Mars previous life?: methane in Mars rocks (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 18, 2015, 19:39 (3245 days ago) @ David Turell

But what does it mean? Crushed Mars rock yields methane and C02, but that is not proof life was there, but it could have been. Why bring it up. Well some folks point to religion as expecting that the Earth is very special. My view is that this solar system is special, so life on Mars does not argue against the existence of God:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/there-s-methane-in-them-thar-martian-rocks/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20150618-"The experiment involved the careful, machine-controlled, step-by-step crushing of small samples of meteorites, with any gaseous products passed into a mass spectrometer at each step. What came out of the crushing included methane, carbon-dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen and traces of oxygen and argon. This mechanical extraction avoided any need to heat up the samples, which could have initiated new chemical reactions. The researchers also studied a range of meteorite samples - including non-Martian ones - as well as a series of basalt 'blanks', or neutral control samples.-"The debate is likely to continue, but these results seem to support the idea that somewhere on Mars, there have been, and perhaps still are, environments that are perfectly good for nurturing life as we know it."