Batfink what does arrogance have to do with anything? And do you want facts, or speculation?
The fact is we know we don't know enough to say with certainty that there is or isn't any life out there, whether similar to ours or not. IOW there aren't enough data points to do much more than speculate.
e.g. There have been clouds of dust or crystals out in the rings around Saturn that acted like living organisms' heredity.
There's this sound byte floating on the net (I think I only had a copy of it on my HDD that crashed recently) of a sound NASA picked up, I forgot where, which sounds like something Sci-Fi movies use when they want to depict some alien radio transmission.. It's not fake and neither has NASA denied they found it as it is (sounding "alien") nor have they given any info about it.
Right here on Earth, people mostly can't prove or disprove that computer "intelligence" does or doesn't satisfy the criteria for sentience and/or life...
Statisticaly, either we're unique in the whole universe, which must be one of the smallest odds you can make with respects to anything in the cosmos.. Or we aren't, and somewhere out there are at least a few other forms of life. The odds are that there's a ton of em - IIRC even with one in a billion odds for life as we've got it here, there's still a billion planets out there where it's happened. But that's already speculation.
And all this is (even the assertion that just our point of view, and even our own creation (AI) will probably have a point of view we couldn't have come up with ourselves. Nevermind what the "point of view" of an alien somewhere out there would be. Anything we posit will be true only in the universe as we imagine it. That's a matter of metaphysics.
As far as we know, we could be anything from
brains in space or dreaming all this like in the Matrix, or AI-like simulations on some guy's science project, or artifacts in three of the universes 6 or 10 or 20 dimensions... or, as far as we know, the acceleration of the universe's expansion is in fact time turning into space (i.e. the universe shifting into 4 space dimensions and 0 time dimension) which would explain why the space seems to be expanding as it has and is... There's so many competing explanations for it all that at this point betting on any of them seems as good as playing the lottery.
Now personaly, I don't think Mars had life. IIRC Mars dried off too soon for life, as we've had it here, to evolve as far as it has here. In other words it might have happened, but not beyond the goo stage, I think.
Mars wouldn't even have had to have been particularily hospitable, considering the current track record of extremophiles:
* up to 113°C
* down to -18°C (metabolizing), far less in dormant state
* down to pH 0
* up to pH 11
* without Sun
* up to 1.5 Megarads
* in salty waters up to salt saturation
* in Chernobyl nuclear reactor
* up to 1000 bars
* close to vacuum
Not too long ago there was a report that some rock off from Mars that had landed here carried some stuff which IIRC was part of the chemical pathway for genesis.
But then again equaly significant chemicals have been found in rocks floating in outer space, as well as being produced by stars, and (I think) similar compounds have also been seen out there in the freezing voids, so once again there's not just one plausible explanation.
Another thing that most people probably don't know about is the almost omnipresence of water in the solar system. Pretty much every body in our system has it:
Mercury (3.5% of its trace atmosphere), Venus (atmospheric), Earth (everywhere), Mars (poles & subsurface), Jupiter (atmospheric), Saturn (atmospheric), Uranus (atmospheric), Neptune (atmospheric), Pluto (thick ice mantel), Ceres (60+ km deep surface)... Probably about as common in the rest of the smaller moons and objects. It just isn't in liquid form (for sure) anywhere else than here on Earth and a few other places.. That's the Goldilocks zone which one of Gliese 581's planets was supposed to be in.
Copyright Joel Poncy.
But back on topic, a general rule of thumb is that we aren't special, nor is our planet, or the time or conditions we live in; we're somewhere near the middle of the bell distribution curve in terms of most things. Being the first or last in the whole universe to have life would be a pretty unlikely thing by all accounts.
edit- I think if our solar system is what's needed for life, we're nearer the beginning than the end of the goldilocks time window - there's more time left for suns like ours to live than there has been yet.
Originally posted by Slash27
Lots of intresting "formations" on Mars.
E.G. ?
