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Mars NASA Space Science

Possibility of Life On Mars Looking More Remote 169

Posted by Zonk from the it-is-kind-of-a-long-way-off dept.
Riding with Robots writes "The never-say-die robotic geologist Opportunity continues its extended explorations in Victoria Crater on Mars. The latest findings from the mission suggest that while plenty of water did exist in this location, it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold. 'Not all water is fit to drink,' said Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team. 'At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic. Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life.'"
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Possibility of Life On Mars Looking More Remote More

Possibility of Life On Mars Looking More Remote

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  • Dead Sea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by davidc ( 91400 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [ffupdc]> on Friday February 15, 2008 @08:31PM (#22442076)
    I suppose it hasn't occurred to them that the rover might be in a Martian equivalent of the Dead Sea? There are plenty of inhospitable places on Earth, too.
    • The planet is a giant frozen dustball with a poisonous atmosphere.. also am I the only one who's seeing the "remote" pun here?

      • Re:Dead Sea (Score:5, Interesting)

        by davidc ( 91400 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [ffupdc]> on Friday February 15, 2008 @08:41PM (#22442140)
        It's a frozen dustball now. Many years ago, who knows? And Earth was supposed to have had a poisonous atmosphere a long time ago (similar to the one we're trying to create nowadays :-)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mrxak ( 727974 )
        I would think the air pressure would be more harsh than the actual makeup of the atmosphere.

      • How do you figure that it is poisonous? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @09:30PM (#22442386) Journal
        It is mostly CO2, which makes this ideal for micro-aerophiles, or even an anaerobic lifeforms. In addition, we have plenty of low life at each pole. The dead sea is anything but. I will agree that the likelihood of carbon based life being there is DAMN slim, but slim is not the same as none. No chance would be the sun, or even the Venus surface (though it would be possible in the upper atmosphere).
        • Oh come on, with a sample size of 1, "slim" is not worth hundreds of billions for exploration and research.
          • Antibiotic, namely penicillin, came about after HOW much money on research? Keep in mind, that the world was looking for the safe silver bullet. These days, we spend billions looking in Yellowstone, Antarctica, even the ocean floor. And find the needle in a monster haystack the size of earth is billion x easier than finding the right microbe that will cure aids, or stop some other future plague. And yes, it might be expensive to find life on Mars. But it may be just what we are looking for. And that speaks

    • I suppose it hasn't occurred to them that the rover might be in a Martian equivalent of the Dead Sea? There are plenty of inhospitable places on Earth, too.

      TO say nothing of the archeobacteria that thrive in the Dead Sea. Some sort of Haliophile (sp?).

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by wizardforce ( 1005805 )
      glad you brought that up, there are organisms on earth that can survive hellish conditions and in fact are thought to have existed on early earth. extreme saltiness, acidity, cold, heat, pressure, radiation etc... we have organisms living happily in all of them. there's bacteria that survived being autoclaved, found in acids nearly 0 in ph, radiation levels 3,000 times what it would take to kill humans and microbes that survived being frozen in ice for 8 million years. life can be pretty stubborn and fra

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jez9999 ( 618189 )
        But you have to admit, the salinity of the Dead Sea kills off pretty much everything (I think there's like 1 little bacteria that lives in it, but nothing else).
    • I'm sure they have. I think a more apt title would be 'Possibility of life in Victoria Crater is looking more remote.' I don't think anyone working on it would be dumb enough to think that ruled it out over the whole area.

      When the original Mariner probes that were sent to Mars sent back their data, they managed to capture the most desolate parts of the surface, leading to the impression that it was, and had always been as dead as the moon. There was no data on the impressive amounts of volcanism that was
  • ... with this searching for life on Mars. This is getting ridiculous already... seriously. I understand the importance of finding life on another planet. I do. Seriously though, Mars is a big ball of dust with little atmosphere, no magnetosphere, no water... its practically a giant red moon with two little asteroids circling around it. Its only important because its a planet that we can land on without being crushed and/or incinerated. I know it sucks, especially for those who believe that there "must be li

    • Re:Please Stop already.... (Score:4, Funny)

      by neonmonk ( 467567 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @08:36PM (#22442118)
      There's a chance of the existence of A HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL? Possibly somewhere in the region of my pants??? The fact that there is even a chance I must now search high and low! I Believe!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BitZtream ( 692029 )
      Its rather retarded to think the our planet hosts the only life that has ever existed or will exist. Especially if you are not religious. While the requirements and conditions must be almost perfect for life to form as we know it, there are for all intents and purposes, infinate possiblities for such a thing to occur in the universe due to the shear size and mass available in it. While the odds are that it will probably have some sort of mostly random distribution across the universe, statistics and odds

      • Hmmm. I wouldn't say that it's retarded. I haven't really seen a lot of evidence even that some form of extremely basic life could be formed in any sort of atmosphere even resmbling ours (if I remember correctly, there was something about some scientists that was recently able to get proteins to form in very exact and beneficial conditions, but that's about it). Why should I really believe that life could have possibly formed on some remote place like Mars, where the temperature apparently ranges from 27 [washington.edu]

        • As a poker player, I have a corollary to the Infinite Monkeys theory, which I call the Infinite Donkeys theory. This theory holds that every possible event, no matter how unlikely, will happen if given sufficient opportunity (in this case if you play enough hands).

          Though we do not know the parameters of the Drake equation, it is starting to appear that one of them -- planets in habitable zones -- is much larger than would have been guessed a couple decades ago. Even if the odds of all the cards falling in t

          • Hmm... but if it's infinitesimally small, it would require an infinite amount of time.

            There's an interesting argument that if time/the universe has been existent for an infinite amount of time in the past, we would never have been able to get to this current point in time, because then it would no longer have been an infinite amount of time. I believe it's the Kalam argument.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Mal-2 ( 675116 )
              We know the odds are greater than zero, because we have proof that it has happened once. "Infinitesimal" was probably a bad choice of word, as the anthropic principle shows the odds have to be finite. That is, we're here, so it can and does happen. It sets a lower bound on probability.

              Mal-2

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Original Replica ( 908688 )
      I understand the importance of finding life on another planet. ... Its only important because its a planet that we can land on without being crushed and/or incinerated.

      Which is why I am glad to hear there is no life there. If there was any form of life there it might raise moral questions as to if we as humanity should ever have any kind of lasting presence there. In 100 years there will be self sufficient colonies on Mars, because as you pointed out it's one of the few places in space we can actually ge

    • Re:Please Stop already.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mmalove ( 919245 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @09:06PM (#22442270)
      Of course, given that we probably couldn't completely 100.00000000000% sterilize what we sent there, the next question is:

      Is there life on Mars now? (that we've been there)

      Sooner or later, we're gonna find our own bacteria on Mars if we keep sending stuff there.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by OMNIpotusCOM ( 1230884 )
        You know, that's an interesting point. We should start bringing blankets so that when we do find life on another planet we can give it to them. It worked when we met the Indians.
      • Which is exactly why we need to be sure there is no life there now. Once we start sending humans there, steralizing will be impossible, so any finds from that point on (if not sooner) wouldnt really prove anything.
    • we aren't looking for little green men you retard, even finding a sign that life existed there at some point would be huge. we know mars had liquid water at some point which suggests an atmosphere and hospitable conditions.

      please just go back to watching the "power hour" on discovery channel and stfu while the good people are NASA continue with their amazing work.

    • Re:Please Stop already.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @09:38PM (#22442434) Homepage
      Mars is a big ball of dust with little atmosphere, no magnetosphere, no water...

      Please stop already with displaying your abysmal ignorance. Mars has the largest (though now exinct) volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons, along with three nearly as big on Tharsis). You don't get those on a "ball of dust". Sure, there may not be much magnetosphere at the moment -- Earth has had periods like that too, during geomagnetic reversals. There's still life here.

      As for water...if you don't believe the photographs, go get yourself a decent telescope and just take a look at Mars. See that white patch at the pole? That's ice, also known as frozen water. (Yeah, the winter icecap also gets some CO2 ice; the permanent cap is water ice.)

      Perhaps Mars never did have life. But your analogy is like the guy who goes looking for his dropped keys under the lamppost because the light there is better than where he dropped them. We haven't begun to look in the really interesting places yet.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )
        Mars has the largest (though now exinct) volcano in the solar system. You don't get those on a "ball of dust".

        But that volcano may have been extinct for 2 billion years or so.

        Sure, there may not be much magnetosphere at the moment -- Earth has had periods like that too, during geomagnetic reversals. There's still life here.

        Earth's reversals do *not* stop our magnetosphere, just make it a bunch of mini-magnetospheres for a while. They are not as strong as the normal ones, but they do the job.
    • Life has been found in boiling water, inside ice, inside rocks, exposed to high levels of UV, inside nuclear reactors, and even on the outside of spacecraft. It can probably even travel between planets. Life could probably survive on Mars even today, and it almost certainly could survive at some point in the past. It would be truly surprising if Mars were completely sterile. Whether there is, or has been, life on Mars or not, either way, there is something to be explained and learned. So, looking for li

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khallow ( 566160 )
      You must be awfully smart to figure that out. Even our best scientists haven't figured out whether there's life on Mars or not!
    • The only problem is that you lack knowledge of human history, of consciousness, and of life, thus you conclusion is invalid.

      The interesting question is not "_When_ will remnants of Life be discovered on Mars", but "In _what_ dimensions will Life be found on it?" _Everything_ is alive, because everything is conscious. Mars one of the catalysts that helps us to "wake up."

      > nothing, NADA, suggests life is out there.

      I beg to differ. NASA's own footage shows otherwise. Evidence: The Case for NASA UFOs [amazon.com]

  • Bit early to say that (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Friday February 15, 2008 @08:39PM (#22442126) Homepage Journal
    "The rovers [can] do in a day what a skilled field geologist can do in 30 seconds." -- Steve Squyres.

    Squyres was given the 2005 Wired Rave Award for science by Wired for overseeing the creation of Spirit and Opportunity that had, at the time, lasted thirteen times longer than expected.

    As we approach sol 1500, this means the rovers have done about 12.5 hours of field geology. And that's being generous, as Squyres was talking about the combined work of both rovers and only one of the rovers has been operating at full capacity.

    So maybe, just maybe, Andrew Knoll is a little premature in declaring the planet dead.

    • They also haven't moved all that far from their starting position (about 7 miles).

      If you landed in the bed of a (former) salt lake in the US (eg. the aptly-named Dead Sea), you'd likely draw the same conclusions. It'd be really tough to support life in that locale.

      I don't want to discredit the fantastic achievements of the project, but we currently don't have even remotely enough data to make these sorts of grandiose claims.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by QuantumG ( 50515 )
        What's more unfortunate is that NASA has a habit of doing it. The Moon was declared "explored" after landing at six places on the equator and picking up some rocks.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 )

        If you landed in the bed of a (former) salt lake in the US (eg. the aptly-named Dead Sea), you'd likely draw the same conclusions.

        Traditionally, we've considered the Dead Sea to be outside the US. In Israel, in fact, though I may have missed some recent border movements.

        Perhaps you meant to refer to Death Valley? Which, by the way, is full of life, for all that it's a dried up seabed and the hottest place in the USA.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jez9999 ( 618189 )
          He might be talking about the Great Salt Lake, although that supports a bit more life than the Dead Sea (I wonder why saline shrimp don't exist in the latter?)

          • He might be talking about the Great Salt Lake

            Possible, but he did refer to a "former" salt lake, so I think not.

            You're right, of course, that the Great Salt Lake supports an assortment of life not found in the Dead Sea, but I'm not so sure that it's a matter of "more" so much as a matter of "different" life in the Great Salt Lake.

            Either way, I expect that, by and by, we're going to be astounded at the variety of life that lived on Mars back in the day. And we may yet be astounded by the variety that sti

  • Too salty? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @08:42PM (#22442146) Homepage Journal
    Too salty? Is there such a thing? Here on Earth we've found life everywhere where there's energy and liquid water: even apparently-unliveable places like the nuclear waste tanks at Hanford or the superheated water of deep-ocean vents. Excessively salty water might kill off life not adapted to it, but there's no fundamental reason why life can't form in extreme saltwater.

    • Re:Too salty? (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Friday February 15, 2008 @09:13PM (#22442298) Homepage Journal
      Let's not forget the most unlikely place where we've found life: the human stomach. It was assumed for over a century that the stomach was just too acidic for microbial life.. then some Australian medical researchers claimed to have discovered microbes that live in the stomach and were literally laughed at for decades before they managed to culture them. Robin Warren and Barry Marshall won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2005 after showing the bacterium Helicobacter pylori plays a key role in the development of both stomach and intestinal ulcers.

    • Goodness, yes. Indeed, for all we know, a very salty liquid water environment helps get life started.

      After all, one way to describe a living cell (leaving out its ability to replicate) is a system that maintains across a membrane various ion concentration gradients and uses them for various purposes. Surely one of the most primitive possible cells one can imagine is just a closed membrane with membrane-bound ion pumps actively maintaining a different ionic environment inside than outside, and using the gr

    • No such thing as too salty. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FellowConspirator ( 882908 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @10:19PM (#22442592)
      Here on earth we have several strains of halobacterium that can live inside salt crystals and survive off sunlight and residual moisture. Our terrestrial ones generally like a hot environment too.

      No, a high-salinity environment doesn't rule out life at all.

      Nor do other extrenes. There's plenty of microbes that will live in concentrated acids and bases. In one of my wife's old labs, she once had to through out a jugs of concentrated NaOH solution because a fungus was growing in it...
      • A fungus that grows in concentrated NaOH? Strong bases are the ideal destroyers/cleaners of organics. Only Piranha is more effective. Well, that's what I thought until now.

        Is there a paper on such fungii?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by oztiks ( 921504 )
      Isn't earths oceans full of salt too?
    • We don't even need to go to another country to find extremely salty water where life still exists even today. I can cite two places where high-salt concentrations still harbor life, namely the former salt evaporating ponds owned by Cargill west of Fremont, CA at the south end of San Francisco Bay and the Great Salt Lake--you can find things like brine shrimp and a long list of microbes living in these waters!

  • Late Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @08:47PM (#22442172)
    Optimism continued to make inroads today across the community as K'Breel, Speaker for the most Illustrious Council of Elders, stated that the Council's latest plan to feed misinformation to the robotic minions of the sinister blue planet were bearing fruit.

    "Gentle Citizens, today I stand before you proud as a gerlsh in the first heivtning, positively quirlly to bring you the news that the devices of terror, sent unto us by the hideous inhabitants of the evil blue planet, have been duped by our clever plan! By sowing the soil in their path with the poisonous gretch-sand, we have convinced the credulous fools that life cannot possibly exist here. Thinking our planet a horrible wasteland of gretch-sand, instead of the vibrant paradise we know it to be, the disgusting creatures of the evil blue planet will doubtless abandon their nefarious schemes to annex our world! Rejoice with me, pod-mates! This is the turning point!"


    When a certain impertinent youngling pointed out that there have been so many 'turning points' in this terrible conflict that surely, the Illustrious Council must by dizzy by this time, K'breel denounced him as a traitor and decreed that his gelsacs be lacerated until he admitted his guilt and confessed his onerous crimes. The youngling confessed later that evening, and was immediately executed for his awful crimes.
  • While the BBC series was a good show, I cannot imagine that the proposed US version of Life on Mars could have worked out as well. There is only so far that the premise can stretch, and the BBC was able to pull it off because the relatively short run allowed for it while a US network would not want to pick up a show that was only intended to run for a relatively short number of seasons.

  • That is what happens (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15, 2008 @09:04PM (#22442258)
    When oceans and seas dry up they get saltier and saltier. Unless you know the total volume of water you don't know the concentrations of salts to make a determination of whether or not it can support life.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 )
      Indeed. I'm sure that if the Martians sent a probe to the middle of the Bonneville Salt Flats, they'd conclude that the chances of life on our planet are slim. Ironically, the Salt Flats would also make a nice, safe, predictable place to land an expensive probe.
  • I say hit terraforming mars esp. with an ammonia ball. The likely hood of life being there is REAL slim. Worse, we could search for a hundred years. But if we send a mission to go past jupiter, capture an asteroid and send it back to mars, it would take over 20-30 years for all that. During that time, we could be looking over the planet. If it is found, then divert the asteroid, otherwise, let it hit the planet while we have little to nobody on there. With an asteroid coming say every 2-5 years, we could sl
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Karl Rove, is that you?

      Choosing the answer you want and then altering reality to ensure that it's at least somewhat true is not the same as discovering the answer to the question.

      That's not to mention the sheer irresponsibility of intentionally manipulating whatever ecosystem might (but probably doesn't) exist on Mars. Accidental contamination is one thing, but haven't we learned by now that we can't just impetuously troll the galaxy doing whatever we want? It's certainly caused us all sorts of problems d
  • Well we now know that high blood pressure killed the last of the Martians. Their love of salty food finally ended the reign of our pyramid building face carving brothers.
  • Its possible that the inability of the rovers to locate any evidence of life may be due to a serious morale crisis. Here's an article [theonion.com] with details.
  • Anyone care to explain that tag?

  • Or maybe high salinity and high acidity is what life needs to get started and the conditions on modern earth are the weird ones. Or maybe it doesn't matter because what life really needs to get started is ice, and when ice freezes and thaws repeatedly, you get pockets of water.

    I think it simply doesn't make sense to try to draw conclusions based on so little data. We need to send a fleet of robots to Mars, robots that drill, search across the whole planet, etc. For the price of the Iraq war, we could ha
  • Of course there is Life On Mars, just ask Sam Tyler [wikipedia.org].
  • The Viking data seemed to show a *Martian* circadian pattern to gaseous emissions in incubated soil samples not present in sterilized soil samples ( http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/23/1951245 [slashdot.org]).

    Quite convincing now, but apparently circadian rhythms weren't much recognised / understood then.

    As for this statement: "...it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold., tell that to the fish, or the many extremophiles found here on earth.

    I still think that life was discove

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khallow ( 566160 )
      Once again, life wasn't discovered even if life was responsible for the observations. You can't rule out nonliving explanations for the observation. Even the circadian pattern is expected since the top alternate explanation (peroxides reacting with the medium used) depends on UV radiation from the Sun.
  • Of course life on Mars is going to look remote, Mars is over 200 million km away!
  • It's better that no life is found so that there will be less resistance to human settlement and teraforming in the future.

  • At The End (Score:2, Insightful)

    by robisbell ( 1183613 )
    the water may have been salty there, but does not mean it could not support life at some point. I cite the Salton Sea as an example, it once held life till it became unable to support it in the end. I also cite the Aral Sea, used to support a large amount of life and now it's a desert. Just because it finds evidence within it's limited capabilities, does not mean that that's how everything was all the time.

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