> WOW! This is wonderful!!!
...
> One member of the discovery team, Zare, a professor of chemistry at
> Stanford University, said this could be a first step in answering the
> ages-old question of whether people are alone in the universe and to
> what extent life is unique to Earth. The meteorite and the recent
> discoveries of planets around other stars, he said, are changing
> thinking "from life being special to life being ubiquitous."
i think that this is the most telling comment in the whole article, as
well as the most important implication of this find (which i too am
very excited about).
think what this means, logically, if the find is verified:
1. scientists have believed for decades that the only other planet in
our solar system that might have been capable of sustaining life as
we know it was mars.
2. scientists believed in the past that the genesis of life (all those
primordial soup and auto-generation theories) was either an extremely
likely or extremely unlikely event, given the proper set of
circumstances. (i've found that this assessment was dependent more upon
a given scientist's religious and social slant than upon the
evidence. <sigh>)
3. we find evidence of life on mars.
4. that's two for two in our solar system. (probably <grin>)
5. what does that say about the frequency of auto-generation now...?
the statement, "captain, it's an M-class planet with a oxygen/nitrogen
atmosphere", will never be looked at or laughed at in the same way
again.
joe