On Mon, 06 Aug 2012 23:25:10 +0100, Frank Erskine wrote:

On Mon, 06 Aug 2012 22:23:34 +0100, Andy Burns
wrote:

newshound wrote:

to be fair to NASA now they are not looking for current life, but for
life 3.5 billion years ago

They're not even looking for extinct life this time, they're looking for
evidence that Mars was capable of having supported life ...

Is that life as "we" know it - water, oxygen, MacDonalds, Microsoft,
whatever?

Could there be an entirely different "Martian" form of life to our "own"
elemental structure? That's probably impossible to answer since we can
only make comparisons with what we can mess about with on "Earth".

Or are we assuming that whatever exists is already represented on Earth?

I think the only presumption is that it will be carbon-based.