times seen water recrystallized as white puffy balls (a kind of very small hail). Maybe in special pressure/temperature range that also happens to CO2? Almost all of them DON'T look like they have stalks, only spheres laying on ground, but then there is figure 30 on page 29.
This would be the exciting thing. If there really is fungus growing on the surface of mars, or even some life growing in the recesses of the rover, then getting samples and obtaining DNA (if the DNA is even the same structure) would almost certainly show that there are common ancestors, or there aren't. If there are common ancestors, then panspermia is all but proven. If there aren't common ancestors, then it is proven that life can evolve more easily than we thought, and the great filter becomes really shocking.
Well, there's fungi on Yuggoth, at the far reaches of the Solar system, so why not Mars?
“Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can move with a velocity greater than that of light? With proper aid I expect to go backward and forward in time, and actually see and feel the earth of remote past and future epochs. You can’t imagine the degree to which those beings have carried science. There is nothing they can’t do with the mind and body of living organisms. I expect to visit other planets, and even other stars and galaxies. The first trip will be to Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system—unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct thought-currents toward us and cause it to be discovered—or perhaps let one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.
Well I think Einstein himself knew that he was wrong, and trolled everyone. He used the vast sums of money he made from his patent trolling he had secretly approved, and paid off all those experimenters to confirm his wacky theories. He then established a fund to keep it going.
If you pay enough, you can change how mathematical functions operate whenever someone actually uses them. That was Einstein’s actual discovery.
Did you know Einstein was actually one of the richest men who ever lived? But his estate hid it so well that no one mainstream ever will know that!
EDIT: Look up Poe's law I guess, No matter how obvious I tried to make it...
When we're talking about potential alien lifeforms, assumptions like "fungus eat plants" need to be loosely held. This may not be fungi as we know it at all, but rather an alien analogue that fills a similar role despite having completely different origins. On earth, we know that evolutionary forces can "recreate" similar organisms independently. The same could be true between earth and alien worlds. Ichthyosaurs and Dolphins have a lot in common but aren't related [by earth standards]. Maybe there are comparable similarities between life on different worlds.
Say we send humans or a probe to Mars, how would they confidently conclude something under a microscope wasn't brought by humans unless it's like super foreign/alien/obvious?
If we go to the considerable length of sending actual human researchers to Mars, we shouldn't cheap out on equipment: mass-spectroscopes, microscopes, electron microscopes, ... you name it. That would give us lots of opportunity to examine samples and compare that to what we know from Earth.
That's assuming that we are not contrained by mass or volume on the mission which seems reasonable with a SpaceX Starship-style mission because if we were then we shouldn't be sending humans at all imo.
In all seriousness, I know this was in jest, but I think this is actually still on topic and applies to the bigger discussion of our mission in finding and understanding what the heck life really is. So upvote.
Sequencers are the size of a USB stick now, so they could obtain a sample and attempt to read the genetic code. If it is a branch related to an Earth species it will show up easily in a BLAST search. If it won't sequence because it isn't using DNA then that is even more conclusive.
My vote is the images are also consistent with some sort of seasonal subsurface brine squishing out and about.
And fungi are genetically very complex compared to what Occam is apt to offer first.
Current evidence shows that Mars was habitable and had a lot of water for billions of years. It was only after their magnetosphere disappeared that their atmosphere got stripped away from solar winds. I could easily see complex forms of live adapting and surviving from that time.
We also assume that the 'fungus' seen here has any genetic similarity to fungus on Earth. It could be quite different, only seeming similar because of convergent evolution[1].
According to the study, the puffballs are 3 to 8mm in diameter. I don't know how reliable this site/journal/study is, hopefully its wide availability will lead to people replicating or debunking it.
To be fair, supposing it were a recently introduced earth fungus, it would still be pretty incredible to learn that an earth fungus can evidently flourish on Mars.
Figure 8 and its subsequent treatment in figures 41-44 is very interesting.
Was this noticed by NASA scientists at the time it was originally captured? If this was flagged as an item of interest, did Opportunity not have the instruments onboard to conduct analysis?
When papers like these are published, do NASA/JPL/etc. scientists tend to make statements?
Lots of image pairs showing "growth" (7&8 esp which is the image pair they did their hypothesis testing on) can be perfectly explained by the sand just blowing off and revealing more of the round pebbles. The "smaller" ones are nearly all covered more in "before" than "after" and the "appearance" might just be "reveal of". See 41, 42, 44 for the close-up of changes. I don't buy that whole section.
Fig 29-30 is interesting ...
Fig 31-32 can be explained by the treads collecting blue sand.
All the images of dark streaks and clumps are in line with these:
which show that there's a bunch of dark stuff under the surface that shows when you disturb the surface. Interpreting fresh impact imagery with a fungii story would be "Rocks impacting the surface cause fungii growth" which makes very little sense. Even dust devils strip off the surface enough to show the dark stuff.
Other images show the "sphericals" as being hollow and easily crushed by the treads, and having stalks, and growing together. The "growth" photos which could be possibly explained in isolation by wind exposing round pebbles on previously existing stones doesn't explain the appearance of additional sphericals in the 3 sol period of the same size as the ones being "revealed". If it was just that photo sequence I could understand that argument but the rest of the evidence really pushes towards organic growth as the most likely scenario.
I assume you're referring to Fig 31. (I was referring to Fig 32)
"Spherical" clumps of blue dust would crush just the same. Mars is reeeeally cold a lot of the time and has a bit less gravity. Dust can clump. Again, not a geologist.
What's important to me is that they're presenting crossing tracks as evidence of before/after, when it's not. They don't have two images of the same area separated by X days, they have one image of two tracks separated by X days, and are interpreting the crest-clumping as "new". This is a somewhat disingenuous way to present, if I'm reading it right.
I'm into sending a robot to grab some, don't get me wrong, but I'm also not privy to all the details to make an intelligent prioritization of the robots' time.
> the rest of the evidence really pushes towards organic growth as the most likely scenario
We know next to nothing about geological processes that can happen at low temperatures and extremely low air pressure. Biological explanations are never 'the simplest', as there is no kind of geological formation that comes even close to the complexity of a single cell, nevermind the complexity of a multicellular organism.
"Other images show the "sphericals" as being hollow and easily crushed by the treads, and having stalks, and growing together."
This is an example of "proving too much". If Mars had plant life developed to the point of having stalks and visibly growing in macroscopic amounts over this time frame, we wouldn't be "debating" life on Mars because it would be plainly obvious that it has life, if life was that active.
This is why we discuss whether or not it has a micro-organism based ecology that it is hiding, rather than discussing whether or not it has forests that we just haven't found yet.
I've noticed this is one of the key signs you can use to identify cranks massively overfitting data about life being here or there.
Fungi (and lichen) is known to be able to survive in places where plants cannot. So it's entirely possible that fungi could survive on Mars while trees/moss/grass could not. We also know where this happens on Earth[1][2]. We didn't discover these life forms from orbit or even by standing and looking at them.
> So it's entirely possible that fungi could survive on Mars while trees/moss/grass could not
Nope, there is no real chance to find fungi living at -50C to -70C, with no liquid water. There is no life on Earth that lives at such low temperatures, and there is no way for life as we know it to work without liquid water (or perhaps other liquid solvents, though that is highly speculative).
Also note, fungi in particular can't deal with extreme cold, the coldest I've read about any kinds of fungi living is ~0C. There are bacteria and other prokaryotes that survive at temperatures below that, but even then only at high pressures that allow liquid water to exist at very low temperatures - whereas Mars has extremely low pressure, much lower than anyone on the Earth's surface (Martian atmospheric pressure is comparable to Earth's upper atmosphere).
Whether life could survive is entirely orthogonal to my point, and sneaky life surviving that we can't even see is exactly what I said could still be on Mars. What can't be on Mars is life with stalks (it may not sound like much to a Earth-bound human in 2021, but that's actually quite sophisticated for life) that grows macroscopically over the course of just a few days. There'd be evidence of their metabolites, probably color and spectra changes like Earth's greenness as something uses sunlight, all kinds of things. Macroscopic plants are way too much to claim on the basis of a few photos. I mean, if nothing else, we ought to see lots of them.
That reminds me of a passage from H.G. Wells's «The First Men In The Moon», where the narrator protagonist is so hungry that he can't help but take a bite out of some fungi-like lunar vegetation, and convinces his colleague Cavor to indulge in it as well... but the fungi happens to be psychoactive!
> which show that there's a bunch of dark stuff under the surface that shows when you disturb the surface. Interpreting fresh impact imagery with a fungii story would be "Rocks impacting the surface cause fungii growth" which makes very little sense. Even dust devils strip off the surface enough to show the dark stuff.
there was a link here or on reddit a few days ago studying the link between mushroom growth and the lightning. they claimed just using small electrical charges (1/billion of the power of a lightning) they could get up to %10 more growth
I believe he's better known as the author of "The Time Machine of Consciousness Quantum Physics and the Time Machine of Consciousness: Past Present Future Exist Simultaneously. Entanglement, Tachyons, Relative Time, Circle of Time, Quantum Time, Dream Time, PreCognition, Retrocausation, Deja Vu, and Premonitions".
As of this moment I'm operating under the impression Mars is teeming with shrooms.
The orbital photographs did't make much impact, since at that scale you can convince yourself all sorts of atmospheric and geological activity resembles life.
But the rover photographs comparing to puffballs and clearly showing stems in some cases, very convincing.
Edit: elsewhere in the comments it was pointed out that stems could easily be explained by blown away dust/sand after formation, without involving biological processes. Which is a very good point.
It's still fun to imagine a Mars covered in mushrooms however.
He seems pretty cranky but 'are these observable phenomena maybe some kinda fungus? I don't think it's calcified minerals' is a much more modest claim than 'extinct civilizations built pyramids and giant faces for us to discover.'
I read the paper, I think that this is pseudoscience garbage, in my non-expert opinion. I think the sphericles can be explained geologically, the "growth" of the pebbles is explained, as others have pointed out, by the sand around them being removed and being exposed more.
I don't like to do this because I would rather attack the evidence but for context, look at the author's history and other publications on researchgate as /bluenose69 pointed out. Read the wikipedia article on the "Journal of Cosmology". This author has a belief that there is life on Mars, and if it isn't puffballs like this paper, it is lichens, or stomatotites. Or suing NASA to examine a rock that was flipped by the wheel of Opportunity that the rock was alive and moved around.
I am also not en expert in this area, but I agree with this assessment. This looks like classic anomaly hunting rather than careful science, but I would love to be proved wrong.
Ideally that would be best but I wasted my time reading the entire paper because I took the initial upvotes it got as a signal that it was worth reading.
I gave two examples above where the authors’ claims are very weak and explained by something that myself and others with an initial reading seems more plausible.
If you want to discuss the merits further that is fine but in my opinion it is a waste of time. I think you should post your opinions on the merits of the paper as well, I think, but I'm not certain and I could be wrong, that you'll wish you hadn't read the paper or taken the author seriously because we all have limited time and competing things that we find interesting.
It's like saying, "The National Enquirer posted pictures of lizard people - we should inspect the evidence instead of jumping to conclusions based on the publication's schlock reputation".
It's safe to take this shortcut. The burden of *overwhelming" proof is on the author.
The pictures are posted by NASA and analyzed by this paper. Are you suggesting the photos are fake or altered?
I'm also confused as to what evidence you would accept for proof of the claim that there are fungus-like things on Mars, if you don't accept pictures of them.
Trustworthiness is a prerequisite to doing science. If you can't trust the scientist, you can't trust the science – that's why academic careers end when scientists are discovered falsifying results.
Further, scientific claims should be evaluated by scientists, not laymen. Since this person isn't even a scientist, actual scientists needn't deign to evaluate these claims.
The first author has had questionable publications in the past: "Quantum Physics of God: How Consciousness Became the Universe and Created Itself" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344906681_Quantum_P...) and "Quantum Entanglement with the Future: Lincoln Dreams of His Assassination" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344907026_Quantum_E...). Other coauthors have past evidence for fringe publications (the last author is an astrophysicist who doesn't believe black holes exist). Given the publication records, I would be very skeptical of this paper, even if it seems convincing at face value.
This kind of papers are testament to the amount of data that we are bringing from Mars: multiple rovers with progressively better and better resolution cameras, and the orbiters.
As the amount of data coming from Mars will increase over the years we will see more such "creative" attempts to pick convenient subsets of this data and try to reach for conclusion.
But over time, I think, the wind will blow away the chaff and reveal real results, just like the marsian wind moves the sand around hiding and revealing pebbles at its surface.
Totally agree. It's easy, as an unexperienced individual, to get tied up into mysterious patterns present in martian imagery and immediately jump to the conclusion of life if you don't know of the underlying physical processes. Everybody wants to find life on Mars, so when you look at the images long enough, you start seeing it. This is nothing new: back in the 19th century, people speculated that there were canals on mars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal).
Focus the address bar and click enter, so it becomes its own referrer. In case it doesn't work, it's a galactic cool man made with Paint or something similar.
Yeah I've always wondered what the hell is with that. Like, 1990s level web design taken to some crazy maximalist level. rense.com is like that (eesh i dont even want to make a clickable link to that)
my other favorite crazy person website must be https://arngren.net/ -- see if you can find the hoverpod
I don't like pathologizing behavior over the internet, but I think certain traits (or symptoms) like hypergraphia[1] influence such websites, giving them an unintentional horror vacui[2] aesthetic.
You can't call someone questionable just based on the fact that his/her publications are different or his coauthor doesn't believe in X thing which is widely accepted. Science needs people to think out of the box and in an unorthodox way, and history is full of people who have done it and shed light on things we take for granted. I am also not saying that the author is credible, just saying you need more than that to call a persons work questionable.
The primary and secondary authors are crackpots with a long history of pseudo-scientific, deceptive publication practices [1]. The first author also makes numerous claims that one of the reasons NASA fails to take him seriously is because NASA is full of Jews who can't believe in extraterrestrial life for religious reasons.
I agree the proponent seems rather strange, but this fungus claim is pretty fairly modest and falsifiable.
My immediate hunch is that it might be some sort of liquid condensation which then freezes and merely resembles fungi (ie tiny hailstones) but even if wrong it's interesting.
Sure it is. It's a narrowly-tailored hypothesis for the observed phenomena that as I mentioned is easily falsifiable. It's probably wrong, but makes an apparent good faith effort to consider alternatives (calcified mineral deposits on the ground or salt corrosion on rover surfaces). It's not like elaborate fantasies of alien civilizations building a giant monument of a human face.
Not to totally discount this work based on the author's previous works...but the main listed author of this article works for this site: http://cosmology.com/
I was so excited about these photos before seeing this. I'm kind of bummed.
Were the photos faked? Is there something wrong with the authors' line of argument? Can you provide the name of your favorite exobiologist who, if they had published an identical paper, you would remain unwaveringly excited about?
When someone has a long history of making false claims, it doesn't mean their current claim is automatically wrong but it does mean their argument for it doesn't count as strong evidence for the claim, IMO.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadThey really should put more focus on the first sentence. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary data, which they don't have. They should have phrased it otherwise around. While abiotic phenomenons are more likely, we can not rule out a biological background. Further investigation should be undertaken.
Jumping straight to multicellular life, one of the most complex structures that we've ever seen in the universe, is absurd.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_spherules
[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/6944/martian-blueberries/
[1] https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/check-type-iron-blueberri...
So the next time you take that sip of coffee in the morning, just know that you can't do that for millions of light years around you - or maybe anywhere.
There are pieces of Mars on Earth. Possibly there are pieces of Earth on Mars. If they didn't contain spores, that would be unusual.
So if its possible for fungi to grow in a Mars environment, it seems the more likely outcome. That's the question - can they grow there? Then, they are likely growing there.
Also, there are no fungi living off frozen water at -50 to -70 C or below on Earth, and an asteroid impact doesn't really provide time for evolution to work its magic. Perhaps extremeophiles could be found that would survive, though even that is shaky without some form of liquid water, and they would be extremely unlikely to evolve to something approaching fungi (remeber that extremeophiles are prokaryotes, while fungi are eukaryotes, and as far as we can tell eukaryotes arose from prokaryotes only once in the history of life on Earth, so it was literally a once in 2 billion years event).
Edit to add: Mars' surface is also extremely toxic to essentially all Earth-based life.
Overall, it is very hard to imagine that any form of Earth-based life would have survived the series of events you suggest: an asteroid impact with Earth which propelled a chunk of rock to space, being exposed to space, then burning through the Martian atmosphere, crashing into Mars, then encountering the extreme cold, low pressure, missing oxygen and CO2, high radiation, the toxic soil of Mars, and not just surviving, but growing and thriving from this.
I recall reading another paper indicating there is an unresolved increase and decrease of methane ? in the Martian atmosphere as well. But I’m still inclined to think this is geological not biological.
It would be really neat if we had humans on Mars that could just walk over, pick something up and put it under a microscope and in a test tube. The paper itself cites several other authors that provide abiotic explanations. I wish we could just test it instead of speculating.
Even more useful is that a human may do a completely novel task and provide results of their own volition within the 20 minutes comm delay.
We are a long ways away from having robots that are advanced and flexible enough to replace people.
Well trained, educed people die every year in the thousands from completely unnecessary activities like wing suit jumping. Many millions if you include things like smoking and drinking.
I don't see anything wrong with a few astronauts willingly risking their lives on new frontiers.
And I'm sure this will happen once we have the capability. I think the primary reason why we haven't sent anyone to Mars is the lack of public interest and funding. We don't even have the rockets to launch any considerable payloads to Mars, without incurring insane cost.
Starship (the new rocket from SpaceX) makes me optimistic that things might actually happen in the next 1-2 decades.
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfbiac/Human_efficiency_pap...
So before any scientific equipment you've got literal tons of life support to get to Mars. For robotic probes they can be mostly scientific instruments. They also aren't really limited by consumables like astronauts.
It's not like astronauts wouldn't be cool or useful but for the same cost as one manned mission we can spam Mars with robotic probes. There's also the added benefit of an unexpected lithobraking not leading to some flag draped coffins and a total halt to the program for years.
Or we need to retool and try to get robots to mine the asteroids for us-cus money.
I'm not against manned spaceflight at all but I think it's important to recognize it is very expensive per quanta of scientific data. In a world where money for pure science can be hard to come by it's often better to get more science bang for your space bucks.
Clearly, if we send people on Mars we should make sure they are not just well trained and educated.
This seems highly unlikely at first glance, given the fact that Curiosity has been able to explore 25km and has been performing experiments and observations for 8 years and counting. A human on an exploratory Mars mission would not be able to venture any significant distance from the landing site (unless you also send a vehicle down), and they would definitely not survive for 8 years of soil-level observations.
Where are Curiosity and Perseverance when they are needed??
edit: After looking through all the photos again, I admit that I am feeling pretty compelled by the evidence. If these photos are unaltered, the processes producing the phenomena are absolutely worth studying.
In other words, when I excitedly ask myself the question, "What, other than biology, could possibly create those 'puffballs'?" I have to be honest that there is probably a long list of things that I've never heard of.
But still - this is the most interesting thing I've stumbled across in a long time!
Honestly, the entire thing looks like bubbles to me. If you heat some viscous material that contains some water, you'll see all of those features.
The filament thing is much more lifelike to me. But keep in mind that we don't have experience on a non-oxidizing atmosphere.
Either way, big result!
“Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can move with a velocity greater than that of light? With proper aid I expect to go backward and forward in time, and actually see and feel the earth of remote past and future epochs. You can’t imagine the degree to which those beings have carried science. There is nothing they can’t do with the mind and body of living organisms. I expect to visit other planets, and even other stars and galaxies. The first trip will be to Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system—unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct thought-currents toward us and cause it to be discovered—or perhaps let one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/wid.aspx
If you pay enough, you can change how mathematical functions operate whenever someone actually uses them. That was Einstein’s actual discovery.
Did you know Einstein was actually one of the richest men who ever lived? But his estate hid it so well that no one mainstream ever will know that!
EDIT: Look up Poe's law I guess, No matter how obvious I tried to make it...
Also: you're completely insane.
Say we send humans or a probe to Mars, how would they confidently conclude something under a microscope wasn't brought by humans unless it's like super foreign/alien/obvious?
That's assuming that we are not contrained by mass or volume on the mission which seems reasonable with a SpaceX Starship-style mission because if we were then we shouldn't be sending humans at all imo.
(This strategy works until a human arrives. Once humans are there, we'll be bringing with us all of our microbiotic friends.)
In all seriousness, I know this was in jest, but I think this is actually still on topic and applies to the bigger discussion of our mission in finding and understanding what the heck life really is. So upvote.
https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion
https://store.nanoporetech.com/us/configure-minion-enhanced/
We also assume that the 'fungus' seen here has any genetic similarity to fungus on Earth. It could be quite different, only seeming similar because of convergent evolution[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
They would probably not be the beginning of life on Mars, but the last to turn off the light.
Would be weird if it is in any way similar to earth fungi - could be from earth or evidence of Panspermia theory.
Actually I’d take panspermia as most exciting! Life in the rest of the universe too!
> perhaps fungi may have been transported to Mars already attached to the rover
And another photo of a dark patch emerging from a seam on the rover. Seems to be to be pretty suggestive of Earth being the source.
A crazy scenario would be if Mars becomes covered in mushroom-based life that evolves distinctly from life on Earth.
Was this noticed by NASA scientists at the time it was originally captured? If this was flagged as an item of interest, did Opportunity not have the instruments onboard to conduct analysis?
When papers like these are published, do NASA/JPL/etc. scientists tend to make statements?
Fig 29-30 is interesting ... Fig 31-32 can be explained by the treads collecting blue sand.
All the images of dark streaks and clumps are in line with these:
https://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PIA...
which show that there's a bunch of dark stuff under the surface that shows when you disturb the surface. Interpreting fresh impact imagery with a fungii story would be "Rocks impacting the surface cause fungii growth" which makes very little sense. Even dust devils strip off the surface enough to show the dark stuff.
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2021/02/Mars_dust_...
I'm doubtful but hey what do I know, I just make robots. I hope it's all fungi and I hope it's edible.
"Spherical" clumps of blue dust would crush just the same. Mars is reeeeally cold a lot of the time and has a bit less gravity. Dust can clump. Again, not a geologist.
What's important to me is that they're presenting crossing tracks as evidence of before/after, when it's not. They don't have two images of the same area separated by X days, they have one image of two tracks separated by X days, and are interpreting the crest-clumping as "new". This is a somewhat disingenuous way to present, if I'm reading it right.
I'm into sending a robot to grab some, don't get me wrong, but I'm also not privy to all the details to make an intelligent prioritization of the robots' time.
We know next to nothing about geological processes that can happen at low temperatures and extremely low air pressure. Biological explanations are never 'the simplest', as there is no kind of geological formation that comes even close to the complexity of a single cell, nevermind the complexity of a multicellular organism.
This is an example of "proving too much". If Mars had plant life developed to the point of having stalks and visibly growing in macroscopic amounts over this time frame, we wouldn't be "debating" life on Mars because it would be plainly obvious that it has life, if life was that active.
This is why we discuss whether or not it has a micro-organism based ecology that it is hiding, rather than discussing whether or not it has forests that we just haven't found yet.
I've noticed this is one of the key signs you can use to identify cranks massively overfitting data about life being here or there.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust [2]: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/02/15/antarctic-ice-new...
Nope, there is no real chance to find fungi living at -50C to -70C, with no liquid water. There is no life on Earth that lives at such low temperatures, and there is no way for life as we know it to work without liquid water (or perhaps other liquid solvents, though that is highly speculative).
Also note, fungi in particular can't deal with extreme cold, the coldest I've read about any kinds of fungi living is ~0C. There are bacteria and other prokaryotes that survive at temperatures below that, but even then only at high pressures that allow liquid water to exist at very low temperatures - whereas Mars has extremely low pressure, much lower than anyone on the Earth's surface (Martian atmospheric pressure is comparable to Earth's upper atmosphere).
Whoa, imagine being the first human to eat alien mushroom stew.
I'm not sure I do. If we can eat it, it can eat us.
That reminds me of a passage from H.G. Wells's «The First Men In The Moon», where the narrator protagonist is so hungry that he can't help but take a bite out of some fungi-like lunar vegetation, and convinces his colleague Cavor to indulge in it as well... but the fungi happens to be psychoactive!
If anyone's interested, it's at the end of Chapter XI, «The Mooncalf Pastures», from the paragraph that begins “We roused ourselves...” onward: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1013/1013-h/1013-h.htm#chap1...
there was a link here or on reddit a few days ago studying the link between mushroom growth and the lightning. they claimed just using small electrical charges (1/billion of the power of a lightning) they could get up to %10 more growth
Even if it's not organic, they are pretty odd looking formations that I haven't seen on Earth in any inorganic way.
Nevertheless, the image on picture 30 looks like something that grew out of the ground because it's on a stem.
Can we discuss the merits of his claims instead?
As of this moment I'm operating under the impression Mars is teeming with shrooms.
The orbital photographs did't make much impact, since at that scale you can convince yourself all sorts of atmospheric and geological activity resembles life.
But the rover photographs comparing to puffballs and clearly showing stems in some cases, very convincing.
Edit: elsewhere in the comments it was pointed out that stems could easily be explained by blown away dust/sand after formation, without involving biological processes. Which is a very good point.
It's still fun to imagine a Mars covered in mushrooms however.
I don't like to do this because I would rather attack the evidence but for context, look at the author's history and other publications on researchgate as /bluenose69 pointed out. Read the wikipedia article on the "Journal of Cosmology". This author has a belief that there is life on Mars, and if it isn't puffballs like this paper, it is lichens, or stomatotites. Or suing NASA to examine a rock that was flipped by the wheel of Opportunity that the rock was alive and moved around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology
Can we discuss the merits of his claims instead?
I gave two examples above where the authors’ claims are very weak and explained by something that myself and others with an initial reading seems more plausible.
If you want to discuss the merits further that is fine but in my opinion it is a waste of time. I think you should post your opinions on the merits of the paper as well, I think, but I'm not certain and I could be wrong, that you'll wish you hadn't read the paper or taken the author seriously because we all have limited time and competing things that we find interesting.
It's safe to take this shortcut. The burden of *overwhelming" proof is on the author.
I'm also confused as to what evidence you would accept for proof of the claim that there are fungus-like things on Mars, if you don't accept pictures of them.
Further, scientific claims should be evaluated by scientists, not laymen. Since this person isn't even a scientist, actual scientists needn't deign to evaluate these claims.
This kind of papers are testament to the amount of data that we are bringing from Mars: multiple rovers with progressively better and better resolution cameras, and the orbiters.
As the amount of data coming from Mars will increase over the years we will see more such "creative" attempts to pick convenient subsets of this data and try to reach for conclusion.
But over time, I think, the wind will blow away the chaff and reveal real results, just like the marsian wind moves the sand around hiding and revealing pebbles at its surface.
https://youtu.be/_9ZGcKA_Vk4
Pretty confident to write this one off to be honest.
lmao @ website & valuation up top
funny thing to want to get rid of, you'd think the truth would be more valuable than that!
His personal website is a certified 100% pure gem as well
http://brainmind.com/publications.html
his chest hair's got some sparkly brilliance reflective index out of this world
don't ctrl+f "as for girls" on that page lmao
https://timecube.2enp.com/
Why do these people all try to fit it on one page? It seems to be a bit of a hallmark in this genre.
my other favorite crazy person website must be https://arngren.net/ -- see if you can find the hoverpod
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraphia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui
Still struggling with this...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9ZGcKA_Vk4
(come to think of it though, how does a story fall off of HN this quickly since there's no way to downvote?)
Can we discuss the merits of his claims instead?
My immediate hunch is that it might be some sort of liquid condensation which then freezes and merely resembles fungi (ie tiny hailstones) but even if wrong it's interesting.
I was so excited about these photos before seeing this. I'm kind of bummed.
That seems like the most likely explanation.