Mars Life Hung Out to Dry in Salt

Scientists have just about hanged the possibility for life on Mars.  At first, the acid measured by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers made the environment look inhospitable.  “Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found,” said Mark Knoll on a JPL press release.  “This tightens the noose on the possibility of life.”
    Dreamers of Martian microbes can now only hope that the two environments studied by the Mars Exploration Rovers are not representative of the whole planet, or that the most ancient environments under the surface may have been less salty.  “Life at the Martian surface would have been very challenging for the last 4 billion years,” said Knoll, a biologist at Harvard and member of the rover science team.
    The press release was followed by another at JPL that potentially habitable planets around other stars may be common, based on infrared measurements of dust disks by the Spitzer Space Telescope (see also National Geographic News).  The “follow the water” policy NASA astrobiologists use to search the most promising habitats for life, however, needs to consider more than just the H2O present.  “Not all water is fit to drink,” Knoll quipped.  Chemical evolutionists know that salt, a necessary nutrient for advanced life, is very detrimental to the formation of membranes and nucleic acids prior to the first cell (04/15/2002, 11/23/2007).  Living organisms can regulate salt by means of specialized channels in their membranes.  Prebiotic structures would have borne the brunt of salt’s damaging effects.  Life could not have started in salty water, most astrobiologists agree.
    This announcement was reported also by National Geographic News.  The stories did not ask whether the early earth had salt, and whether this would have posed a challenge to chemical evolution on our planet.

This is old news; they should have given up long ago.  Reports from the first year of the rovers on Mars (12/03/2004) worried about the high acidity and salinity of the water.  Mars is dead; face it.  So we can rule out one body on the list.  Since evolutionists expect creationists to prove a universal negative, they will have job security for a long time.