Methane On Mars May Indicate Living Planet 200
Riding with Robots writes "NASA is announcing today that the definitive detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere means the planet is still alive, at least geologically, and perhaps even biologically. 'Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,' said one agency scientist. The gas was detected with observations made over over several Martian years with NASA telescopes at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Both biological and geological processes could explain the methane."
Re:Martian planetary defence system (Score:5, Insightful)
This joke and others like it would be a lot funnier if not for the fact that methane is odorless. It's not the methane you smell in farts, it's all the other stuff the gas picks up on its passage through, well, a tube full of shit.
Re:Lovelock - Gaia hypothesis strong evidence agai (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's take that seriously for a moment (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting aside some books written by people who thought the Earth was flat, the evidence to date is that where life is possible, there you find it. If you even half accept Popper's falsificationism, it is up to the people who believe that life doesn't appear wherever it is possible to prove that there is no life on Mars. People who believe that life on Mars is probable are actually just accepting that the cumulative evidence of experience is likely to be correct.
Lovelock - Gaia hypothesis strong evidence against (Score:3, Insightful)
Or perhaps it is just that the people at NASA have figured out that holding up the _possibility_ of other life in our solar system is their surest bet for justifying their continued employment? It is obviously a geologic process, but planetary science is boring... "little green men", on the other hand, is a subject that really gets the ignorant taxpayers excited.
Re:Let's take that seriously for a moment (Score:5, Insightful)
I generally agree, but the Gaia hypothesis [wikipedia.org] says a trace amount of methane probably isn't evidence of life. Lovelock's argument regarding Mars was that if there was any life there, it would be easy to tell. The fact that extremophile life exists in niches on Earth doesn't really show that a small amount of extremophile life exists on Mars: over the eons it would have evolved, spread, and altered the Martian environment in ways easy to see. The theory doesn't rule out the possibility that there was once life on Mars that died out, though.
Re:It's comeing form the under grround citys there (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet he misspelled "from" consistently.
Re:Yes there could be Life on Mars or... (Score:3, Insightful)
Science doesn't investigate only those things which seem "likely." If we operated that way we'd be nowhere by now.
Coming from a background of ignorance, how "likely" would you think it was that a lump of some rare metal could be made to explode with the force of thousands of tons of TNT?
Re:Methane is everywhere in the solar system (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lovelock - Gaia hypothesis strong evidence agai (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let's take that seriously for a moment (Score:3, Insightful)
over the eons it would have evolved, spread, and altered the Martian environment in ways easy to see.
What would you be looking for that would be easy to see?
Re:Methane is everywhere in the solar system (Score:3, Insightful)
Er, no. Just... no. Why would a previous solar system be needed if we can't (by your implicitly logic) form it in ours?
Methane can easily form in the protosolar nebula and because it was so cold far from the protosun, freeze into ices. The ices went on to compose much of the giant planets and their moons. Since carbon is a relatively abundant element in the universe (and hydrogen is obviously even more so), a lot of methane would have formed. All you need to put the two elements into proximity and wait a bit, no need to invoke a previous solar system. (You do need a previous generation of star to make the carbon, though.)
Methane on Mars is a different story. You don't expect methane there in any abundance because a) it never was there in large quantities (no ices in that region) and b) what was delivered there can quite reasonably be expected to have broken down by now.
Also, Europa has no lakes, methane or otherwise.
Re:Let's take that seriously for a moment (Score:2, Insightful)
There's nothing inherent in life that suggest that it a) be visible to humans, b) cover the surface of the planet, c) visibly (to humans) change the landscape, or even d) ever live on the planet's surface.
I don't know if the methane is produced by life forms or not. But if it is, I don't think the discovery will be as earth-shattering as it is typically made out to be. I think most people pretty much assume there are other life forms out there somewhere. It could lead to scientific insights once we're able to bring a sample back to earth to examine, but that will be a very long time, and if it ends up looking pretty much like earth life, there won't be that much insight to glean after all.