Antarctic Expedition To Track Down Extreme Living Creatures 69
WirePosted tips us to a story about a group of scientists who are heading to Antarctica to study organisms that thrive in climates too extreme for most other life forms. The team will be visiting a lake that has a pH "like strong Clorox," the sediments of which "produce more methane than any other natural body of water on our planet." The scientists hope to learn about the potential for life in other unforgiving climates, such as those on Mars or the various ice-covered moons in the Solar System. Expedition leader Richard Hoover was quoted saying, "This will help us decide where to search for life on other planets and how to recognize alien life if we actually find it." We've previously discussed Antarctic microbes as they related to conditions on Mars.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A first step to terraformation as well? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you'd read the books, you'd know that while it is all fiction, those series are one of the few books out these days that had serious science done in them. Robinson was a fantastic writer, and very little was far from fact in that book. Terraforming a planet will in a number of ways be asier than changing our because we'd have a clean slate. Initial challenges aside, once we get the process going we can set up a runaway series of "reactions" to get the planet how we'd like it to be. On Earth, we're faced with the fact that the entire planet is alive and resisting nearly any change we put into it. We also have to account for the fact that we can't do anything radical because we're trying to keep everything currently alive still alive.
Nothing needs to change in even my great-grand children's lives, but a long process needs to start somewhere, and it's with parent's thinking.
Re:A first step to terraformation as well? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A first step to terraformation as well? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with the idea of terraforming Mars is that there's no good reason to try it in the first place. Why would you want to do a thing like that?
To preempt the most common answers--
It's not going to be a home for the teeming billions of Earth. It would cost too much, mostly in the form of energy, to transport that many people there. Anyway, it would just be a stopgap even if transport were free. Geometric growth is still geometric growth. The amount of time you'd gain may not even be the amount of time it would take to do the terraform job.
It's not a particularly efficient way to provide a "backup" habitat in case of the destruction of the human species on Earth. Open-space colonies would be cheaper and easier. Even that, of course, is only interesting if you really care about the issue in the first place. Personally, I don't care very much, definitely not enough to go to all that trouble. The big problem with species-destroying events, from my point of view, is the death of all those individuals, and a backup colony doesn't save many, if any, individuals.
Complete boondoggle. And politically and economically impossible, as well...