Gadgets
New Gadget May Reveal Your Martian Ancestry
By Mike Wall
Published March 24, 2011
| Space.com
This 1 inch by 1 inch chip is part of the SETG instrument prototype, intended to search Martian soil for life -- and compare it to human DNA.
It's possible that the family tree of all life on Earth has its roots on Mars — and a new device could put that theory to the test in a few years, researchers say.
Researchers are developing an instrument that would search through samples of Martian dirt, isolating any genetic material from microbes that might be present — bugs that are living or that died relatively recently, within the last million years or so. Scientists could then use standard biochemical techniques to analyze any resulting genetic sequences, comparing them to what we find on Earth.
"It’s a long shot,” said MIT researcher Chris Carr, who's working on the life-detecting device, in a statement. "But if we go to Mars and find life that’s related to us, we could have originated on Mars. Or if it started here, it could have been transferred to Mars." [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
There may be 2 billion more earth like planets out there in our galaxy alone.
Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals.
These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added.
These new calculations are based in data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or moves in front of a star.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., focused on roughly Earth-size planets within the habitable zones of their stars — that is, orbits where liquid water can exist on the surfaces of those worlds
So to say that DNA found on Earth may have come from Mars or vies a versa may be a false assumption. Any DNA found on Mars may have come from the same original source as Earth’s DNA.
