It was known as the silly season once upon a time, when newspapers during the news dead summer months gave more than usual prominence to stories about flying saucers and other entertaining distractions. Serious news now continues right around the year both locally and globally, so there may have been some surprise that newspapers around the world should have carried on their front pages reports of, possible evidence of life on Mars. The evidence arises from detailed scientific analysis of a meteorite, found in Antarctica in 1984, and believed to have "fallen" from Mars some 10,000 or 15,000 years earlier. The scientists believe that they have discovered fossilised remnants of very basic single celled organisms, possibly resembling primitive bacteria, in the substance of the meteorite. The techniques used to make these discoveries, including electron microscopy and laser mass spectrometry, have only become available in the last few years. To the lay observer unfamiliar with their potential they are almost as exciting as the story itself, so are the cross disciplinary skills the researchers brought to their task and the rigorous standards of proof they have set, which were vividly conveyed at yesterday's press conference in Washington.
The significance of the discovery - if the evidence stands up to further scientific examination - has more to do with science and the origins of life than with any kind of social or political considerations as to how life as we know it is now lived: It says nothing about life on Mars now, several billion years after the single celled organisms might have evolved there when the planet was climatically much more supportive of basic life forms than it is today. The likelihood is that any life which might once have existed on Mars is now extinct.
There has for a long time been a scientific consensus that there must be life elsewhere in the universe and that, within this solar system, the likeliest of the planets to have sustained life forms, apart from Earth, was Mars. Scientists from the North American Space Administration, whose work in association with other scientific bodies has produced the evidence available from the meteorite, must have been disappointed when the Viking surface probe of Mars in the late 70s failed to find any evidence of life there. They, and the scientific community at large, will have reason to feel vindicated by this new evidence.
No doubt the further probes of the Martian surface which are planned by NASA to start in November may now be modified to see if there is any evidence in surface rocks on the planet to substantiate the findings in the meteorite. Even if they do, however, the evidence will do nothing to bolster the many Hollywood myths of the alien "red planet" and Martian invaders of Earth. It might help our understanding of how primitive life forms on this, or other, planets could have emerged from the primordial slime billions of years ago. That is not the stuff of the silly season it is, as President Clinton said yesterday, a far reaching and awe inspiring demonstration of modern science in action.