If Mars had life?

Question

Where is it?
If the planet had life there should be an abundance of evidence.
Take earth for example there is harldly a square inch of planet surface that is devoid of some life of some sort.
If life was was die out today and you came back in 500 million years you would find a wealth of evidence that life existed at one time.
Accept the fact there is no life on Mars no matter how much you wish to will it to be and how closely you search.
Wishful thinking.

Answer 1

this isn't a question. if you want to express your opinion, start a blog, don't post a "question" on a Q&A site.

if the planet had life, that doesn't necessarily mean there would be an abundance of life. just because earth has an abundance of life doesn't mean that all planets would. also, someone mentioned that the continents moved from a large continent called pangea in 250 million years to their current positions. he is right. if life died out right this instant and there was nothing to keep it from being eroded way and whatnot, then the only evidence of life would be FOSSILS. we can't possibly explore every cubic inch of mars, especial since the rovers don't dig. if we were to actually find anything, it would be underground.

of course Mars does not currently have life on it, but you don't know that Mars at one time did not have life. of course it would be easier to just assume there wasn't and move on with life, but people have a tendency of wanting the truth. when you send a probe to Mars and explore at least one third of the entire planet without finding signs of life, then I will accept that Mars never had life on it. until then, we continue to wonder, and people that state things so bluntly aren't going to change our opinions.

just accept the fact you don't know everything, and it's hard to prove things wrong, when you yourself know nothing of what you're proving wrong.

Answer 2

What are you talking about a "wealth of evidence"? If this were true then we wouldn't still be finding lost cities in the rainforests, and we wouldn't still be finding hidden cities in the deserts of the Middle East. Also if all life died off on the Earth then in 500 million years there wouldn't be anything left. It only took 250 million years for all the continents to separate themselves from Pangea and move into the places they are now. If that amount of physical change can happen to our continents in just 250 million years then how could there still be evidence of humans on this planet let alone other life? One thing people don't realize is that the Earth was here before there was life on it and that it will be here long after all living things on it have long since vanished.

Answer 3

We have not looked carefully enough at Mars yet to confidently say that no life currently exists, no more than we can say whether or not it is technologically feasible to grow inexpensive diamond wafers for future semi-conductor devices.

I think it is highly likely life existed on Mars at one time, (simply because it appears to have developed quickly on Earth, so why not there on Mars during the first few hundred million years when there was decent temperature and surface pressure and water?) If it exists still in some form it will be something like the colonies chemotrophic bacteria that live fairly deep in the Earth's crust. (See Wiki article on endolithic extremophiles).

Beyond this, exotic (non-Earthlike) biochemistries could support some form of life nearer the surface, however I don't think we understand even how terrestrial life works well enough to scientifically speculate to the likelihood of exotic ill-defined metabolisms on a planet whose environment we don't understand well yet.

Still, to rule out the existence of all life just because Mars' atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium (unlike ours) and there are not clear sheets of vegetation is naive. Only very subtle life exists in certain harsh environments even here on Earth.

Example: The Antarctic ice sheet exhibits little clear evidence for life once one gets a few 10s of miles from the coast. Careful experimentation would find some of the simple life forms (see Obligate psychrophiles below) that actually make a living in the surface snow. I am not confident that these ice sheet indigenous bacteria would have been detected by any of the experiments sent to Mars so far since at those incubation temperatures, these guys would have died. (As opposed to random bacterial spores blown there from more hospitable parts of the world; I am sure many of these would have flourished in the Viking experiment conditions.)

There may well be an abundance of evidence on Mars if you literally dig deeply enough, unfortunately searches for life on Mars suffer from a paucity of investigation. When life searching experiments have taken core drills deep into the Martian crust (deep enough to get near geologically hot spots where liquid water and chemical energy imbalances exist) in several places and come up empty, then I will begin to feel confident saying there is no life on Mars. Until then, from a scientific perspective, the jury is out.

Answer 4

most people have accepted the fact that there is no life on mars. if there is its either under the surface or at the top and bottom of the planet, i heard that they were frozen? i could be wrong?

Answer 5

I agree with you. Mars is lifeless.

Answer 6

may be
http://www.2xmoinscher.com/edito/context.asp?context=imgPerso&img=%2FDATA%2Fimgperso%2F766445%5FMISC%5F130640%5F5%2EJPG
http://metaluna.miniville.fr/