Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Ancient Lakebed 74
astroengine writes "The site where NASA's Mars rover Curiosity landed last year contains at least one lake that would have been perfectly suited for colonies of simple, rock-eating microbes found in caves and hydrothermal vents on Earth. Analysis of mudstones in an area known as Yellowknife Bay, located inside the rover's Gale Crater landing site, show that fresh water pooled on the surface for tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of years. 'The results show that the lake was definitely a habitable environment,' Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told Discovery News. The finding was announced at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco."
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banded iron formations
I always suspected Iron Maiden was from Mars.
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Re:Microbes require hundreds of Myrs to evolve (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose the assumption is that, if there was one habitable environment that persisted for tens or hundreds of kiloyears, there were probably others. I also suppose that life would be more likely to maintain its foothold in an environment where lakes tended to persist for many years, as opposed to appearing and disappearing with the seasons.
Re:Microbes require hundreds of Myrs to evolve (Score:5, Insightful)
Tens of thousands of years just ain't gonna cut it. Water may be necessary for life, but it is not sufficient.
Tell that to the iron respirating microbes of Blood Falls [wikipedia.org] that were in their transient little pool breathing oxygen normally until one sudden winter the surface froze and never receded. All they "needed" was a pool of water and some chemically active elements, like iron and sulphur -- both present on Mars.
Transient lakes are not a good environment - anything that gets started gets nipped in the bud when the lake dries up.
You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years, and probably oceans, not lakes. Find some banded iron formations and we'll talk.
You're in luck! We found a formation right next to Mars! You're living on it! And we even have rocks from Mars on Earth -- ejecta from impacts -- and estimate that tons of Earth has been spread about the solar system, possibly seeding live just about anywhere that could support it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just as sceptical as the next person. I'll rightly dismiss any claim without evidence, but I refuse to have a closed mind to possibilities for the very same reason: Every time we've declared places on Earth devoid of life, we've found it thriving there. Used to think life couldn't exist at the bottom of the ocean, wrong. Used to think no life could survive subduction into the crust, wrong. We've had to re-define what life "needs" to survive so many times it's more truthful to say, "we're not really sure where life can't survive." So, if you make an unevidenced claim like, "You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years" -- I'll give you the same sceptical middle finger: Fucking Prove it, or you're full of bullshit.
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LIfe existing != life arising (Score:2)
There are several different niches on earth where life exists in very hostile conditions. But that's not relevant to the question of life on Mars. The point is, did extremophile life arise spontaneously in such places, or did it migrate from somewhere else and gradually adapted to extreme conditions?
As far as we know, life may have a very low probability of appearing. We still don't know the exact combination of factors that led to the formation of the first living organisms, no one has ever been able to du
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The presence of the moon could be fundamental to both the magnetic field and plate tectonics, due to the churning of the earth through tidal action. Also, ocean tides may have been a contributor to the creation of life, perhaps the concentration of soluble minerals in tidal pools were a factor. So, it could be that life will only evolve on a planet with a large moon.
That was a proposition in one of Asimov's last Foundation books (Foundation and Earth? I haven't read them in a while) and Asimov was a biochem
Incredible That This is Happening (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it incredible that we're getting all these results today, that it isn't some scifi or something. JPL, NASA etc are really doing a great job.
I mean, it's pretty much been determined that Mars used to be habitable. We may be only a short time from someone finding real microbe fossils there.
At the same time, exoplanet research is exploding. Someone just found oxygen in the atmosphere of some exoplanet. In the near future, we may be able to detect signatures of life on exoplanets, at least spectroscopically.
Disclaimer: My niece works at JPL. I'm therefore somewhat biased in favour of them, and may not be completely objective. However, I believe my interest in these matters to be true. I was fucked in the ass by a goat yesterday.
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I find it incredible that we're getting all these results today,.
Why? Remember that congress is in the process of putting together the continued funding of the Federal Government as I type this. Time is running out on the temporary agreements currently in place and the horse trading is kicking up into high gear.
Such announcements are at least partially timed by the political reality of having to obtain funding. NASA and JPL are just getting started sooner than the rest I guess.
rock eating microbes (Score:3, Funny)
We welcome our rock eating microbe overlords...
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...by sending a NSA --er, NASA drone to spy on them.
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It's all fine and cute, until they grow up to be Horta's.
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What have you got against Hortas? They're perfectly nice as long as you aren't butchering their children to make paperweights.
Ancient? (Score:1)
"When I was your age, I made love to your grandmother by that lake! Eh? WHAT. No, WHAT? There ain't no more water in that lake? That's the first I heard of that."
... ...
This was the response from my geriatric grandfather as I just read him the story from the tablet. Sigh.
Now get off my lawn...
Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Ancient Lakebed... (Score:3, Funny)
...still searching for new source of NASA funding.
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They can just claim they found dark life in dark rocks. Solid evidence not required. Works for astrophysics. (Although you risk getting elusive dark funding).
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They can just claim they found dark life in dark rocks. Solid evidence not required. Works for astrophysics
the obvious guaranteed way to get funding is to claim they've found signs of al qaeda!
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or oil
Shit, to late! (Score:2)
genesis of life (Score:1, Insightful)
Now although there might have existed water on Mars, and even oceans, the reality is that the chance that life had been ab
Re:genesis of life (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars had an atmosphere before it's core cooled and it lost it's magnetic field, so it would have been significantly more hospitable way back in the day. It wasn't always a "dried up" "reddish rock".
Re:genesis of life (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, and it was totally gone within 500 million years after Mars was formed, and had likely become prohibitively thin for any life to form way before it was gone. Any life that existed must have evolved during the first couple of hundred million years. But on earth, it took 1 billion years. And earth is bigger, closer to the sun, has more water, a less toxic surface than Mars.
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There was no real chance for life on Earth before the Iron Catastrophe, which melted the crust and likely was the first time the crust was anything like a smooth layer. Life may have formed as "quickly" as a hundred million years after the crust cooled enough to have liquid water pooling. [wikipedia.org]
Mars is less certain, but I'd assume it went through the same cycle, and had at least a couple hundred million years with stable liquid water before its core solidified and stopped spinning.
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Latest evidence is that life on Earth started a lot faster than that, maybe even less than half a billion.
Mars cooled faster than Earth (in part because of the incident which led to Earth's Moon), and early Mars had a magnetic field and relatively thick atmosphere. It took over a billion (maybe 1.5, maybe as long as 2) for Mars to dry up.
It's entirely possible that life started on Mars before it did on Earth. It's even possible (unlikely, but not impossible) that life started on Mars first then transfe
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I think I'm right in saying that the environment on earth when life started to appear would actually be lethal to most current-day life including humans, i.e. too hot/unbreathable/toxic and too much radioactivity.
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the reality is that the chance that life had been able to start on Mars before it dried up and turned into a reddish rock is zero.
Got a source to cite for that or are you reading from the book of Armchair Science for Slashdot?
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The now-famous "Miller–Urey experiment" used a highly reduced mixture of gases—methane, ammonia and hydrogen—to form basic organic monomers, such as amino acids.[26] This provided direct experimental support for the second point of the "soup" theory, and it is around the remaining two points of the theory that much of the debate now centers. In the Miller–Urey experiment, a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia was cycled through an apparatus that delivered electrical sparks to the mixture. After one week, it was found that about 10% to 15% of the carbon in the system was now in the form of a racemic mixture of organic compounds, including amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.
Sounds a lot like mixing a "bowl of water" (calling it a bowl of water is oversimplifying too much for my taste) to me. Let's not start in on your blatant abuse of probability: orders of magnitude less does not equal zero. Try out Zeno's Paradox sometimes.
Re:genesis of life (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really true, at least in terms of conditions for life being better than on Mars. The Late Heavy Bombardment probably ended about 3.8 Ma ago, and even the more conservative estimates have life leaving identifiable marks by 3.6 Ma, and there are arguments for rocks even earlier than that -- and we don't have many of those. Life seems to have appeared on Earth not long after the crust cooled enough for such to survive.
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A hundred sample return missions could come back empty and it would still not tell you if life existed on Mars or no. Same for human sorties.
This is not an argument against spaceflight , but i think the chase to find evidence of life on Mars - if it ever existed - at this stage of our spaceflight capabilities is slightly futile and a little bit overprioritized. The best you can do is characterize the environment of the past, which is what Curiosity did here, but actually hitting a fossil with any one off mi
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...the conditions for life to appear have been orders of magnitudes better than on Mars. Lower radiation due to an atmosphere, warmer but not too warm, less toxic chemicals on the surface, and covered mostly with oceans.
For Earth-Life, yes. Now for hypothetical extraterrestrial life on the other hand...
Call me when it finds an actual lake. (Score:1)
All these reports of finding topographic depressions is depressing
Evidence (Score:2)
Beer cans, trolling jigs and outboard motors lost overboard.
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They don't call it the Red(neck) Planet for nuthin'
Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Ancient Lakebed (Score:1)
Perhaps the new web hasn't caught up to them... (Score:1)
Fish, or it didn't happen!
Every planet (Score:1)