The evidence is mounting that there never has been any life on Mars.
Here is a Yahoo! article at:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/science/story.html?s=v/ap/
19990720/sc/mars_research_2.html
which reports that although through NASA's Mars Global Surveyor images
"We know the topography of Mars better than we know the topography of
Earth", the mission "has yet to produce any evidence that life could ever
exist on Mars."
Not only is there no evidence of life, but "An instrument that studies the
composition of surface minerals has so far found no rocks from which the
building blocks of life could develop".
One can see a pattern developing in exobiology that is already well-
develped in Earth-based origin of life studies: "Things that we thought
would be the precursors of life have not shown up."
Steve
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Yahoo! News Science Headlines
Tuesday July 20 6:20 AM ET
Mars Researchers Hear Surveyor Data
AP Photo
Full Coverage
Mars Global Surveyor
By MATTHEW FORDAHL AP Science Writer
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - The latest images from NASA's Mars Global
Surveyor portray a climatically diverse yet lifeless planet - a place where a
mountain soars 17 miles high and a canyon plunges 11 miles deep.
More than 350 researchers gathered in Pasadena on Monday at a conference
to discuss the findings of Surveyor, which began mapping the planet in March
and will do so for 687 days, a full Martian year.
The Surveyor mission has yet to produce any evidence that life could ever
exist on Mars. An instrument that studies the composition of surface minerals
has so far found no rocks from which the building blocks of life could develop,
said Arden Albee, Surveyor's project scientist and organizer of the Fifth
International Conference on Mars.
"Things that we thought would be the precursors of life have not shown up, "
he said.
But four months into the mission, scientists say they have acquired the most
accurate picture of any planet in the solar system.
"We know the topography of Mars better than we know the topography of
Earth, " Albee said.
The $250 million spacecraft already has found that Mars is shaped like a
pear, its mountainous southern half nearly two miles higher than its flat
northern hemisphere. Its surface has the highest, lowest and smoothest land
forms found in the solar system.
"We are seeing a very interesting planet in that we have no idea of how it got
into that form, " said David Smith of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md., principal investigator for the instrument that measures the
planet's elevations.
Smith's instrument, known as a laser altimeter, has never been used to
systematically measure all of Earth's continents, although such a mission is
planned for the future.
The Surveyor altimeter will re-scan the same areas to find out how those
regions have changed. Researchers hope to learn more about how the
planet's ice caps grow as well as its weather patterns.
A landing site for the next Mars probe, which arrives in December, will be
determined over the next few months using Surveyor data.
[...]
Copyright (c) 1996-1999 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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"It is not surprising that large evolutionary innovations are not well
understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether
any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any. Because
they are difficult, evolution has occupied billions, not hundreds of
thousands of years." (Wesson R.G., "Beyond Natural Selection," [1991],
MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1994, reprint, p206)
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