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Life on Mars? We may have found it — and killed it
Tom Paulson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
We may have already encountered Martian life about 30 years ago and accidentally killed it, according to a new analysis of NASA’s Viking mission to Mars presented Sunday at a major astronomy conference in Seattle.
“It’s a plausible hypothesis that explains the Viking results quite well,” said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University who studies the interplay of microbes, water and geology. Schulze-Makuch spoke Sunday at the American Astronomical Society meeting, which continues through Wednesday in Seattle.
When the Viking 1 and 2 Mars Landers dropped onto the Martian surface in 1976 to look for signs of living creatures, the scientific consensus was that they had failed to find any.
But Schulze-Makuch and his German colleague, Joop Houtkooper of Justus Liebig University, argue that the failure could have been more about how the scientific community defined life at that time. Back then, the WSU researcher noted, the definition assumed that any form of life would be based on water.
“Life does need a solvent, because otherwise you would just be a rock,” Schulze-Makuch said Sunday. “But there is no reason the solvent always has to be water.”
(8 Jan 2007)
Grim prognosis for Earth
Peter Gorrie, Toronto Star
So far away, and yet so close.
It’s 2050.
…Up to one-third of the global population – about 9 billion in 2050 – lacks water. The shortages are worst in the areas of Asia and South America that get their supply from melting glaciers in the Himalayas and Andes mountain systems. Those rivers of ice have melted away.
Some parts of Earth, including much of Canada and Europe, get more rain, but others – notably southern Africa, Australia and the Mediterranean Basin – are parched by drought.
Mediterranean tourism has withered away; the beaches are blistering hot. But people flock to toasty warm northern Europe and Britain, where they can sit under palm trees and munch on locally grown olives.
And if it’s business as usual?
(3 Jan 2007)
The following scenario ties a lot of the threads of climate predictions together regarding future environmental refugees, US and global agriculture, the inuit, tourism, ocean life and so on.
-AF
The Big Question: How quickly are animals and plants disappearing, and does it matter?
Steve Connor, The Independent
As 2006 drew to a close, the polar bear was about to be classified as a threatened species by the United States Government. Melting Arctic sea ice could significantly reduce numbers of the world’s largest terrestrial carnivore over the next 50 years. And, just before Christmas, a 38-day search for the Yangtze River dolphin ended without finding a single member of the species. It is feared that the aquatic mammal may be the latest in a long line of extinct animals.
Extinction is as old as life on Earth – about 3.5 billion years – but scientists calculate that we are losing species at a rate of somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural “background” rate of extinction. This means that technically we are going through a period of “mass extinction”, the sixth that we know about over the hundreds of millions of years of the fossil record. But unlike the previous five mass extinctions, this one is largely caused by the actions of a single species – Homo sapiens.
…It has happened before, so why worry?
There are several reasons we should be concerned. The first is that in the past it has taken life on Earth between 10 million and 100 million years to recover from a mass extinction. The second is that for all our technology, we still rely on the delicate ecological balance of the natural world for our survival. The Earth’s biodiversity provides us with clean air, drinking water, food and even new drugs – upsetting it too much could cause the collapse of this vital life-support system.
The third reason is philosophical. If we conserve works of art, why should we not also conserve nature? The extinction of a humble beetle is no less important than the wilful destruction of a Rembrandt or a Picasso?
(2 Jan 2007)
