Perseverance rover may have found Life on Mars

[Ninurta]

So Percy has been trundling around an ancient riverbed in Jezero Crater for a while looking for evidence of Martians and although hints have been found Martians there are non , until they happened upon a rock last year fancifully named “Cheyava Falls” which shows signs of potential biosignatures , the spotty bits between the rocky bits.


A sample of the potential Martians was taken and packaged ready to be collected .... who knows when , good idea NASA bad implementation.

A sample collected by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover from an ancient dry riverbed in Jezero Crater could preserve evidence of ancient microbial life. Taken from a rock named “Cheyava Falls” last year, the sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” contains potential biosignatures, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before a conclusion can be reached about the absence or presence of life.  

“This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “NASA’s commitment to conducting Gold Standard Science will continue as we pursue our goal of putting American boots on Mars’ rocky soil.”

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-s...last-year/

This finding bolsters those including myself who believe the previously recorded Methane spike during Martian Spring are a result of biological activity below the surface and more complex life could exist in water filled caverns with Mars.

That slab of spotted rock reminds me almost exactly of a slab of spotted diorite bedrock that was exposed on the side of a hill a couple of hundred yards behind the house on the farm I was raised on. I took some samples of the rocks, and the "spots" in particular, for identification, and it turned out the "spots" were very ancient structures called "stromatolites". Stromatoliites are circular mats built up over generations by algae as they live, die, and pump out the oxygen that initially populated our atmosphere as a waste by-product of the bacterial photosynthetic lifestyle. The byproducts they produce include oxygen that populates the atmosphere, and calcium carbonate (in the form of limestone) that builds up the stromatolite structures over generations of algal life.

The stromatolites in that diorite were a minimum of 540 million years old, and potentially much older. The circular structures and "spots" on that Martian slab look very much like them to me.

.Note: Stromatolites still exist and live on Earth, in extremely isolated colonies now - most notably in the shallow seas off the western coast of Australia. If they still live on Earth, I see no reason that they cannot still live on Mars, in isolated bacterial mats in wet spots underground, where they would be protected from UV radiation However, if they only exist underground now, then they must have developed some life mechanism that no longer involves photosynthesis, since light is unlikely to penetrate. Perhaps something akin to the "black smokers" on the bed of Earth's oceans, which also derive their energy from mechanisms other than photosynthesis.

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