A New Form of Life

Posted by tourdemars to Life on Mars at July 30, 2003 12:00 PM

Mark Twain didn't think much of California's Mono Lake. "It lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert," he wrote in his 1872 travelogue, Roughing It. "This solemn, silent, sailless sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth--is little graced with the picturesque." Astrobiologist Richard Hoover of NASA's National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Alabama, has a different view: "It's beautiful," he says.