Journal Entry # 10

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/06/20/its-official-there-is-ice-on-mars/
It has just been announced that the Phoenix Lander has found ice water on Mars. Supposedly, the Lander found specimens of white material. The next day, pictures taken of the same area where the chunks of white material were revealed were no longer there. Scientists are confident that only a water based material acts in such a way that would evaporate in comparison with a mineral or salt-based substance. As the article stated, NASA’s motto for the Martian mission is “follow the water”. This directed mission seems to be in hopes of seeing if Mars ever supported primitive life.
However, these white little chunks that were there and disappeared could not have been water at all but a type of food source for microscopic beings that ate them before the next picture was taken.
This theory however, could not hold too much validity because the Lander also dug a pit where it reached a hard surface of white material, believed to be the findings of additional ice collections hidden under the surface of the Martian landscape.
Within this search it seems though, we are basing are strategies for our findings on a water source. But I beg to believe that every existent terrestrial body in the sky may not revolve around carbon as the main building block for that particular environment. According to theorists who have analyzed and summarized the hypothetical occurrences of the Big Bang theory, those have reported that at the beginning of creation hydrogen was 3x more present than other gases. Oxygen however was prevalent as well and thus went through a process called nucleosynthesis to create stars with combinations of chemical processes derived from helium interactions. (http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/physicsuniverse.html)
Indeed, if stars were created from the chemical phenomenon of hydrogen and oxygen and many scientists believe the whole universe is created off of similar chemical make-ups, there is little to refute that trying to theorize that there exists such an environment where the building blocks of life are very different from those observed on earth exist. It is only when we find this alien planet, but until then, we continue in search of hoping are little white chunks are the beginning to the monopolization of water on the next planet.