Water on Mars - Clues to Life? 178
PHPee writes: "Reports of water on Mars say that huge amounts of water gushed through the surface of the red planet fairly 'recently'. (Recently being as little as 10 million years ago)
This is big news, because it may lead to finding some simple forms of life on the planet.
For more info, check out:
(story #1)
and
(story #2)."
Of course - (Score:4, Funny)
Duh.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
The biggest canal on Mars (Score:2)
Really? But the biggest canal [nasa.gov] was neither formed by water nor carried significant water.
Since these scientist chappies are getting so good at finding water on a completely dry planet (and explaining away global floods on another planet which is covered in water to an average depth of 2.7km [edgewood.edu]), perhaps they can figure out where that much lightning [electric-cosmos.org] came from? It certainly explains all of those rocks you see strewn around in Mars lander images.
Canali, floods (Score:2)
Not sure quite what to make of this, since the original links spoke of water gushing from cracks and flowing through channels on Mars' surface (unrelated, as you might expect, to Lowell's original canali).
That too. Many ancient records speak of either a global flood, or at least something much bigger than a local flood, something overwhelming. Science in general won't take these records too seriously lest they be seen to undermine naturalism/materialism or even (horrors!) support the dreaded cult of Creationism. At least, that's the only reasonable conclusion I've seen. A succinct way of putting it is, ``it's too scary to take seriously''.
Whatever happened to ``investigate, and let the facts fall where they may?''
As to the big canal, the only natural force which fits all of the characteristics (flat bottom, steep sides, subcanyons tending to intersect perpendicularly, no clear source or sink, pairs of parallelish canyons, sausage-strings of canyons blending to craters) is a lightning bolt. A nice big lightning bolt. A good time to be elsewhere... a good event to watch from a distance... maybe a few dozen planetary radii... maybe further...
Alien bacteria (Score:4, Informative)
Apart from being fastinating and a sign that further evolved life forms may exist, are there any potential advantages for finding extraterestrial bacteria?
Consider the fact (Score:3, Insightful)
People expect to go on other planets and find the same lifeforms you see on earth, bacteria, and mammals, and so on, what if you find a lifeform thats unlike anything, like a gas or liquid based lifeform, or something just totally weird.
Scientists should at least be ready for it.
Re:Consider the fact (Score:5, Insightful)
The chance is very small however; therefore, I think it's more important that the presence of water enables us to create colonies on Mars in the near future: water can be used as a source of energy and offcourse to quench our thirst..
C-H == carbohydrate == life like us? (Score:2)
Well... not exactly. The CO2 is about 50x more common in proportion, but remember that there is also 100x less pressure [washington.edu] (7-10 millbars versus roughly 1000 millibars [usatoday.com]) so the total amount of CO2 around on Mars is about 1/2. Low atmospheric pressure complicates things even more by boiling off [nasa.gov] most of the volatiles which would generally be considered useful for quite a big stretch along the putative road to life.
After an initial flurry of excitement, the original Miller-Urey experiments [duke.edu] which produced some amino acids [duke.edu] also highlighted a number of problems on the way along said road.
Agree. And let's do it properly, by building a Beanstalk [aol.com] now that it is technically feasible [techtv.com]. Or is that the mistake the Babelians made? (-:
Re:Consider the fact (Score:2)
Re:Alien bacteria (Score:2, Interesting)
Looking at signs of life that evolved on another planet might tell us a lot about how early life on earth may have evolved. The problem with life on earth is that it's a palimpsest--a tablet overwritten so many times that the original message has been effectively erased. We can be sure that modern proteins didn't just happen by accident, but on the other hand we don't yet know how they did come about. If signs of life should turn out to remain on Mars, particularly if that life took a different turning than life on earth did, it would show us one more trace through the maze, one more way of existing than the one we know about. And we'd learn a lot more about life in general.
Re:Alien bacteria (Score:1)
How can we be sure of that? I can see a semilogical porcess that could lead up to modern life that occured by accident.
Dig your user name btw.. what Banks book is that from? Exession?
Re:Alien bacteria (Score:2, Informative)
Dig your user name btw.. what Banks book is that from? Exession?
As a GSV I get to choose my own name <grin>. It's inspired by Excession, as you guessed. The conversations between the Minds in that book are very reminiscent of internet/usenet/webforum culture.
Driving a GSV through t.o (Score:2)
The talkorigins crew repeatedly stuff up bigtime [bearfabrique.org] and would rather crawl up their own asses than admit either error or defeat [bearfabrique.org]. The possibility that Santa Claus exists [uchicago.edu] does not equal the certainty, but that is how their logic generally runs when arguing in favour of one of ``their'' points (for examples of such begging-the-question, where does the hypothetical lipid layer in their non-self-reproducing HypUrCell come from, why does it form a layer rather than disperse, what powers the lipid-generating reaction, how does one get from a fat-bubble to the complex, filtering, active membrane in the prokayote below it, where did the primordial peptide come from, and do they also believe in sympathetic medicine - with which their HypUrCell comparison bears a more than passing resemblance?). Arguments against opposing points are generally pretty abusive. You get a lot of the tone (with the offensive language distilled off) from their article.
Try this essay [trueorigin.org] for balance. If you enjoy sarcasm, this one is amusing [bearfabrique.org] as well.
I can't resist my own separate dig at this page, it's just asking for it:
If you covered the entire Earth with amino acids useful for generating Ghadiri's peptides - and never mind sources of raw materials and sinks for elimination, decay and other factors - a nice sticky layer a third of a millimeter deep, odds are even that you would get one after a thousand iterations of the whole planet. If we inject a sliver sliver (and no more) of reality into the scenario, and reduce the total area of entirely-composed-of-useful-amino-acid-only lakes on Earth at any one time to that of the Great Lakes (roughly a quarter million square kilometers vs 500 million square kilometers) we're up to two million planetary iterations per peptide. How fast do these processes iterate? What happens when we account for impurities? How about dispersion in a hypothetically (but not realistically) neutral medium like ocean water? How long does a peptide hold together? How many peptides do we need in order to be useful for the next stage? Note that I'm focussing on just one putative stage, not stacking them as the article accuses all opponents of doing.
The idea of making GSVs transparent was a good one, I thought. The idea of stations with rank upon rank of GSVs parked inside them was a bit breath-taking... the human mind doesn't accept scale very well, but the Port of Fremantle, just down the road from here, is about the right size to be a GSV docking cradle, and I can mentally replicate that to car-park quantities.
Threads, fait accompli (Score:2)
Yah, and be sure follow the threads through to their termination. TO runs the gamut of dud debating techniques, there are constant examples of any class of mistake imaginable (the dialogue with Remine illustrated most of them) and they ``win'' most arguments by begging the question, as you are about to do. (-:
Oh, and by publishing before all of the outstanding answers are in, and calling their claims unanswerable.
Seriously, very few people have a real understanding of what a billion items, a cubic kilometer, or a nanometer actually is. A nanometer sounds really small, but how small? How do you visualise something invisibly small?
You can measure mark out a square kilometer on a flat patch of land and use that to imagine a cubic kilometer, but that doesn't really give you a feel for what a cubic kilometer really involves. Now scale to parsecs.
This is why a lot of quantitative arguments don't come to satisfactory conclusions. When you see 1:10E50 as a probability, at some level of awareness you're almost certainly reading it as 1:50, which doesn't seem that unreasonable.
You've just illustrated a point rather neatly. (-:
Why did you insist that the grounds of debate be materialism? Why reason with on hemisphere tied behind your back? Is it some kind of religious conviction?
I've never seen ``we're here'' explained without ``and then a miracle happened'' or more often ``and then a whole passel of miracles rode onto the scene, shot the inconvenient facts, and rescued the hypothesis''. I'd be delighted to see you make a worthwhile attempt. (-:
You see, your statement is both begging the question, and a tautology. Begging the question in that you assume your point is true and insist that I prove it, and a tautology because you've said, in essence ``here is a problem that has no materialistic solution. give me a materialistic solution.''
After that, maybe we can negotiate ethics... (-:
Re:Alien bacteria (Score:1)
Re:Alien bacteria (Score:1)
I guess learning about the universe is alright providing we can find out about it on Discovery Chanel.
yes, life (Score:3, Insightful)
Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, is also thought to be one of the prime candidates for life in our solar system.
Re:yes, life (Score:1)
Yes, but we can attempt no landing there (as we'll be told in another 8 years, apparently).
(-1, redundant)
Oh come on, what's a "Life in space" story without a few 2001 / 2010 references?
Maran
Re:yes, life (Score:1)
Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a misconception that water is a requirement for life. Sure, life without water is practically impossible on earth. This is mainly because the melting point and boiling point of water are in the range of temeratures encountered here. That is also where carbon-based lifeforms are usefull.
Now on a much hotter planet for instance, COH lifeforms won't hack it, as the COH bindings are too weak to hold on at very high temperatures. In such cases it would be wise to adapt a Si-based form, which has quite similar characteristics to C when placed at a higher temperature.
On the other hand, when a planet is much cooler, water is pretty useless as it's only present as ice. Mind you: ice is no good when you are dealing with cell-like organisms (as we are). In such case another liquid is more practical (maybe some very apolar fluid)
We shouldn't decide whether something can be called 'life' just because it looks like us. Life should be quantified in terms of energy and entropy instead
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
In such cases it would be wise to adapt a Si-based form, which has quite similar characteristics to C when placed at a higher temperature.
The properties may be similar but they are in general still not [sciam.com] the properties needed for life. For instance, when carbon oxidizes it produces a gas, which is a useful characteristic for breathing. When silicon oxidizes it produces sand, which would prevent breathing.
One could imagine very different organic chemistries but these would might not have anything in common with carbon chemistry and thus silicon would not be relevant. For instance, nitrogen and phosphorous [psu.edu] can form the long molecular chains needed for DNA-like structures.
Life should be quantified in terms of energy and entropy instead.
One of the key characteristics of life as we know it is chirality [chiral.com], which is the property of a the mirror image of an object like a molecule to be a different shape from the object. Carbon-based organic molecules have this property but phosphorus-nitrogen ones do not.
Chirality suggests that organic molecules might need to embody certain mathematical characteristics that are fundamental to life. What we would need, therefore, is a mathematical definition of life.
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand this at all..
First of all, it's very hard for a molecule beyond a certain size to not be chiral - if you have an atom coordinated to 4 different groups, that's all you need.
And although organisms are full of chiral molecules, that doesn't mean that chirality is somehow a "key characteristic of life" - it's just a trivial consequence of the fact that you need big, complicated molecules to build robustly self-reproducing objects.
Carbon-based organic molecules have this property but phosphorus-nitrogen ones do not.
But the polyphosphazene polymers you provide a link to could easily be chiral, if the R groups are different!
Chirality suggests that organic molecules might need to embody certain mathematical characteristics that are fundamental to life. What we would need, therefore, is a mathematical definition of life.
But why do we need a mathematical definition of life, or indeed any definition of life at all? It's not as if, should we find something on Mars that reproduced and grew, and had a sophisticated metabolism to extract energy, but didn't fit some dimly imagined 'mathematical definition', we would shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, that's quaint, but it isn't life, you know.. let's ignore it.". The word "life" is like the word "game" - it's a word we have no problem using in daily life, but coming up with a precise definition is both pointless and impossible.
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't understand this at all..
for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself.
But the polyphosphazene polymers you provide a link to could easily be chiral...
I'm following Prof. Robert D. Minard (Penn State Astrobiology Research Center) who says [nasa.gov] they aren't chiral.
But why do we need a mathematical definition of life, or indeed any definition of life at all?
I was playing here with the previous post's idea that life might be more fundamental than its chemistry. There's a hint of this idea in Stephen Wolfram's theories [newscientist.com]. Coming up with a precise definition of life would only be pointless if it's impossible. The point would be that a mathematical description of life might give it the same standing as a natural law like gravity or entropy: The Law of Life.
A mathematical definition of life (Score:2)
p.s. What about those sand people on Star Wars? They seem to be ok with breathing sand.
So what you really mean to say is... (Score:1)
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:1)
Yes yes, something like that
At what point does matter become organised enough to be called alive?
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:2)
It is a misconception that water is a requirement for life. Sure, life without water is practically impossible on earth.
Do we have any examples of life that does not require water? For all I know, it's more of a hasty assumption than a misconception.
Water is just *really* strange stuff, and I don't think there's any other substance remotely like it. ('course I'm not a chemist or whatever so there ya go)
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:2, Interesting)
At the same time, presence of water on Mars does not really give us any clue as to whether or not there is water outside our solar system, since Mars and Earth both came from the same primordial mass...
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:2)
Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars (Score:2, Insightful)
If life already exists on other planets, we should leave them alone. Humankind has enough of a bad track-record of screwing up one planet – sending countless species into extinction and precipitating environmental melt-down.
Only if a planet is proven to be free from life should we consider colonising it.
Startup Opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
Who's up for bottling the stuff and reselling it here on Earth?! Forget that $1/bottle outa the New York tap stuff, we're talkin' $5,000 per bottle, extremely limited supply, right off the space ship! Hasn't been touched since man kind migrated off of Mars when it blew out of an opposing orbit from Earth and
Once you sign the NDA, we'll talk... Drop an email to ac1@slashdot....
Re:Startup Opportunity (Score:1)
Re:Startup Opportunity (Score:1)
Earth has a stronger gravitational field than Mars, so it takes more fuel to get stuff off Earth than it is to get the same stuff off Mars.
Plus it would be more expensive since you have to carry fuel to get to and from Mars, etc, etc.
There is a clever trick to get around this problem: instead of bringing heavy fuel to Mars, bring a lightweight but powerful energy supply and some hydrogen. On Mars, use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the hydrogen you brought to make methane-oxygen fuel.
I think the most expensive part of selling bottled Mars water on Earth would be convincing governments that it's safe to drink.
Re:Startup Opportunity (Score:2)
Re:Startup Opportunity (Score:2)
Or at least we hope its simple (Score:1)
Since its on Mars, theres no telling what kinda lifeforms you may find. We should be very careful, just because the lifeforms in our ocean and on our earth are simple, does not mean what we find on mars will be.
Second, are we even looking? The only way we will know if theres life on mars and i say this all the time, is to drill. drill several miles into the ground and see if theres water. If there is, you could have a whole ocean of life down there and for all we know it could be intelligent. If not, well then we may not find anytihng but sand, but until Nasa decides to check we wont find anything.
Origin of life (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Biblical: God created life
2. Alien: Life came from fragments of comets and meteors travelling
3. Self created: Life self created from the primal mess, which created the first aminoacids.
I was thinking, what is your opinion about us, humans being, start launching around organic materials into space. Can we be the creators sometimes? I think our satellites and probes (read, Voyager) are already travelling and carryin some organic residues around, no matter how clean we build those machines.
Sometimes I stop and I think, in millions of years our propes may crash in some remote plantets. The chances are near zero. But imagine that it crashes, some bacteries or virii survive and start propagating in an enviromentally friendly planet. If they evolve, if they generate intelligent life, will they still look for the origin of their lives, and perhaps contaminate around other planets?
Vibriting thoughs.
Re:Origin of life (Score:1)
Re:Origin of life (Score:1)
Re:Origin of life (Score:1)
It was first thing in the morning and I was feeling cynical.
Why this news is important. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why this news is important. (Score:1, Interesting)
I didn't get the impression that water was free flowing 10 million years ago. The last paragraph makes mention of an ice dam close to the surface, with the built up pressure exploding it outward to create the mesas. That, to me, indicates a surface too cold for water to cut any channels (maybe an ice flow, though -- just a thought). There's an older, interesting article (Nov 2001) [spacedaily.com] that talks about this sort of thing, and refers to the meteriorite found with fossilized bacteria from Mars. Maybe it came from one of these geyser blowouts?
"Recently?" (Score:1, Funny)
From whose perspective is this stuff written? The Grand Canyon?
Mission to fetch our bible. (Score:2, Funny)
Of course since they were following
When they built the great Face, as instructed in page 23 in their bible, and completed orgy ceremony Part B, subsection 42, it began snowing
carbon dioxide and that was the end of them.
Re:Mission to fetch our bible. (Score:3, Funny)
Are you one of those people who worship dog?
What happened (Score:1)
Flood volcanism on Earth occurs about every tens of millions of years," McEwen said. "The last such event was 10 million years ago
so, what kind of event could have happened 10M years ago, leaving traces of unusual water floods on two planets?
Perhaps an alien expedition taking samples?
Re:What happened (Score:2, Funny)
Perhaps an alien expedition taking samples?"
Perhaps an alien expedition taking a leak?
I bet you get a lot of "Last gas for 100 light-years" signs in deep space. Then you've got to put up with the kids crying "Are we nearly there yet?!" every time you go past some insignificant little main-sequence star. Not to mention us men hate asking directions, so before you know it, you're in completely the wrong constellation.
Maran
Re:What happened (Flood vulcanism on Earth) (Score:1, Interesting)
The scientist quoted did use an ambiguous phrase, but when mentioning Earth 10M years ago I'm pretty sure he was referring to floods of lava, not water.
The proposed floods of water 10M years ago at Cerebus Plains on Mars were preceded by large, flood-like flows of lava that left a large area covered with a flat lava plateau. Presumably that volcanic activity provided the energy to melt the ice (or, the water could have come up as gas dissolved in the magma).
More details in the U of Arizona press release [spaceflightnow.com]
These eruptions aren't quite like a normal volcano in that they produce such gigantic amounts of highly fluid lava so quickly; doesn't make a cone, it's more like, well, a flood!
Even if he didn't mean there were lava floods at that location on Mars, what I'm pretty sure he is referring to on Earth is the Columbia River flood basalts, which cover most of eastern Washington and Oregon. They erupted about 12M years ago, and covered that whole region in lava a couple of thousand feet thick. Some flows made it all the way to the Pacific, 300 miles from their source. Even bigger examples are the Deccan Traps in India (65 million years ago), and the Siberian Traps in Russia (250M years ago). Same sort of thing made the "seas" (mare) on the Moon, 3+ billion years ago.
Re:What happened (Score:1)
Re:What happened (Score:1)
Thisthy ? (Score:1)
White Mars (Score:3, Informative)
This may be a daft question, but...... (Score:1)
Re:This may be a daft question, but...... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This may be a daft question, but...... (Score:1)
Is there any theory around about how the aggregation of the Northern Ice cap occurred ? It seems that there must have been some kind of precipitation at some time, or at least free water in the atmosphere, to have transported all that moisture to the poles.
This would indicate ( at least to me ) that the surface temperature of mars was substatially higher at some point in the past. Ergo..Liquid water.
Re:This may be a daft question, but...... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, that's pretty much the hypothesis people are working with today (Mars used to be hotter and wetter).
It's even pretty much a certainty, considering the huge volcanoes on Mars. While they were being created, they would have been spewing absolutely vast amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapour into the atmospher, and seeing as how the atmospheric pressure and temperatures on Mars are even now not too far away from allowing liquid water, it's difficult to imagine those volcanoes being created without also creating a thicker atmosphere.
At the bottom of the deepest canyons on Mars, the atmospheric pressure is a few tens of hectopascals (about 1/30-1/50 of sea level earth) and temps can reach above 0 Celsius, enough so water doesn't flash-evaporate, but can remain liquid for a considerable time.
Re:This may be a daft question, but...... (Score:1)
and they had not been sure if there had been any water in liquid form(essential for life..)
now they seem to think so(?):
"What's different here is that this is very recent, and the water source is nothing like we have on Earth," she said. "The water here gushed from volcano-tectonic fissures. While the fissures themselves may be older, the latest eruption of water was probably only about 10 million years ago."
i think the above is the thing that matters in the article.
(hey, i'm not a rocket scientist)
contamination (Score:2, Insightful)
On another note, it definitely will be strong evidence for life being universal if we find living organisms on any other body outside of earth. It allows us to determine that there are other orbit zones and climates outside of our own to support life. That would increase the number of planets outside of our solar system that we would believe could support life and thus bolster the theory that we are not alone.
Secure? Its not secure anymore. (Score:2)
If you want something to be secure, then dont announce it. Dont even say it exsists, put the samples in some super secret underground base that no one knows about and send scientists into it, if an accident happens, nuke the underground base killing all the lifeforms
Re:contamination (Score:1)
Re:contamination (Score:1)
Quote from an expert (Score:3, Funny)
Dan "What a waste it is to lose one's mind" Quayle
(source) [snopes2.com]
Hi-resolution images of the fissure. (Score:5, Informative)
here [msss.com] here [msss.com] here [msss.com] and here [msss.com]
No signs of life there, some say that these ones show life: "Banyan Trees" [msss.com], "Hot Spring??" [msss.com], "Leopard spots" [msss.com]
Personally, at this resolution, they could be anything, but they are still fun to look at.
You mean.... (Score:3, Funny)
finally!
yeah, but... (Score:3, Funny)
That's fine and all, but what I really want to know is how these "simple forms of life" end up getting to Earth and acquiring jobs as managers and politicians...
Re:yeah, but... (Score:1)
wow (Score:2, Funny)
Like marketing executives?
Too bad it can never be disproven (Score:2)
Just some food for thought...
Re:Too bad it can never be disproven (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither claim is scientific, the only correct statement now is "Until now we have not found life on Mars", and that will remain the claim until one of two things happen:
- We discover alien life on Mars
- We start living there
In both cases, the claim "there is life on Mars" will be scientifically correct.
Remember, the existence of life on Mars is not and never will be a hypothesis/theory (which is where Popper comes in), it is either a fact or an unknown.
Re:Too bad it can never be disproven (Score:1)
Would you also say "until now we have never seen anything travel faster than light" and claim that relativity is not a hypothesis/theory? What is the difference?
Life on Mars... (Score:4, Funny)
1. A bacterium surviving the impact of a meteor hitting Mars. The size of that meteor must have been considerable to survive through the Mars atmosphere.
2. Some piece of rock being thrown back into space, and at sufficient speed to overcome Mars' gravity and low enough to not melt because of friction against the air.
3. That piece actually having a surviving bacterium.
4. That piece actually hitting Earth.
5. Scientists actually finding that unlikely piece of Mars on Earth, in dirt.
6. Finding that that highly unlikely piece of Mars contains unknown form of life.
7. Finding a president who actually believes you are on the right track and is ready to pay for your continued research.
Out of these I find step 7 the most probable.
Re:Life on Mars... (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientists actually finding that unlikely piece of Mars on Earth, in dirt.
I believe the meteorite you're talking about was found in Antarctica. I have a friend who was doing research there one season, and she said one of the things they would do when they were bored was look for meteorites. Pretty much anything that wasn't snow was a meteorite!
Re:Life on Mars... (Score:1)
Why should Water=Life? (Score:1)
On earth life developed just a few million years after the planet got cool enough to sustain it, but it still took millions of years. In a stable environment. With liquid water constantly available. And plenty of sunlight to pump energy into the system.
One flood on Mars, even every million years or so, does not a life-cradle make.
So there's water on Mars for us to exploit when we get there, good deal. But life on Mars, will have a tough time of it. And, yes, I know that different chemistries might produce life, but for the moment we have a pitifuly small sample size, so I'm going to have to stick with the good old carbon-based model for now.
Also if there is life on Mars, should we invent our own "prime directive" and leave the planet alone? After all in a few billion years, the stuff could evolve to multi-cellular organisms.
Given humanity's track record as a whole, I think not. We exploit things to easily to let ethics get in our way. If the first probes in the 60's and 70's had produced evidence of Little Green Men or any civillization at all, we'd be selling them Coke and Beenie Babies right now. To pay for it, we would have negoiated "mining rights" and hauled off all their easily extractable resources.
So what is all the excitement about? There's not much chance of life even with this latest story, and even if life does exist, we probably will kill it (or at best, put it in a bacterial zoo) the first chance we get.
Uhh and how is this news? (Score:1)
Watch any science space TV show about mars or the planets that has been produced in the last two years+ and you will see that we've known this for a long time.
I can't believe this made slashdot... sigh.
Volcanoes (Score:1)
Maybe this explains the worm trails?
Martian popsicles? (Score:1)
Re:Martian popsicles? (Score:1)
the water had a chemical reaction with the ground (which has a very high iron content) and basically disintegrated it into Hydrogen where it escaped the outer atmosphere (because hydrogen floats to the highest reaches of the atmosphere (being the lightest element) )
4Fe + 3O2 = 2Fe2O3
3Fe + 4H2O Fe3O4 + 4H2 !!!!!
Re:Martian popsicles? (Score:2, Funny)
Stop It! (Score:1)
Why do you people have to turn every astronomy story into a "chance for life in outer space" story? NEITHER of the two linked stories has a SINGLE WORD in it about relating or reflecting life in outer space.
Frankly, you're never going to find any other life in outer space, so you should just start dealing with it. Even if you disagree with that, at least stop warping every astronomy story that comes down the pike to fit your sci-fi fantasies.
hmm... (Score:1)
Survivor Mars (Score:1, Funny)
We all know why... (Score:3, Funny)
Also, I can bend spoons with my mind.
Leaps of Logic (Score:1)
Look at it this way: the smallest number of different proteins that is guesstimated to get life going is 400 for a minimum cell. Ignoring all the non-protein components of a cell, now consider the amino acids. There are a lot more than the 20 we need for life, but let's be generous and assume that somehow all the amino acids in some lipid-isolated droplet are the 20 we need for life. Since they have to be one enantiomer (aka one chirality) to be in proteins for all but the simplest one of the amino acids, that means you've got 39 possible choices, and you need to get them in a specific order.
So just one protein of less than average size (say 300 amino acids), assuming there are no other chemicals interfering (i.e, say inside a droplet with exactly the right composition), is going to have odds of one in 300^39. That comes out to one in 10^96. Since there are only 10^78 ATOMS in the UNIVERSE, clearly it is not in the realm of "chance" to say even one protein could happen by chance.
Then molecular evolution would require 400 more different proteins, each rather specifically structured, to be in the same droplet at the same time.
And consider further that proteins denature rather quickly outside living cells, when exposed to pH swings, temperature, salinity, and other variations.
So the odds of finding life arising somewhere by blind chance is, well, so close to zero that it's absurd to consider. Or to put it another way, it takes more faith to believe it happened by chance than to believe in a creator.
Re:Leaps of Logic (Score:2)
Come on... (Score:1)
Re:Come on... (Score:1)
I think the discovery of any kind of life, past or present, even some little wiggly bacteria thing, it would be a very big deal. First, it would show that Earth is not unique. If life can gain a foothold on two planets in the same solar system, it could imply that life very common in the universe. Second, the similarities and differences between a bacteria on Mars and a bacteria evolved under similar conditions on Earth could provide insight into the evolutionary process.
Life on Mars...no no no no no! (Score:3, Interesting)
Is finding life "out there" the ultimate goal of space exploration. No! Finding life would be a big deal but it cannot be the driving goal. This is for the same reason that going to the moon cannot be solely for collecting moon rocks. Answering the question would stop the program right in its tracks..now what?
Finding water on Mars is a big deal because it vastly eases human outposts. Air and rocket fuel can be synthesized more easily, not to mention the need for water itself.
Re:Supposing there's water on Mars (Score:3, Informative)
We don't know, over 4.5 billion years, the odds may be 99.99999% or 0.000001%, we just don't know.
In the case of Earth&Mars, the odds are probably close to 100%, if only because it has been shown that bacteria could easily survive the trip from the one to the other, and we know of a mechanism (asteroid impact) capable of "soft-launching" rocks from one to the other.
The life would be of the same origin of course. The odds of life emerging independently on both rocks are totally unknown, because for now we have a statistically useless sample of 1.
Re:Supposing there's water on Mars (Score:1)
A very simple illustration, take:
1. A frog.
2. A sterilized blender in a sterile room
3. Puree the frog for 1 hour.
4. Irradiate the pureed frog with gamma rays
You've now got all the elements for life in exactly the right ratios in one place. What happens when you do that? Life does not spontaneously form... it's just a bunch of dead chemicals.
Further proof: if you managed to get only the 20 amino acids necessary for life into droplets all around the world, and started trying to assemble them into a protein, the odds are roughly 1 in 10^96 that you would be able to do that. Even if you tried once for every atom (10^78) in the universe, you would need to beat one in 10^18 odds. For just one protein - then you need about 300-400 more to get the right mix of proteins for a theoretical minimum cell. Then you need DNA, RNA, ATP, lipids, minerals in the right valence state, etc. to get the minimum cell composition.
So no, the odds are so fantastically against it happening by chance that to say it happened that way takes more faith than believing a creator was involved.
Re:Supposing there's water on Mars (Score:2)
This would be as ludicrous as imagining that a fully functioning single-celled organism could be created by microwaving amino acids.
That is why NO EVOLUTIONIST BELIEVES THAT LIFE BEGAN IN THAT MANNER. If you want to attack their theories, learn the theories first. Start with The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins.
Re:Supposing there's water on Mars (Score:1)
I was a dedicated, hard-core evolutionist for over forty years; I know the arguments very, very well on the evolutionist side. Dawkins is not the greatest example, he has been debunked many times rather handily; Behe and others have done so.
We do apparently agree that random chance was utterly insufficient to create life from random chemicals.. but Dawkins and others need natural selection to operate in order for things to improve, and if starting from scratch, you need at first an accurately self replicating system before natural selection can take over from randomness and pure chance.
Without the order imposed by a self-replicating system, randomness is the only operative force.
And chance just won't do it.
Re:Supposing there's water on Mars (Score:2)
Of course you need a self-replicating system. That is why people searching for the origins of life tend to look for simple self-replicating systems. Not single celled organisms.
There are a number of candidate simple self-replicating systems. None of them are particularly impressive, but it's imaginable that they could have lead to RNA and protein chains. We may not have discovered the correct process. We may never. This does not make evolution false.
You might feel that Dawkins has been debunked. But you also seem to think that all of evolution has been debunked. Evolutionists certainly haven't abandoned Dawkins because of something Behe said. No one has ever brought up Behe in this sort of discussion with me after they had heard the counterpoint. A good starter is here [talkorigins.org]. That review's mousetrap argument is pretty lame, but the rest is ok.
Behe's irreducible complexity argument has been asked and answered many times before Darwin's Black Box. Just because one scientist cannot imagine an evolutionary pathway does not mean that one did not exist.
Still, Dawkins' books aren't flawless. No one's ever complained to me about him, but in a simple reading of any of his books, a number of little details rubbed me the wrong way. None of those details, however, are essential to his conclusions. I only brought up his book because he has a good discussion of Fred Hoyle's argument (and yours).
Anyway, I would love to continue this conversation in email. I think it's a little out of place on slashdot, but I'll leave it up to you as to where we should continue.
Re:Who cares! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think space exploration and the quest for extra-terrestrial life is an invaluable quest for all the reasons we *don't* know about. You can't tell me (and even if you did i'd tell you that you're full of crap) that if someone finds even one tiny living single-cell organism on mars, that there is no possibility that the study of that one small organism could not be a catalyst of evolutionary discovery for all life as we know it. I'm not saying it will change the world. I'm saying it has the chance of adding to our understanding of the world and of ourselves. Every little bit of knowledge advances us one step closer to scientific goals we may not even know exist yet.
Space exploration and space research absurd? Humans have only been flying for about a century. How many discoveries in how many different fields have come from flight, and space research? Rocketry, physics, medical disoveries on so many levels, engineering and computing advances, biologic and genetic research in space or even modified gravity environments; I'm not sure anyone knows exactly how space research has impacted humanity in the last 50 years, because its influence is just too wide-spread. If someone somewhere develops a cure for some disease, or a bitchin new technology that will drive our cars, or even replace our cars 10, 50, or 100 years from now, i'm all for it. Space research is far from absurd. It's integrally linked to the standard of living you and I enjoy today, and will enjoy tomorrow.
As for protection, buddy, the only thing we need protection from is ourselves at this point. If we can't get to another developed species capable of space travel (assuming as i do that one exists "somewhere"), then we're probably ill equipped to defend ourselves if they can get to us - again, assuming they have nothing but hostile intentions. I chuckle at your expense, and at the same time sigh that close-minded individuals like yourself are all too common.
Re:Irony of Life (Score:2)
Re:Irony of Life (Score:1)
Re:Irony of Life (Score:2)
No, there isn't. My sperm is human life but it's not considered murder if I abandon them to die.
The issue is whether a handful of cells should be treated the same as me.
Re:Irony of Life (Score:1)
The issue is whether a handful of cells should be treated the same as me.
isn't even possible, because the premise, "handful of cells", isn't true, unless you consider every human to be a "handful of cells". If human life begins at conception, then your statement must be rephrased to: "The issue is whether a human life should be treated the same as me." This is why the matter of when life begins is so hotly contested, because if it begins at conception, we aren't discussing handling of meaningless protoplasm, we are discussing a human life, and the whole "cells" or sub-human-fetus-notion is not analog.
Following, if sperm = life (which I do not believe), then if you abandon them, it is murder, regardless of what "it's considered". Popular opinion isn't a basis for moral rights or wrongs anyway, so what it is "considered" is insignificant anyway.
Re:Irony of Life (Score:2)
Sorry, but your misinformed opinion isn't the basis for moral rights or wrongs.
How can you live with yourself when you condone the slaughter of trillions of human beings? You monster!