Recently posted at CNN

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"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

Hmm... I think it takes a bit of a leap in imagination to apply the logic of permafrost drilling on Earth to deduce life forms on Mars.

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By asking questions we sometimes get the wrong answers, from wrong answers we learn to ask the right questions.

Its CNN what does one expect? :P

If I were the author of the article I would just suggest that this would give a place for ancient bacteria that could just be in suspeneded animation.

I didn't notice the author of the article suggesting much more than that. In fact, I don't see anything particularly wrong with the article. Nowhere did it say that this discovery proves that there is life on Mars.

I think the only link to mars is the argument that the specific ice structures in the permafrost are similar or analogous to other structures expected or imaged on mars. While it is not proof of life on mars, it illustrates a possible hiding spot for life already extant when the freezing began.

I wonder... Some theories think that mars captures small asteroids as moon that ultimately spiral in and crash, leaving elongated craters. I wonder if a large enough impact might warm up the martian regolith (locally, or even globally) to a point that such frozen bacterial colonies might experience a short renaissance. Might life survive and expand on mars periodically from and during these resurgent evolutions? Compare this with our evolution theories that consider the same process to be exticintion level events when occuring on earth.

__________________
"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax