Extraterrestrial Life?
No verified form of life which originated outside of earth has ever
been observed. If life evolved on earth, one would expect that the
elaborate experiments sent to the Moon and Mars might have detected at
least simple forms of life (such as microbes) that differ in some
respects from life on earth (a).
Many people, including Carl Sagan, predicted the Viking landers would
find life on Mars. They reasoned that because life evolved on Earth,
some form of life must have evolved on Mars. That prediction proved to
be false. The arms of the Viking 1 Lander sampled Martian soil.
Sophisticated tests on those samples did not find even a trace of
life.
a. The widely publicized claims, made by NASA in 1996, to have found
fossilized life in a meteorite from Mars are now largely dismissed.
[See Richard A. Kerr, “Requiem for Life on Mars? Support for Microbes
Fades,” Science, Vol. 282, 20 November 1998, pp. 1398–1400.]
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/ReferencesandNotes13.html#wp1279359
