Blogs/Robert Walker/What would it take to access the newfound lake on Mars?: Difference between revisions

 

I don't see how it is a justifiable risk myself. How can we take such a risk of losing something as precious as - say - RNA world life that has never evolved to DNA - and perhaps - is still in the pre-Darwinian phase that Carl Woese hypothesized Earth life may have gone through, when there was no interspecies competition, no distinct species as such, just RNA capabilities shared by everything.

 

This example is based on a direction suggested by Carl Woese, in a 2002 paper On the evolution of cells (http://www.pnas.org/content/99/13/8742), and followed up in many recent papers on early pre-LUCA life (“Last Universal Common Ancestor).