Star Mars

Star Mars

Since the boom in space technology about 30 years ago, man has found the method for expanding his existence beyond the many once thought "unbreakable barriers." Together with this development in space technology came a large quantity of information and discoveries of the compounds of the universe, and scientific questions seemed to jump out in equal number. The question that captures the eye of the media today causing a bitter controversy is probably the most easy to understand, considering the complex astronomy jargon. Is life possible on Mars? The fact is we still don't know. "Some of the early arguments we now know to be almost certainly erroneous, but even the most recent pieces of evidence do not unambiguously demonstrate the existence of life on

Mars." ( Sagan and Shklovskii 273)

Some scientist believe man should look up in the sky searching for new habitats for future generations, since human kind today seems to be going backwards in many aspects of the earth's ecology. The first attempt would be to study the moon; the second, our neighbor planet. Unfortunately, our actual technology slightly provides strong, useful information about the red planet because of the vast distance between us.

While people such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas try to convince us with hundred million dollar movies that we are not alone, engineers and geologists like from the NASA-Stanford University team pursue, based on true evidence, the idea of possible life on Mars. However, the burden of proof is sometimes too heavy even based on real evidence. The tough debate started on

August 1996, when scientists from the NASA-SU team announced that a meteorite found on the Antartica contained evidence of past life on the red planet. They supported their conclusion on the basis of organic molecules, carbonates, and minerals found inside the rock, which are basic components of living things.

This announcement astonished the world, but not the critics who skeptically stated opposite explanations for each of the components discovered. The main discussion focused by critics like Allan Treiman arguing that "This scientist have lowered the standards of evidence rather than raised them, which is what you would expect for a claim this extraordinary." (qtd. in Begley and Rogers

58) The problem raises when it is proved that those kinds of minerals and organic molecules found in the meteorite, which fell from Mars about 13,000 years ago, can also be formed during nonbiological reactions such as very high temperatures. For us, the common magazine readers, it is difficult to deal with these two positions: the final acceptance of extraterrestrial life, which is the