Can Amino Acids Survive on Mars?

The speculations about life on Barsoom Malacandra Mars are very old, which has given rise to fantasy and science fiction stories about it. For a spell, scientists seem to have said, "There ain't no life on that one, old son", because they realized that the temperatures and atmosphere were not conducive to life. But it remained a curiosity, which increased with the adoration of evolutionism by secularists, which in turn fueled efforts to find evidence of life out there, thataway. Since abiogenesis is an absurd concept on Earth, there must be some way to find excuses to disbelieve in the Creator in the far reaches of space.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

Evolutionary scientists are not above cherry-picking data and setting up tests in such a way as they validate evolution. Although gamma-ray bursts that should extinguish life were given a bit of a nod, conditions on Mars were set up in a lab and (Mr. Gordons should like this) the survivability of amino acids under certain conditions was studied. Naturally, this involved speculations and assumptions. Even with conditions set up in their favor, results were less than spectacular.

UV radiation quickly degrades amino acids on most Martian minerals, a new study shows.

Using the “Open University Mars Chamber” in the UK, four British scientists watched to see what happened when amino acids were subjected to ultraviolet (UV) light. They spiked 11 different minerals known to exist on Mars with different concentrations of amino acids, then irradiated the rocks with UV ray levels expected at local noon for a total of 28 hours of exposure, the equivalent of about 6.5 Martian days’ worth of UV dosage. They published their results in an open-access paper on Icarus. Here are the highlights:

To read the rest, click on "Amino Acids Unlikely to Survive on Mars".