Cave-life on Mars, NASA researchers claim

Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

NASA researchers are making one of the biggest claims since empirical post-Galileoan science turned its attention to the celestial orbs. The May issue of professional magazine Nature will outline just why the researchers examining feedback from the recent Mars explorations, in comparison to empirical data from discoveries in strange circumstances on Earth, have tentatively concluded that life exists at present in caves on the planet next to ours - you know, on the side facing toward the outer limits of our sun-orbiting planetary system. We (that is, all life-forms on earth) are not alone.

The photo above shows cave openings on Mars that may correspond to similar openings found in Spain where the caves contain pools of highly-acidic water. The viable habitat of Earth-based high-acidity-thriving micro-organisms turns out to be viable for unique life-forms that have a unique metabolic system, allowing them to take nourishment from the otherwise killer water, both here on Earth and now most probably on Mars as well. There's a biological doctrine involved to boot, that's the princple of uniformitarianism - it posits in evolutionary geology that the same processes and laws that obtain in one area of Earth obtain in all others. The uniformitarian idea has been translated into the framework of most schools of astronomy, and now in geological, hydrological, and biological terms it is being drawn upon to unite two very different discoveries - one in Spain in the Rio Tinto area, and astrophotographic analysis of openings to Martian caves.

What's more, the Christian-philosophical biologist, Dr Uwe Zylstra has posited in an important recent article in Zygon that Intelligent Design theory has a huge hole in it, due to its lack of a leading theory of irreducible laws in an ascending order of dependence on one another. In this, he takes a chapter from the work of the reformational Christian philosophers, Herman Dooyeweerd and D.Th.Vollenhoven, who claim only one biotic law in a law order where it places the biotic above the physico-chemical and below the psychic irreducible modes of created reality (to the best of our public-knowledge scientific endeavour to date). In his major revision of his mentors' modal-scale, Zylstra claims three or four irreducible biotic modes. My point here is that with the new discovery on Earth at Rio Tinto, Spain, do we have evidence of another level of biotic law? And, if so, where would it place in the order tentatively being developed along Dooyeweerd's lines by Zylstra? If not, into which irreducible modal category among Zylstra's three or four, would the new phenomena best fit? The answer may be obvious to Zylstra and colleagues in biology who are also in dialogue with reformational philosophy and its prime modal-scale theory, but laity who follow this theory would gain insight into a facet of the new claims regarding life on Mars. How does the uniformity hypothesis fare in this new Gestalt of biochemistry, biology, and photographic empirical measurement and analysis resulting in the claim of life on Mars? - Owlb

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