Intraterrestrials: Mars Life May Hide Deep Below 79
astroengine writes "Almost every month we see news dispatches from the Mars where the nuclear-powered rover Curiosity finds water-bearing minerals in rocks and other circumstantial clues that the Red Planet could have once supported life. But in terms of finding direct evidence of past or present Martians, the rover barely scratches the surface, says geochemist Jan Amend of the University of Southern California. Using Earth life as an example, some species of microbes live miles below the surface, without sunlight or oxygen, metabolizing chemicals that are the result of radioactive decay. Most intriguing of all is the microbe Desulforudis Audaxviator that dwells nearly two miles down, a life form that would feel right at home inside Mars' crust. 'This organism has had to figure out everything on its own,' says Amend, 'it splits water into hydrogen and oxygen for metabolism.' Amend hopes to drop probes deep underground in some of the world's most inhospitable locations over the next few years, creating a possible analog for future Mars subsurface studies."
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:5, Informative)
what are you blathering about, the wars of choice waste so much money the space budget (and all other science combined) is of no consequence
we do have the cash to do science, and we'd have a lot more not spending hundreds of billions every decade to slaughter innocents
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You want to find aliens without a military? You'll be sorry when xenobacteria are shooting laser beams at your family.
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hah, think of what the last 75 years have brought us: nuclear weapons, ICBM, satellites, lasers that can shoot down aircraft, rail guns, bioweapons, genetic engineering......now you're talking about a species centuries advanced from ours that can not only travel interstellar space but wage war on that scale? wouldn't matter if we had a military or not, we'd be dead meat before we even knew we were being attacked.
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hah, think of what the last 75 years have brought us: nuclear weapons, ICBM, satellites, lasers that can shoot down aircraft, rail guns, bioweapons, genetic engineering......now you're talking about a species centuries advanced from ours that can not only travel interstellar space but wage war on that scale? wouldn't matter if we had a military or not, we'd be dead meat before we even knew we were being attacked.
Think about what the next 75 years will bring us. Science is advancing at such a rate that we might be a species capable of interstellar travel ourselves very soon. Regardless of this, having a well-trained military may be a costly burden on the U.S., but one day they might save your ass from a pissed off E.T.
I don't want to confuse science with fiction, but what if a fraction of the fiction behind Scifi series like Stargate would actually be close to the truth: alien civilizations far out of reach for ou
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:5, Funny)
For all we know, we might be more popular than Meercat Manor.
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99.5% of our military spending is on things which will be utterly useless in such a case, I've counting the $4 Billion spent on nuclear weapon maintenance as potentially useful.. Decades spending a tenth of the defense budget on pure science (physics, chemistry, biology) would be the better investment for such a future.
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Think about what the next 75 years will bring us. Science is advancing at such a rate that we might be a species capable of interstellar travel ourselves very soon.
Interstellar? You do know that means "between stars" don't you? At the moment we're quite impressed that we have got an unmanned probe out of our own solar system in 35 years.
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The amount of resources marshalled to enable interstellar travel implies mastery of forces that can obliterate human civilization in a single blow. If aliens wanted to kill us, there wouldn't be a war. They could just accelerate a big rock at us and obliterate all civilization in a single strike, regardless of how big our military is.
Generally speaking, destruction is easier than construction. It takes a lot of effort to assemble castles out of chaos, but a good thwack in the right places is all it takes to
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In former Soviet Russia (Score:1)
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(Oblig...)
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I probably make more money and pay more taxes than two average slashdotters put together, professionals that are half a century old are generally like that....
we've caused many times more (hundreds of thousands) of Iraqi deaths than Saddam did. those people never attacked us. The villagers and goat herders of Afghanistan did not attack us either, Al Qaeda and the "Taliban" that hosted Bin Laden left there long ago and fled to Pakistan and other parts.
Now we are not "winning" in Afghanistan, and are negot
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In the past, things like infrastrucure and wars were seen as benefitting future generations as well as current, so it was seen as ethical to borrow.
Current borrowing is largely to pay for retirement benefits that current retirees did not want to set enough of their own money aside for and another trillion of other spending that has nothing to do with fuure generations that the current generation does not want to pay for.
It is unethical borrowing. Forget the incremental cost of ongoing wars -- you could can
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Some people are more than ready to spend other peoples money but are unwilling to spend their own.
Fundamentally, you do not own your own money/wealth. You live in a society that allows people to accumulate individual wealth almost infinitely beyond their needs. This is not some rule of nature, it is a distorted version of civilisation.
A CEO does not need to have thousands of times the wealth of his workers. It doesn't do him any good, never mind society as a whole.
When someone spends $500m on a yacht, he is simply thumbing his nose at society. There is no particular reason why the overwhelming m
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Fundamentally, you do not own your own money/wealth. You live in a society that allows people to accumulate individual wealth almost infinitely beyond their needs. This is not some rule of nature, it is a distorted version of civilisation.
I disagree that your original assertion is a distorted view of civilization. It is fundamentally a self-contradictory statement. To say that you don't own the money and wealth that is "yours", that is, which you own is an inherently false statement of the classic form, "A is not A".
A CEO does not need to have thousands of times the wealth of his workers. It doesn't do him any good, never mind society as a whole.
We don't do such things because of need, but merely because it's a better idea than the alternatives we come up with. It's worth noting here that no one else needs that wealth either. As to whether wealth does the rich any good o
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Well, enjoy your status as a second tier nation in a couple of hundred years while everyone else is running around the solar system claiming its resources.
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Re:Jesus Christ (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called investing in the future. I'm sure that building all those aqueducts in various Roman provinces cost the Republic, and later the Empire, vast amounts of coin that if it could not be directly gained, had to be borrowed. The plus side was prosperous cities that were major economic generators. This idea that the only thing any state should worry about is the nebulous creature known as "fiscal responsibility" is pretty strange, first of all because the term has real meaning. Borrowing money to build infrastructure like highways will certainly throw major liabilities on a government's balance sheet, but no one seriously says that the only measure of fiscal responsibility should be liabilities.
Look at this way. At some point in the next century or two, the major industrial powers will likely begin some sort of race for solar system resources. But that race will not be built out of nothing. It will be built out of a whole series of major investments, many (if not most) by governments. Each one of the stepping-stone advances may seem on paper at that moment to be an utter waste of time and money, but at the end of the day, being in that race is only made possible by having made those other investments along the way.
If the US wishes to sit it out, that's fine. In short and medium terms, it will be a net gain, and give some temporary economic advantage over the Europeans, the Chinese and the Japanese (and, pretty soon, Brazil, I'll wager). But at some point, when they've made advances far in advance of the Apollo program, the US will have to rebuild what it gave up in the name "fiscal responsibility", and it may find that that is a lot easier said than done.
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So one of the biggest problems in US s
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I think that's possibly the most depressing comment I've seen on a technology news website.
Look. I value knowledge too. But I don't like overpaying a lot for it or ignoring what else could have been done with the money spent.
What I think is mildly depressing here was the argument that launching the occasional very expensive space probe somehow is an "investment" or will give an advantage in some future space race. It doesn't follow logically.
Here's what I think the real argument is. I want space probes therefore space probes must be good for something. The rest of the argument is merely a f
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Ask the Germans and Italians how that went as they furiously tried to become grand colonial powers at the end of the 19th century.
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"intraterrestrial" (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Intramarsial" has an unpleasant tendency of making people think of antisocial kangaroos.
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Really? That didn't seem so bad to me, compared to "news dispatches from the Mars." I didn't bother to read the article, but it seems the summary at least could be suggesting that there may be life on Mars similar to intraterrestrial life that we've already found.
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Given that the article is about understanding life forms deep in the Earth's crust (which provides an analogous habitat to Mars' crust), what different meaning of "intraterrestrial" do you think the authors should be aware of?
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Intraterrestrial? You mean like, life on uranus?
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Heh good point, but perhaps the poster might be forgiven as much as someone referring to seismic activity on another planet as an earthquake.
Deep underground = inhospitable? (Score:3, Interesting)
>> Amend hopes to drop probes deep underground in some of the world's most inhospitable locations over the next few years
Where? Beijing? Mexico City? Or the real kind of inhospitable like the Gobi desert or Antarctica? I'd think once you get far enough underground pretty much anyplace would be inhospitable...to humans.
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Depends how deep you go. Most cave systems are far more hospitable to humans than the world outside, once you aren't worried about food and in some cases clean water. Stable temperatures, little chance of exposure, no heavy rains or winds, a nice cave makes a good hidey hole if you're stuck.
Ugh, more Mars love (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish I had a few hundred million to push NASA out to Encelaedus or Europa. I bet we could just take samples of water spewed up from below to find evidence of life it it exists on either moon.
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All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
Clarke thought Europa to be the most likely candidate for extraterrestrial life. Still unlikely but perhaps more likely than the rest, based on the albedo. And if there's a chance of life, some of us might not want to disturb it. And would violently protect it.
Mole men? Crab men? (Score:1)
Mars life will be DNA based (Score:4, Interesting)
Panspermia is the theory that life is ubiquitous and travels from planet to planet and star to star. Less unlikely than it seems. For example, dormant spores trapped in salt crystals 25 million years old rejuvenated themselves when released. Life is hardy.
Which of three theories seems on the right side of Occam's Razor:
That life is unique to Earth (where it is all DNA/RNA based)?
That life originates in novel non-DNA based ways independently on each planet?
or that DNA-based life is mobile, seeds planets from above, and then evolves to suit each new environment?
(Wait, I think that could be a Slahdot poll...)
I believe we will find the same is true for life in the the seas of Europa, and elsewhere, too.
Re:Mars life will be DNA based (Score:5, Interesting)
James Lovelock pointed out in the sixties that viewed from space, it would immediately be apparent that earth and life. The prescence of huge amounts of gases which are not stable distinguishes from all other planets in the solar system. He predicted that Mars was in fact dead (before the Viking landers). The idea was that if life had got a foothold, it would probably have managed a similar totally transforming expansion over millions of years. Life that does not leave a big footprint wouldn't seem very much like the life we know from Earth.
You got to admit, it's held up for a long time. Viking sondes found no life on Mars. OK, maybe there used to be life on Mars, at least microbial life? Newer sondes with better instruments find no evidence of that either. If there was, wow, it's done an exceptionally good job of dying out without trace (considering the extremophiles we know from Earth). Now maybe there's life deep in the crust?
Maybe not. And maybe still more excuses will be made if that too fails to pan out.
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Not even life can make up for what Mars does not have as compared to Earth. It has a far lower gravity and virtually no magnetic field, meaning any dense atmosphere is going to essentially be eroded into space. As I said in another post, the Mars of today is not the Mars of 4 billion to 3 billion years ago, and it seems more and more likely that its early conditions were no more inhospitable to the evolution of life than Earth's (being further away from the Sun it may even have been able to form bodies of l
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Stating that life is going to leave a monstrous footprint on the surface of a planet is a pretty major assumption, that I think at this point is unwarranted.
I think it's reasonable to assume that any life on Mars would be self-replicating and subject to evolution (which isn't Earth-centric). Meaning that it would adapt to a variety of living conditions over time.
Given that the extremophiles which live deep underground and survive in very marginal environments on Earth are genetically tied to some of the earliest organisms indicates to me that metabolic processes of Earth organisms were among the earliest things to be optimized and that there probably was som
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But on earth, the footprint is truly monstrous, touching the atmosphere, every part of the surface, and deep into the crust. The carbon cycle even takes a trip down into the mantle via subduction of limestone. I agree, it's not necessary to believe it would have been that omnipresent on Mars. But how reasonable is it to believe it would be totally unde
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or perhaps that there is life on Mars, but it is a dying planet, with an extremely limited biosphere in which dwindling amounts of extremophiles are pushed to the limit.
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Wait, I think that could be a Slahdot poll...
It definitely not a Jahdot poll, mon... :p
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Planet-to-planet to a couple places within one solar system is feasible. However, if we end up discovering that not every potentially habitable niche in our own solar system is (or at least has been within recent geological history, prior to some particular ecological disaster) absolutely teeming with life, then the interstellar hypothesis becomes quite unlikely. If life-supporting planets are spewing out space-hardy life seeds at a high enough rate to chance upon planets in solar systems several light-year
This would be the least interesting Martian life. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Me -- I want some proof.
Re:This would be the least interesting Martian lif (Score:5, Insightful)
Life happened when Earth was in general far far less comfy to life than it is now. Mars likely had similar conditions very early on, but for a number of reasons (lower gravity, lack of magnetic field), it lost the thick atmosphere that would have made liquid water possible for extended periods of time on its surface. The hypothesis is that Mars may have evolved a biosphere during that period when it possessed a dense atmosphere and liquid water. In that case, even after most of the atmosphere disappeared, some portion of the biosphere that had adapted to living deep underground would have continued on even after the surface of the planet had been rendered completely uninhabitable.
And, of course, we do not know for certain that the entire surface is uninhabitable. We have a damned small sample size, and have landed no probes in places like Valles Marineris, where the atmosphere is considerably denser and liquid water may last longer (we have observed fog there). If I was looking for life closer to the surface, I'd bee doing it in the deepest points of Valles Marineris.
Like I said the other day (Score:2)
NASA these days is staying alive more by issuiing a weekly
PR-bulletin than by good old scientific or technological achievement.
It's their Swan-song, in a way.
Frack Mars . . . ? (Score:2)
So is that what we need to do to smoke them Mars critters and varmints out . . . ?
And maybe some natural gas, on the side, to power our Mars colonies . . . ?
Stop dreaming (Score:1)
There is no life on Mars. Stop dreaming.
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not for the last 3 billion years anyway, but possible before that
Earth First! (Score:2)
We'll strip mine the other planets later.
Curiousity needs to find a fresh crater (Score:2)
Life IN Mars (yet again) (Score:2)
Here [slashdot.org] is my second comment entitled "Life IN Mars"; my original comment on this was so long ago that it has vanished. Let me merely add that eventually we will find life inside almost every extra-terrestrial planet-sized-or-larger object (assuming we get there), with the probable exemption of solar objects.
Unlikely metabolism... (Score:2)
'This organism has had to figure out everything on its own,' says Amend, 'it splits water into hydrogen and oxygen for metabolism.'
It's hard to believe that geochemist Dr. Amend said that about Desulforudis Audaxviator, since D. Audaxviator is completely intolerant of oxygen, and its sulfate reduction mechanism is right there in its name!
If anyone had bothered to follow the links in that discovery.com article, they would have found this useful article [mst.edu] that quotes the original discoverers of Desulforudis