Megan Garber relays the latest findings on whether life is possible on Mars:
[T]he answer is probably most definitely not. And that’s because Mars, it seems, has no methane. Or, at least, the Curiosity rover that’s been tooling around the surface of the Red Planet for more than a year, taking measurements of the air and the soil, has found no methane. And that means, essentially, that life as we know it does not — cannot — exist on the planet. Methane is the byproduct of microbial respiration; no methane, basically, no microbes. “It just isn’t there,” Dr. Sushil K. Atreya, a member of Curiosity’s science team, told The New York Times.
Bill Andrews adds:
It’s surprising but not shocking, since there was already so much confusion about the methane levels. (Plus a fair amount of controversy, since anything that has to do with extraterrestrial life often leads to emotional rather than rational discussion.) It’s possible the previous findings were accurate, and that some unknown process has destroyed or removed the methane (such as a dust devil creating an electric field that zaps away the gas), but there’s no evidence to support this.
So it looks like reports of underground life on Mars have been greatly exaggerated. To be sure, the odds of Mars currently hosting life were never enormous, but now they’re that much lower. (But still not zero!)
The Dish 