Life on Mars, and Missing Factors that Allows for Life on Mars!

Because so many fellow classmates have posted blog posts about the meteorite from Mars in Antarctica and its implications, and the possibility of Mars sustaining and retaining life, I shall also do one of my own in hopes to answer some of the questions they have left behind and come up with questions of my own! Life on Mars for us seems to be a highly skeptical topic, but for Penelope Boston, a scientist that has worked with extreme lifeforms on Earth, she has in fact very high hopes for discovering life on Mars! Here is a video of her point of view!

Despite her optimistic beliefs that there is 25-50% chance that there is life on Mars, I disagree with her claim that life is a "natural outgrowth of evolution of matter." Certainly this is the premier theory of life's origins but it is one that is barely supported. To assume that matter can evolve from a state of unawareness to self-awareness is like saying early, primitive computers can evolve their own artificial intelligence and self-awareness without the help of human programmers. Thus I would criticize that 'evolution' is probably the biggest understatement I've ever come across when it is used to define the transformation from inorganic chemistry to biological cells! I personally doubt that biochemists can create artificial life, especially without a full understanding of the requirements that fuel this process of changing nonliving matter into living matter. However, this does not mean that there is no life on Mars. Although Penelope Boston is highly confident in the chances of finding life on Mars(and she IS an expert on extreme organisms on Earth), I'd say that without knowing the process of how matter transforms from nonliving to living, it is impossible to say if Mars fits the requirements of such transformations. So even if Mars had the environment to sustain life, perhaps unfortunately Mars did not have the requirements to bring life into existence in the first place. Thus Mars' ability to support life does not have any relevance to Mars actually having/have had life existing on it! Of course, these assumptions of mine are based on the theory that life can only exist if they were transformed from nonliving matter to living matter on a specific planet. If astronomers are able to provide support for the case that life is seeded from one planet that is teeming with life, to another through meteorites and other modes of natural transportation, that may provide an adequate explanation if life on Mars is validated to be true. On the other hand, if it is ever conclusive that life is on Mars, another adequate explanation for such an event is that perhaps Mars met the requirements, whatever these requirements are, for life to transform from nonliving matter into self-aware living cells.

Another way of guessing if life was ever on Mars is by seeing if all factors that are required to sustain life (as we know it on Earth) is or was present on Mars. As Science-Nut pointed out on the "Is there Possibility for Life on Mars" blog entry, it seems that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field strong enough to protect the entire planet from solar winds, flares, and deadly meteoroids. Without a dense atmosphere, meteoroids of the same size would cause much deadlier explosions on Mars compared to Earth because Earth's atmosphere causes friction from dense molecules which may burn full meteoroids into crisp (shooting stars), or even reduce the meteoroids' size before it impacts the Earth's surface. Mars' lack of magnetic fields is actually an anomaly within our solar system. As this article from Nasa shows, Earth, "Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all have magnetospheres" and only Mercury's magnetic field is smaller than Earth's (and for good reason due to Mercury's relative size to Earth's!) Venus, which does not have a global magnetic field is an understandable exception due to the fact that magnets "lose magnetism" from exposure to heat. Being the hottest planet in the solar system, this allows Venus to pass the buck. However, Mars' climate is nowhere close enough to be understood in the same way as Venus. Recent studies provided in this article show a possible explanation: perhaps giant asteroids that impacted Mars in the past may have crippled the planet's magnetic field. On another note that has a more direct impact on question of life on Mars, is that this article also shows that recent data indicates that Mars' global magnetic field disappeared just when Mars became 500 million years old. This perhaps may decrease the chance of finding life on Mars greatly, be it dead remains and or existing life! Present studies (from this website) show that it took Earth about 1 billion years for the first lifeforms to form. This would mean that maybe before life ever existed on Mars, Mars lost its magnetic field which rendered the planet unlivable because solar winds would blow away the atmosphere of Mars and lethal solar radiation would hit the planet's surface mercilessly. 
Although I do hope that there is life on Mars, unfortunately present data indicates that there is more chance for Mars to only have nonliving matter than having life or remnants of life.

There is still so much about the nature of life that we as humans have no clue of. Our educated guesses unfortunately may still be distant from the actual truth of what is necessary for life to "evolve" from inorganic matter.