There's been much media hype recently about methane found in Mars' atmosphere by NASA probes. The presence of methane on the planet, according to what I've read, is significant in and of itself because, as one blogger put it, "Methane is not stable in Mars’ atmosphere: it goes away rapidly. So there must be a source of it that is making methane now, actively." Furthermore, the presence of the gas detected seems to change from time to time and from place to place, meaning that whatever is producing it is also changing, possibly according to seasonal/rotational/what-have-you changes on the planet.
Pretty exciting. Of course, the media is in a frenzy, putting headlines like "Life on Mars" on publications and implicating "alien bugs" farting and other such unsubstantiated nonsense. And for the time being, these wild allegations are just that: nonsense. Methane can be made in a number of different ways, and with what we know so far about Mars (which, let's remember, is extremely little) there are plenty of options as to how a gas that's associated with volcanic and biological activity on Earth could be produced on a very different planet. Volcanoes, at least as we know them, are right out, since the other gases released in volcanic eruptions and such haven't been found on Mars, but there's still a lot to learn about how their geology differs from ours. Aside from volcanoes, however, there's plenty we don't know about the chemistry taking place under the surface of the planet, and the chance that methane could be being produced by the interaction of other substances that we haven't been privy to just yet. And, of course, there is the remote but very real possibility that there is some form of living being burping and farting and decaying away somewhere on Mars in substantial enough numbers to be contributing its gaseous waste to the atmosphere.
Most scientists and science enthusiasts out there are quick to caution us that the biological option is the least likely to be true, given that there is very little and very salty water (in the form of ice) on Mars. And it has long been held that life is only possible where there is abundant oxygen and water, as there is on Earth. Scientists have acknowledged that perhaps life is possible in other conditions, but given that we would know very little about how that would work, it's safest not to hypothesize.
I say, why WOULDN'T life be able to exist in other conditions, and the very vastness of our universe seems to point to that idea. Granted, we haven't found it yet, but we've been spending our time looking for it exclusively on planets like our own, under the assumption that it can't exist elsewhere.
I understand the need to narrow down the search, since we can't well try to examine every planetary object out there, but I think limiting ourselves to the idea that life is only possible on Earth-like bodies is, well, limiting. Who says there's not some species out there on some dark rock that exists entirely by consuming plutonium? WE don't know. We're making a very rigid and binding set of assumptions that, despite all our resarch and speculations, we know virtually nothing about. And those assumptions are based upon our own experiences, which take up a fraction of the experiences available in the universe so small it probably can't even be calculated. Those assumptions, therefore, statistically speaking, have to be considered ridiculously invalid. They're like a baby assuming that everything in the world is fuzzy, because its eyesight hasn't yet developed fully, or like a deep sea fish assuming that all the world is darkness. Not necessarily bad assumptions, but still completely WRONG.
And here's the thing: we should know better. Not so very recently, scientists have discovered living organisms living ON EARTH completely independently of the sun, in the absence of water, and even with very limited access to oxygen! If they can live HERE under such circumstances, why would they not be able to do so elsewhere?
Seriously.
Entire communities of species hitherto unknown to science have been found - long ago enough to have been filmed by BBC film crews and subsequently studied - living in the deepest parts of the ocean (The Mariana Trench near Guam, and on extremely deep-water "volcanos" spewing superheated water into the ocean) and in caves completely cut off from sunlight. Some quite advanced living creatures have been found in these supposedly inhospitable environments, surviving on colonies of bacteria that subsist on acids and sometimes even rock. They did not depend on reliable sources of oxygen or sunlight, and some went without water entirely. Not exactly our idea of normal life, but it exists, right now, on our very own planet, which just goes to show what we know.
So, let's say things on Mars are very different from here. WE couldn't live there. But there's nothing -NOTHING- to say that nothing can.
So, basically, all I'm trying to say is that David Bowie is in fact right, there IS Life on Mars, and he knows it because he is actually a god from outer space.
Hah! Betcha didn't see that coming!
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