Curiosity is landing in a month. Maybe we will find out. Anyway, here is an opportunity to come with your best guess.

Myself: Yes

Why? Two reasons. 1) There are microorganisms on earth that could survive on mars. 2) Every once in a while asteriod impacts causes a small exchange of matter between planets. Over millions of years chances are that some robust microorganisms could have survived the trip from earth to mars.

Mars looks lame, there cant be life there. But there might have been a long time ago, but it probably got wiped off for some reason.

There are Martians. I thought they live on Mars, but whatever

Well, Yes, of course!
Read to many Books to belive otherwise.

Altough... probably not the kind of life my scifi heart so desires.

I'll answer with either: No, there is no life on mars; or No, there may be life on mars but not anything detectable by the probe.


It is pretty clear there is no widespread life on the surface of mars. Widespread life, even as subtle as a crust of algae, causes slow but noticeable changes.

However, here on Earth we have discovered microorganisms that live within stone, others that live within ice. There may be small colonies of microbes in either of those places, or in the atmosphere, but that isn't the kind of life the probe is looking for.

All of the probes remind me of the movie "Planet 51" where the rover is only interested in collecting rocks, and ignores all the other life going on around it. It is possible there is life, but it is pretty clear that walking the surface and grinding random stones for water is not the right approach to finding it.

I think there easily isn't any life on mars. Why? Because there is no liquid water and the temperature is too damn cold for anything to survive.

I think you really need oceans of water to eventually get life. The curiosity probe will probably be disappointing to those expecting life or evidence of life.

I also believe that there is certainly life elsewhere in the universe, but the sheer vastness of space and time will mean that we'll never meet. Time may even be the bigger dimension to be concerned about. How many intelligent civilizations existed millions of years ago? If the human race goes extinct in the next 50,000 years (a blink in cosmic time), how many intelligent civilizations will we have missed because the time lines of our existences didn't match up?

I had another weird thought the other day. Of the millions of years of evolution and millions of species of life on earth, why are human beings the first to become space faring civilizations? Or... are we not the first? What if velociraptors figured out how to build space ships and left earth before the asteroid hit?

I think there easily isn't any life on mars. Why? Because there is no liquid water and the temperature is too damn cold for anything to survive.

I think you really need oceans of water to eventually get life. The curiosity probe will probably be disappointing to those expecting life or evidence of life.

I also believe that there is certainly life elsewhere in the universe, but the sheer vastness of space and time will mean that we'll never meet. Time may even be the bigger dimension to be concerned about. How many intelligent civilizations existed millions of years ago? If the human race goes extinct in the next 50,000 years (a blink in cosmic time), how many intelligent civilizations will we have missed because the time lines of our existences didn't match up?

I had another weird thought the other day. Of the millions of years of evolution and millions of species of life on earth, why are human beings the first to become space faring civilizations? Or... are we not the first? What if velociraptors figured out how to build space ships and left earth before the asteroid hit?

Now you've said that, reminds me of this.

http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=505090

a truly great game that deserved to do better...

I think there easily isn't any life on mars. Why? Because there is no liquid water and the temperature is too damn cold for anything to survive.

But there was once liquid water and on earth we have found worm like creatures which survive in ice so the idea that mars couldn't have at least bacterial life (or something like it) isn't that far fetched.

Here's a sort of related question:

Is a significant portion of the carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the Venusian atmosphere from dead plant cells and dead animal blood cells?

Yay! LOL.

Maybe I'm lacking the "romantic feeling" for it, but it's a bit beyond me why one would want to burn considerable resources (both money and "real" resources, e.g. rocket fuel) on studying a planet that is already known to be naturally uninhabitable for us when we are 7/8 on the road to making our own planet uninhabitable. The billions spent on such a project would be much better put in protecting the world we live in. When you buy a new car, it's well regulated how much CO2-per-100km is allowable and whatnot, and you're told to save energy, you can't buy real lightbulbs in the EU any more, and everywhere you're told about "green" and "eco" and all that bullshit (much of what's "eco" is just as bad or sometimes worse anyway, getting to think of this poster I saw last week about using the gulf stream to produce energy) -- a single unnecessary Atlas V launch probably produces as much CO2 as a million people are able to economize in a year.
Plus, the Curiosity project swallowed something around 1.2 billion dollars, if Wikipedia is right. I wish they had put that money into either saving some trees or into averting the financial crisis if you don't care about environment (those people who lost their houses probably wish that, too).

So maybe there is life on Mars, maybe there isn't. Apart from curiosity (no pun intended), what is it good for knowing about it? Is this knowledge so impotant that it justifies such a massive endeavour? If there is intelligent life, they most obviously don't want to talk with us, or they would have by now (and they must live deep underground, or be very good at hiding). If there exist micro-organisms, which is the more likely variant, why would we care and burn extra fuel to find out when we already have enough problems on our own planet?

That said, I hope there really is no life on Mars, because if there is then undoubtly some "genious" will decide that it is a very clever idea to launch another rocket and bring some "life samples" home, so they can be studied better. Surely that'll be a perfectly safe thing to do, rockets never crash, and lab accidents don't happen.
Invasive species have long, sad history on biodiversity, but of course man never learns. That's probably because so far "biodiversity" never meant "man". An unknown micro-organism from another planet might not be able to live here -- but it might as well. Do we really want to find out?