Blue, Not Red: Did Ancient Mars Look Like This? 75
astroengine writes "Using elevation data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, software engineer Kevin Gill was inspired to create a virtual version of the red planet with a difference. 'I had been doing similar models of Earth and have seen attempts by others of showing life on Mars, so I figured I'd give it a go,' Gill told Discovery News. 'It was a good way to learn about the planet, be creative and improve the software I was rendering it in.' He included oceans, lakes, clouds and a biosphere — a view of a hypothetical ancient Mars that looks wonderfully like home."
Re:BS (Score:5, Informative)
This is where using 2-3 minutes to read the fine article would have helped you out.
It is a software guy who just wondered what it would look like with earthly features. This is not based on any kind of facts other than the elevations.
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It implies that somebody (perhaps the submitter?) thought that the simulation is intended to be accurate.
As parent says - read TFA, it's meant to be a creative exercise.
Also read Kevin Gill's own explaination [google.com].
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Jepardy answers, not news headlines: Are Slashdot titles more like them?
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Yes. Because amino acids inevitably evolve into green photosynthesising plants. The original comment made a bad assumption, but so did you.
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Planet Mars Feed [feeddistiller.com] @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
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If Mars ever had chlorophyl containing life, it would have left and oxygen atmosphere which Mars hasn't got.
Yes, because Oxygen is non-reactive and couldn't "disappear" into complex molecules.
"Wonderfully homely" (Score:4, Funny)
So the typical Martian was one ugly motherfucker, then? "Ain't got time to bleed!"
Props for realizing that a Mars covered with water would be blue, too. Such insight!
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The Shire (Score:1)
I think I see the Shire down there
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There's no reason to put "blue" in quotes there. The sky is blue (when it's blue) because of its optical properties. Explaining it in more detail is informative, but doesn't make it not really blue. Same as how a deeper understanding of the electromagnetic forces that bind together atoms and molecules doesn't mean that objects never really "touch" each other, as deep a thought as that may seem when you're eight and you learn some basics of atomic theory.
interesting excercise (Score:5, Insightful)
It is an interesting exercise.
But I notice the renderings show a lot of nicely circular lakes, suggesting meteor impact craters. If Mars at any time had this amount of water and a thicker atmosphere there would likely be less craters and those that did remain would probably have different shapes due to erosion. It would suggest the meteorite impacts happened after the water evaporated and the atmosphere thinned.
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No, craters of the size in the images would be caused by bodies big enough that they wouldn't even notice an atmosphere.
No, not really. You can't erode something circular into something that's not circular - that's why we can find impact craters on Earth that are millions of years old.
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Re:Um... (Score:4, Informative)
In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, the northern ocean is filled with fresh water from the molten polar ice cap, while the rivers take up salt from the rocks they flow over, so there are salty rivers flowing into a fresh water ocean. I'm not sure how realistic that is, but it doesn't seem completely illogical.
As artist impressions go, I prefer this one [wikimedia.org], by Daein Ballard over the one in the article.
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Fresh water is important for terrestrial life. It's not exactly like the oceans on Earth are barren and lifeless.
Fauna (Score:1)
Unlikely - mars has always been cold (Score:5, Interesting)
People seem to forget that after its formation the sun was somewhat LESS bright than it is now so Mars would have been even colder in its current orbit. If there ever was large amounts of water on Mars I suspect that it would have spent most of its time locked up as ice sheets with the occasional melting due to impacts. Pretty much the way it is today.
All this warm wet life on mars stuff strikes me as nothing more than wish fulfillment - the same way people used to imagine Venus was a tropical paradise. Until the probes went there and proved those predictions to be some of the worst ever made in astronomical science.
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Hey, I am all for space exploration, and bothering to go has lead to some good knowled
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That's like claiming we should still believe the scientists mentioned by the grandparent who pred
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I'm no planetary scientist, but I'd imagine this would depend greatly on the atmospheric composition at the time. If it was thick enough, liquid water should have been possible, especially with methane added to the mix.
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This is only a problem if the rate at which the atmosphere is blown away is high. For example, I claim that serving water in a glass is pointless because the water would dry away, and you answer "Sure would".
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When Mars still had its atmosphere, it was mostly CO2, so the greenhouse effect could keep it warm enough for liquid water.
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People seem to forget that after its formation the sun was somewhat LESS bright than it is now so Mars would have been even colder in its current orbit.
And some forget that after Mars' own formation it was damn hot (molten, even, for a while) just from the energy of its own formation, just like every other planet. Although only a trace is left today, this would have lasted for some time. So it is incorrect to assume that "less bright sun" equals "colder planet" unless all other things were equal, which they were not.
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Actually Mars might have been warmer, THEN colder. The planets maintained much internal heat left over from creation for millions of years. Mars once had an active core like the Earth still does (the now dead volcanoes on Mars are proof of this). With an active core Mars also once had a magnetic field that protected it's early thicker atmosphere. Mars might once had been a lot warmer and wetter, perhaps long enough for life to evolve there. In fact the early Earth might have been TOO HOT due to still
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Insolation is only one part of the equation. While the sun may have been less bright, the Martian atmosphere would have been much, much thicker - more than o
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"and that there were once considerable quantities of free flowing water for a long period."
No , there nothings showing it was there for a long period. All the signs of water could have been made by flash floods and lakes that lasted for a few decades at most.
"were working with the best information they had. (Unlike you.)"
Ooo, get you. Careful with that handbag!
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... now so Mars would have been even colder in its current orbit.
Global warming should tell you that much of a planets temperature is a matter of its atmosphere.
So with a CO2 rich atmosphere nothing speaks against an ancient Mars with free floating water, forests and other life.
Keep in mind: mid day summer temperatures or at the equator on Mars are above zero regularly.
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Even then, still too cold: I bet chances are better for terraforming the moon.
Blue shift (Score:3)
Campaign Cartographer (Score:2)
Many years ago the software Campaign Cartographer showed us this picture, of course with old mapping data but it was close.
Also the moon (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been (very slowly) doing something a bit similar with the moon --- see here [google.com] --- although differently; I've been trying to render everything and producing ground-level views rather than producing a painted sphere like TFA. (His looks better from a distance. Mine looks better close up.) I've been trying to use procedural texturing and atmospheric effects. The pictures above are rather out of date; rendering your own from SVN will look better.
Unfortunately rendering things the size of planets from very close up runs into big problems with floating point precision. The only renderer I've found which will do it at all is Povray, and even then there are loads of bugs --- volumetric effects for things like clouds is well buggered at this sort of scale. See this picture [twitpic.com] for an example. Plus Povray's is really slow at procedural surfaces.
Right now I really need to start again from scratch using higher-resolution terrain and gravity data from some of the recent lunar probes, and I also probably want to switch to a different renderer which works at higher precision. Any suggestions of a fast raytracer that does procedural isosurfaces, volumetric effects and works at double precision will be gratefully appreciated...
I will also share this test render [twitpic.com] with you, which I think is delightfully surreal...
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SimEarth? (Score:1)
It had a pretty accurate height map of the planet it seemed and showed what it would look like terraformed. Maybe not in as super cool graphics but still.
So why does this guy get a Slashdot mention for something I could do at 8?
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Kees Veenenbos' work is pretty spectacular: http://en.fishki.net/comment.php?id=88754 [fishki.net]
His website [space4case.com] has more, and he's been doing it since 2001.
Always room for beautiful visualisations of the natural world, IMHO. :)
No. (Score:2)
It couldn't possibly look that way. Mount Olympus would be smaller or non existent, craters wouldn't have reshaped the terrain as much, and on top of that, it is thought that Mars might have briefly had some plate tectonics. It depends on the time period they want to depict, of course.
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This is the epitome of slashdot (Score:3)
Show the nerds a beautiful picture and they'll totally miss the point and dissect it to death. Good thing this is not a beautiful naked woman. They'd be complaining that the angle of the elbow isn't quite right and prove it with a mathematical formula.
Why not? (Score:2)
Who knows? Our grandkids could be vacationing on Arsia Mons.