Hello and welcome to my new video. Today we will talk about Extraterrestrial life On mars. The recent claim to have discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life on a meteorite from Mars is not compelling, but the study nevertheless has useful heuristic value.The recent claim to have identified possible signs of ancient life on Mars has been widely publicized and discussed. The authors conceded that none of the half dozen pieces of evidence adduced in their paper individually provided strong support for extraterrestrial life, though they argued that the pieces added up to a case worth considering. Most perhaps all of the observed phenomena have counterparts in the inorganic world, so even the combination does not make a compelling case that there was ever life on Mars. Nevertheless, the importance of the problem has justified bringing the results to general attention. The paper has focussed interest on the origin and possible ubiquity of life, and on how we can design techniques capable of giving a more definitive answer to the question of whether there is, or has ever been, life elsewhere in the Universe. With the breakthrough of the heliocentric concept of the solar system, philosophical correctness mandated the acceptance, given the assumption of an orderly creation, that extraterrestrial life forms must exist. Consequently, it was taken for granted by orthodox 19th century philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, that beings of some kind must exist on all planets. Astronomers, such as Schiaparelli and later Lowell, selected Mars for astronomical verification of extraterrestrial life because of its relative closeness and transparent atmosphere. From observations of Mars, they inferred the presence of polar ice caps, seasonal changes in the planet’s albedo that they attributed to plant growth, and the existence of linear structures, canale, that were thought to be the work of intelligent beings.In the latter part of the 19th century, the notion of extraterrestrial life, or exobiology, was discussed as an extension of the laws of thermodynamics. An authoritative opinion was expressed by Sir William Thompson who in his presidential address to the British Association in Edinburgh in 1871, stated: because we all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seed bearing meteoritic stones moving about through space. It would be another century or so, however, before it would become possible to test this confident belief. See you at part 2.Thank you for watching.
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