A self-proclaimed astrobiologist has filed a petition for a writ of mandamus against NASA and NASA Chief Administrator Charles Bolden, seeking to compel it to investigate possible alien life on Mars (h/t). If you have access to the PACER online database, you can access the court file here, but the complaint is also available on Scribd.

Remember when a mysterious rock appeared in front of Opportunity, the rover that has been tooling around Mars for over a decade? It led to a bit of wild speculation as to how it might have gotten there, but scientists tend to take a cautious approach when forming hypotheses.

For one Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D., however, NASA scientists are not speculating nearly wildly enough. He saw the picture of the rock and thought it looked familiar, since (begin sarcasm) an object on Mars will obviously have immediate analogues here on Earth. He claims that he:

immediately recognized that bowl-shaped structure…as resembling a mushroom-like fungus, a composite organism consisting of colonies of lichen and cyanobacteria, and which on Earth is known as Apothecium.

Then he magnified an earlier picture of the same area, saw what he claims are spores, which would grow into an apothecium, and so on. NASA apparently did not come to the same conclusion right away, so he filed a pro se lawsuit seeking a writ of mandamus, by which a court would compel NASA to, um, investigate or something. It would involve “close up photos from various angles” and “microscopic images of the specimen,” for a start.

Dr. Joseph has some ideas about the origins of life that are, I think it’s fair to say, not entirely mainstream. He has a page on RationalWiki, which I guess doesn’t prove anything by itself, but it offers some interesting tidbits:

Joseph is an advocate of directed panspermia and has developed his own hypothesis about the origins of life on Earth. He believes that life did not originate on Earth but was transplanted here by “cosmic seeds” encased in space debris 700 million years after the formation of the planet. He claims that these genetic seeds filled with DNA contained the genetic instructions for the metamorphosis of all life, including human beings.

Directed panspermia is the idea that life originated elsewhere and was seeded on Earth with some sort of purpose—in other words, it make the movie Prometheus into something of a documentary instead of an extremely disappointing Alien prequel.

From that standpoint, I guess it could be reasonable to expect to find familiar-looking fungal growths on Mars. Is it reasonable to seek a court order compelling NASA to conduct mycological experiments on another planet, though? That’s a different story altogether.

Oh, and the mystery rock? It probably got there because some external force acted upon it (i.e. physics), causing it to move from a position where Opportunity couldn’t see it to a spot where it could. What external forces are currently present in that vicinity that might cause a rock to move? Could it be the alien rover churning up dirt in that very same location??? That would be a reasonable hypothesis, but not nearly as exciting as going to federal court over alien fungus.

Photo credit: By NASA / JPL / University of Arizona [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.