Viking landers may have missed Martian life

You can't go looking for humans on another planet...every place is unique and life is not nearly as constrained as some have thought...

Gilbert Levin, one of the Viking scientists who has long argued that the GCMS test was flawed, told New Scientist that the new study provides "strong support" to the idea that life was indeed detected on Mars...

The outstanding puzzle is to explain what causes the high reactivity of the Martian soil, which keeps the level of organics so low despite a constant influx of organic material from asteroids, comets and other planetary sources. Most astrobiologists assume that some mysterious oxidising material in the soil is destroying the organic material but other possibilities are emerging.

Schulze-Makuch and Joop Houtkooper of the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany, suggest that an exotic form of Martian life might provide a tidy explanation. They propose that an organism might have evolved on the Red Planet to use a solution of water and hydrogen peroxide as an intracellular fluid, rather than just water as Earth organisms do.