The Black Vault

Space Forensics Might Point to a Martian Ancestry Analysis
by Ray Villard
Sat Mar 26, 2011 06:03 PM ET

Our search for life beyond Earth could take us down the road to a shocking look into the mirror -- a climax straight out of a Twilight Zone plot.

A team of researchers at MIT is proposing to apply forensic science testing on the Martian surface. Specifically, the task would be to do DNA and RNA sequencing on Martian microbes (if they exist) to see if they share a common genetic origin with us.

This addresses the novel question of panspermia -- that we are descended from Mars life that migrated to Earth. Such testing could also offer key insights into how serious a risk Martian microbes would present to human colonists.

The MIT team led by Christopher Carr and Maria Zuber (head of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences) and Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, are proposing to build an instrument to send to Mars and test for extraterrestrial genomes.

Despite the numerous landers and rovers we've sent already, the only surface biology experiments were carried out in a bold but premature effort in 1976 aboard the trailblazing NASA Viking landers. The confusing results from these tests remain controversial and ambiguous today.

Invaders From Space

Such a mini-forensics lab would test the hypothesis that life on Earth may have come from Mars. The Martians didn't arrive in spaceships, but microbes hitchhiking aboard meteorites blasted off Mars by ancient impacts. After millions of years in space, the meteorites would fall onto Earth and the microbes adapt to a new home.



There's another pic at the site that I couldn't get to paste right on here. You will see it at the beginning of the article.

To read the rest, click below:

http://news.discovery.com/space/space-f ... 10326.html

and how cool..and how hilarious how people might think the idea that we might be related to Mars is new..
I know you (as well as most around here) know it's not a new idea.
But how cool to able to confirm it or rule it out more clearly.

I know..I got a good laugh at the "new" idea. When I heard this idea years ago, it made me think of Genesis and the Garden of Eden. The Bible talks about 1000 years is like a blink of an eye to God. And God took 6 days to create the universe and everything else, so it could literally have been a few billion years in the making.

With that belief in mind, what if we originally were living on Mars, millions of years ago, in the "Garden of Eden" and were cast out (to Earth) in a new form (God changed our form and limited our lifetimes) never to return to Mars because the Creator blasts Mars into a lifeless planet.

Now, here we are in our new forms (human), living away from Eden never being able to go back there to the way it was, and just roaming this Earth all the while destroying it. In the meantime, we have such a desire to go to Mars and trying to "reconnect" to a past that may, or may not have, existed.

Is it so strange to consider that the black plague may have been delivered via a meteor impact?

panspermia doesn't name a specific place of origin for whatever fertalized our planet, not really a big deal, but... anyways, I'm glad to finally hear of more interest in analyzing mars. Only problem is going to be in what we find there, if anything, isn't dna/rna based. I know it's a must here, and likely there or anywhere else too, but it IS possible for something else entirely.