SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Is Life Its Own Worst Enemy?
from New Scientist
The twin Viking landers that defied the
odds to land on Mars in 1976 and 1977 had one
primary goal: to find life. To the
disappointment of nearly all concerned, the
data they sent back was a sharp dash of cold
water. The Martian surface was harsh and
antibiotic and there was no sign of life.
To two NASA scientists, James Lovelock and
Dian Hitchcock, this came as no surprise - in
fact, they would have been amazed to see any
evidence of life on Mars. A decade before
Viking, Lovelock and Hitchcock, both
atmospheric scientists, had used observations
of the Martian atmosphere to deduce that there
could be no life on the planet.
From their research arose one of the most
influential, ground-breaking scientific ideas
of the 20th century - the Gaia hypothesis,
named after the ancient Greek goddess of the
Earth, a nurturing "mother" of life. But is it
correct? New scientific findings suggest that
the nature of life on Earth is not at all like
Gaia.
Read
more...
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