Right Wing Nut House

In an exclusive report, Space.Com is reporting that two NASA scientists have told space officials that they have strong evidence that life currently exists on Mars.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

Methane is a waste gas that some biological organisms give off when processing food. Such gas was discoverd by Dr. Stoker when she and a group of scientists made a trip to one of the most inhospitable places on earth to harbor life: The Rio Tinto River in Spain.

Stoker told her private audience Sunday evening that by comparing discoveries made at Rio Tinto with data collected by ground-based telescopes and orbiting spacecraft, including the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, she and Lemke have made a very a strong case that life exists below Mars’ surface.

The two scientists, according to sources at the Sunday meeting, based their case in part on Mars’ fluctuating methane signatures that could be a sign of an active underground biosphere and nearby surface concentrations of the sulfate jarosite, a mineral salt found on Earth in hot springs and other acidic bodies of water like Rio Tinto that have been found to harbor life despite their inhospitable environments.

Scientists call these organisms “Extremophiles” because they exist in extreme environments. Thousands and thousands of new species of bacteria are being discovered in some really unbelievable places like 2 miles underground or in the permafrost of the Arctic. Since the bulding blocks of life-amino acids, and simple proteins-seem to be extremely plentiful in the Universe, scientists are coming to the remarkable conclusion that wherever life can exist, it will.