February 13, 2005

robert casey wrote:

Thomas Lee Elifritz wrote yet another troll:

But I'll feed the troll anyway.....

I'm not trolling, I'm absolutely serious.

The Mars rovers are not equipped with microscopes
good enough to see microbes. Also remember that
Earth did not have multicelluar life until about
600 million years ago. Which means that life on
Earth was single cell for 2 billion years. Which
suggests that it's hard for life to make that
jump, and maybe Mars life (if there is any) never
did that jump. All we can say with the rovers is that
we haven't seen any spiders on Mars, or turtles, but
we can't tell one way or another about microbes, alive
or fossil.

Actually, that's simply not true.

Cells were symbiotic long before then, organized stromatolites,
sponges, invertrebrates, etc, and multicellar specialization
appeared very quickly after climatic stresses were self induced
on the ecosystem by iron oxidation and oxygen accumulation.
Mitochondia and ribosomes even the nucleus were basically
specialized cells incorporated by other cells.

We are just now finding out now how the fossil record
of dna decoded organic chemistry actually proceeded,
and since the chemical and environmental conditions on
Mars were much different than the Earth, we can expect
that the decoding of geochemistry proceeded in very
different directions. I believe we are seeing evidence
of this, but without any spectroscopy, it's hard to tell.

The climate on Earth was very stable for 2 billion years.

You simply haven't done your homework, why even comment?

We are very clearly seeing fossil evidence in these images.

Thomas Lee Elifritz
http://elifritz.members.atlantic.net