"Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars.

What they believe to be a lake sits under the planet's south polar ice cap, and is about 20km (12 miles) across.

Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day..."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44952710

i wish that they would find life on mars

just hoping that they dont bring any kind of super pathogen to earth lol.

It is very unlikely life will be found as long as the search is for Earth life. There are many places in the solar system that could potentially have life, but it would not be the same organisms that live here. In our arrogance, we believe we know everything and that Earth is the template for the universe.

Before anyone rebuts with, "But science tells us ..." When I was in primary school it was scientific fact that light is the basis of life. Light makes it possible for plants to grow and plants make animals possible by be food got the animals. Without light there can be no life. When I was in middle school we told that scientific fact was wrong. When it became possible to study the ocean flood, an entire ecosystem with plants and animals was found living in an oceanic trench where there is never any light. !!! The energy powering the ecosystem is heat from volcanic vents.


The bottom line is life will never be found until we stop looking for earth life and start looking for life that has evolved on the particular world being searched.


Myself, I would like to see what might be on Titan's land and in its sky, rivers and lakes.

i am fond of Europa, i would like to see if there were macroscopic life beings. like an inch in size and bigger.
i am believer when it comes to life at our solar system, i wouldn't be surprised if future space programs found life at other planets/moons.

Agreed. Seems to me that humans might not even be able to recognize "Life" out there as being something "alive". We're probably looking at this all wrong.

isn't there life on Venus?
(seriously, microorganisms and such)

It's rather comical that Fred Hoyle, who postulated and then was proved largely right about Nucleosynthesis in Stars (the production of heavier elements from Hydrogen and Helium but was such an old fuddy duddy he resisted the Cosmic Egg and coined the term "Big Bang" to be derogatory. He was apparently convinced our Universe is Steady State all the way up until his death in the 2001. Yet this conservative staid old man wrote an amazingly open and creative piece of Science Fiction regarding our anthropomorphic view of what constitutes Life and blew it completely apart in The Black Cloud. It still hasn't passed smoothly into mainstream thought but it is also entirely possible that Life is something our Universe "just does" and is ubiquitous almost everywhere. To take it to an extreme it is possible that stars themselves have some sort of Life, since they most certainly have Life Cycles.

I think it is highly likely our terminology of "Extremophiles" will be extended repeatedly. This is why it is so incredibly important we send men to Mars. The deeper understanding of the Processes of Life will change literally everything, perhaps the most pragmatic applications being in medicine but extending well into Science, Philosophy and even Religion. It is a very Big Deal and we really need to know..

Life is made up of what ever components make up that planet...Life on Earth resembles the Earth, therefore life on other planets will resemble that planets makeup...gaseous planets could = gaseous lifeforms etc... The possibilities are endless, could even be life that our senses cannot detect (see, hear, touch etc...).

I am of the opinion that life is as abundant as the universe.

Possibly/likely: https://www.popularmechanics.com/spa...enus-for-life/

^ ok.
i thought it was long considered proven, but it seems to be a long-standing theory at best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Venus
- however, i agree that most scientists are way too anthropocentric in their ways of looking at space - no imagination.

On the contrary most scientists are dreamers many of whom got into science exactly because of their early romance with science fiction. This is what stimulates them, motivates them to search and explore. It's just that for scientist's that exploration requires charting what you discover.

Currently humans know of no other lifeform other than carbon-based that depends on DNA to reproduce/replicate and water to sustain it. Since we know that best that has the best odds of being able to recognize any new lifeform at this time. Our Chemistry knowledge that comprehends how different atoms can combine shows that it is possible for silicon to combine in ways similar to carbon and thus could possibly be an avenue for quite different forms of life, but until we actually find an example we are on shaky ground there.

Scientists, especially research scientists, are highly imaginative but they are also disciplined enough to hopefully to keep that out of equations as much as possible lest they risk heading off into fantasy land.

well i don't know all scientists personally, so i can't really say if "they" have imagination or not.
sorry for that.
btw, i meant "earth-centric" really, not "human-centric".
as was outlined in this thread (and many sci-fi novels): would we even (be able to) recognize life in space?
maybe even our definition of "life" is limited to this planet, or humanity. though persdonally i do believe in it.

LOL well ondoho I don't think anyone knows "all scientists" but we don't have to. The evidence is all around and not just from interviews, biographies and such. Scientists, especially research scientists, in my experience tend to have imaginations orders of magnitude greater than engineers who tend to be the pragmatic type, yet consider events and items all around us, even right in front of you. One example I'm sure everyone is familiar with, even if only thanks to Tom hanks, was the Apollo 13 debacle when an oxygen tank exploded and an improvised set of solutions was needed to keep them alive. That, my friend, took imagination and creativity as well as technical expertise.

However I don't disagree with you about life in our Universe. I strongly suspect Life is ubiquitous since we know that even just based on Us, the organic molecules that make us up are essentially everywhere, even in the remnants of exploded star's gas clouds. I, like so many others, am just waiting "for the second shoe to drop" to lend a degree of reality to speculation. Mars may well be wearing that shoe.

ah, it's a comparison.
well, maybe they are relatively imaginative if you compare them to engineers...


i don't know; look at the vast space that is the universe, or even our galaxy; what are the chances that the answers are so close?
i might be a believer, but i'm also a realist. some simple math, some probability, how long it takes for signals to travel... isn't it likely that our galaxy (not our solar system) is teeming with life, and we just lack the means to see it?

Discussions like this always remind me of something J. R. R. Tolkien wrote about his first experience with the Finnish language. He'd been mad about languages since childhood, but all the ones he knew (English, German, French, Latin, Gothic) were Indo-European. Finnish is an agglutinative Uralic language which is constructed in a quite different way. It made him realise that much of what he thought of as "language" was just the Indo-European way of doing language.

He was so fascinated by Finnish that he invented a language with the same structure. It became Quenya (High Elven). Then he created a world where that language could be spoken. So without the huge differences between Indo-European and Ural-Altaic languages, we probably wouldn't have Middle Earth or the whole literary genre of high fantasy.

The first non-terrestrial lifeforms that we discover are going to be our "Finnish". Once we've taken on board the differences, we will at last know what is really necessary for life and what is merely the terrestrial way of doing life. Then we shall be much better placed to recognise other types of life elsewhere. I just hope I live to see it.