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[Astrid]

Pretty much as stated in the titlebar.

They found 'funguslike' life that grows and multiplies between rocks in protected areas. That stuff has even nested itself into the protected inner areas of the Rovers Oppurtunity and Curiousity.

Video with images in german: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzCT1Aq3g_Y

Plain wall of Text in English: http://journalofastrobiology.com/Mars5.html

//:Edit.
Finally got my hands onto a computer again and edit this. lol what a epic fail.
Learn from my mistakes kids. Never trust a youtuber even if he's been a creditable source for Years. in the end its only the money that counts for them and they WILL 'bend the story' for more views.

[Zangi]

So we brought that stuff over?

[Astrid]

Unconfirmed, i didnt read the wall of text completely yet.

I want to believe that it is Alien life.

Which means i will believe that it is Earth life brought over because of idiots until proven otherwise, because thats quite frankly more realistic.

[Jopax]

Getting high on mars shrooms hypeee

[Trekkin]

Unconfirmed, i didnt read the wall of text completely yet.

I want to believe that it is Alien life.

Which means i will believe that it is Earth life brought over because of idiots until proven otherwise, because thats quite frankly more realistic.

Maybe hold off on calling people idiots until you've actually read the article you're so excited about? Because it doesn't say what you think it says.

[Astrid]

Nahh, if you work on a multi million dollar machinery destined to go to other planets and fail to decontaminate it then the title is well deserved. Thats a LOT of tax money there.

[Madman198237]

Nahh, if you work on a multi million dollar machinery and fail to decontaminate it then the title is well deserved. Thats a LOT of tax money there.

Go ahead, you decontaminate a machine so thoroughly that you manage the complete removal of microbes that can survive in the vacuum and radiation of space and temperatures of several hundred Celsius WITHOUT damaging any of the electronics or control systems of your spacecraft and rover (and you must decontaminate ALL of the systems, or your work was basically for nothing).

NASA knows what they're doing, more so than people like to give them credit for. They've got problems, but don't assume that everything they do is wrong.

[Astrid]

I surely dont. As stated, i hope and expect that its geniue Alien life and that those people ARE the most competent avaible.

However. I stay a little pessimistic until further details come up.

[Telgin]

Even if it is just Earth life shown to be growing on Mars, that's still an interesting result.  Kind of a shame that questions of life on Mars can't really ever be conclusive until we're able to get people to Mars or get these samples back to Earth.

[Trekkin]

Right. Ultracrepidarian finger-pointing aside, the fact remains that the article is not reporting conclusive evidence of life on Mars. Its conclusions are that simulations indicate certain forms of fungus could survive on Mars under conditions on the surface as we understand them, similar modeling indicates life could have survived transfer from Earth to Mars via natural processes as well as space probes, and -- and this is the sole bit of new data -- a survey of biologists indicates a lot of them think that some of the stuff on the rovers (and on/in the rocks) looks like it might be fungus but might also be dirt. In other words, life on Mars is not ruled out, but it's mostly a literature review. You can write those on anything, and they are helpful, but they're not probative of anything, and neither is their primary research.

Funny enough, if you read their sidebar: "The possibility of life on Mars is an open question. Although there is evidence, evidence is not proof and there is no conclusive evidence of current or past life on the Red Planet."

The other clue, by the way, is that this is published in the Journal of Astrobiology and Space Science Review. That is not where you will find anything that can honestly be described as "life on Mars is found and confirmed." Check Science or Nature for that.

What we have here is a massive failure of reading comprehension, but sure, they're the idiots.

[Reelya]

We have too high an opinion of ourselves if we think that us sending probes is the only way microbes could get from here to Mars. Mars and Earth have already exchanged material in the part, and any Earth life on Mars could have come from e.g. space rocks blown out because of the impact that killed off the dinosaurs or even earlier.

[Trekkin]

We have too high an opinion of ourselves if we think that us sending probes is the only way microbes could get from here to Mars. Mars and Earth have already exchanged material in the part, and any Earth life on Mars could have come from e.g. space rocks blown out because of the impact that killed off the dinosaurs or even earlier.

Thankfully, the authors of the actual article do not think that.

One obvious source of life on Mars would be Earth. It is probable that solar winds striking, ejecting and propelling microbe-laden dust and debris in the stratosphere and mesosphere, deep into space (cf Arrhenius, 1908), and microbes dwelling in rock ricocheted into space from Earth by meteor strikes, have repeatedly contaminated Mars and other planets (Davies, 2007; Fajardo-Cavazosa et al. 2007; Hara et al. 2010; Melosh 2003; Mileikowsky et al. 2000; Schulze‐Makuch, et al. 2005) and vice-versa.

[scriver]

Well this is very interesting.

How unfortunate Bowie did not live to see this day.

[Astrid]

@ Trekkin

Yap. I stand at my points that they are idiots if it should come to light that living fungus is there because their Rovers brought them over, and then sell it as a 'life on Mars story'
given that i got the news from the video author above which so far was a very creditable person the failure of reading comprehension can be blamed on him because i hadnt had the time yet to
read that article.
But i might just be as much of an idiot because i linked it before checking and cross reference checking myself so, guilty as charged. *shrugs*

I guess i still trust people way to easily just because they had a history of good honest work. Aint gonna do that mistake twice.

[Trekkin]

Well, the authors' assessment of the competence of NASA engineers disagrees with your namecalling, and with good reason: the goal of decontamination is not, and should not be, to completely eliminate all risk of life on the probes, since the only way to ensure that is to not send a probe in the first place. The goal is effectively ALARA anyway, but from a microbial standpoint the rovers are about as survivable a way to reach Mars as Earth rocks ejected via meteor strikes or debris flung out of the upper atmosphere, as has been happening since life on Earth began. That's one of the points of section 4 of the paper: that natural processes repeatedly launch Earth life into the solar system anyway. Probe contamination is neither the only nor even the most likely way for Earth fungus to reach Mars.

tl;dr: relevant experts say "Nahh."

As for checking the paper, you really should, especially when it's open-access like this; you're at enough of a disadvantage by being outside the paywalls without taking a lay summary of a summary as accurate. Remember that every step from the authors to you goes through an implicit sensationalism filter; people don't make popular videos about the boring but vital results that refine what we already think we know, but an awareness of that research is important for putting results like these into the proper context. On a more meta level, it's not trivial to understand what, for lack of more precise terms, a given result changes about the scientific consensus without fiddly statistical analysis that would be nuts to do if you aren't being paid to do it; a more cursory examination can handle edge cases (like reviews), but for primary research, beware the conclusions of anyone who explains them to you in words, and definitely don't rely on argument from authority. That's how errors like this get so tenacious.