Scientists Have Spotted the Signs of Flowing Water On Mars 260
New submitter universe520 writes: Using neat imaging technology that allows them to determine the chemical compound of a substance by looking at the light reflected from it, scientists have spotted the traces of flowing water on Mars. By looking at the dark streaks on some photos of Mars, Lujendra Ojha from Georgia Tech has found compounds that are made in liquid water—meaning that water may be trickling down those streaks when the climate is just right.
From the linked Economist piece: Details remain to be worked out, including where the water in question originates. Possibly, it derives from subsurface ice. Or it might condense out of Mars’s thin, dry atmosphere. Wherever it does come from, though, the amounts in question are modest in the extreme. But even modest amounts of water are intriguing to biologists. If Martians evolved during their planet’s earlier, wetter phase, the continued presence of water means it is just about possible that a few especially hardy types have survived until the present day—clinging on in dwindling pockets of dampness in the way that some “extremophile” bacteria on Earth are able to live in cold, salty and arid environments.
Let's face it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Life on Mars has already been discovered by somebody, but they're rolling out this news slowly so people don't flip their shit.
Re:Let's face it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering even if there is life on Mars it's going to be a long long way from Little Green Men I don't see why anyone except creationists would flip their shit. And even then, creationists and cdesignproponentists will ignore it and do the fingers in ears na-na-na thing. So nothing really would change except smart people would redefine their picture of the universe.
Even at that, considering how much material Earth and Mars have exchanged over billions of years, it wouldn't even really be that amazing for single cell life to be on Mars, especially if it has a common origin with life on Earth. If we proved beyond doubt that it had an independent origin, THAT would be big.
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Since it's a long long way from little green men, as you put it, I'm not sure why you think even a lot of creationists would "flip their shit". Some would, I have little doubt... but I'm not convinced it would really be that many.
The existence of life, particularly very simple kinds of life, is not remotely incompatible with the bible. The existence of advanced *intelligent* life, however, may be.
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Your statement that the Bible is not contradicted by extra-terrestrial life is true. The Bible only says God created life. It doesn't specify all the places where he might have put it, and it never says he didn't put it on other planets (in fact it is completely silent on the topic). Considering the Bible says he created the entire univers
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Are we sure our probes didn't bring life to Mars? (Score:3)
Let's put aside the long timelines and asteroid impacts and focus on more recent exchanges. We keep sending probes to Mars, and I don't think we sterilize them before we send them. I know space is a ha
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I don't get it. Since when do the fundies take a position on extraterrestrial life? I've never heard that one before.
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It is a thing.
One anecdote that is related indirectly to the topic is the ignorance of the nature of stars. Someone in my family didn't know that stars are like our sun but much further away. There was no malice or contradiction of beliefs and they took it as a VERY awesome fact, but that sort of gap in knowledge combined with religious fervor can, and does, lead to the outright denial of even the possibility of life elsewhere.
Bear in mind that many people are in the dark about the nature of the universe as
Stars [Re:Let's face it...] (Score:4, Informative)
One anecdote that is related indirectly to the topic is the ignorance of the nature of stars. Someone in my family didn't know that stars are like our sun but much further away. There was no malice or contradiction of beliefs and they took it as a VERY awesome fact, but that sort of gap in knowledge combined with religious fervor can, and does, lead to the outright denial of even the possibility of life elsewhere.
Indeed.
The first person to clearly state the hypothesis that stars are other suns like ours, but much farther away, was Giordano Bruno-- who also said that since they're like the sun, they undoubtedly also have planets with life. A pretty far-thinking hypothesis, considering that Copernicus' work saying that the Earth circled the sun (instead of vice versa) was still newly published when he asserted it.
Of course, he was burned at the stake for it.
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"One anecdote that is related indirectly to the topic is the ignorance of the nature of stars. Someone in my family didn't know that stars are like our sun but much further away. "
So after you explained this to her, is she vaccinating her kids again?
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its just religious people seem to have developed it into an art.
I worked with a NucE who was a fundamentalist a full fledged. October, 4004 B.C.E, no evolution allowed Fundie.
The tap dancing needed in attempting to reconcile reality to a 4004 b.c.e. creation date for a nuclear engineer, is simply astonishing. He had to quite literally use and accept calculations and measurements as correct that he didn't believe in.
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For the sake of all that is Holy, don't take those Answers in Genesis wackos as speaking for all Christians. Science and Christianity are compatible. In the earlier times of "Western Civilisation", it was mostly Christians who were the great scientists, looking to understand God by working to understand what He has created.
Macroevolution is a theory and one that explains quite a bit of what we see, but it is not considered a Law yet. (Though even scientific "Laws" can be demoted or disproven, though the pro
Re: Let's face it... (Score:2)
Science and Christianity are NOT compatible (Score:3, Insightful)
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Religion demands that you take the word of some unknown person having a revelation thousands of years ago as the truth for some pretty important questions.
False. Well, true for Fundamentalist Christianity, and for many other religions, but NOT true for all forms of Christianity.
The "modernist" Christian churches take a completely different view of the Bible and of its place in their lives. Most of it is considered to be something of a moral fable. Mythology used to deliver a message, without needing to b
Re:Science and Christianity are NOT compatible (Score:5, Insightful)
They seek from the Bible inspiration, a cultural identity, etc., but not doctrine.
Well, I hate to tell you, but the vast majority of Christians would consider you to be a heretic at best. And the same would happen at any given point in the history of Christianity. Your version might be more intellectually palatable, but don't imagine for a moment that it represents a majority.
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They seek from the Bible inspiration, a cultural identity, etc., but not doctrine.
Well, I hate to tell you, but the vast majority of Christians would consider you to be a heretic at best.
Wrong. This is the stance of the Roman Catholic Church, which is larger than any other Christian denomination by an order of magnitude. The principle that all truth comes from the Bible and that it is *literally* true is known as the sola scriptura heresy, and is limited to a handful of Protestant branches.
The truth here is the reverse of what you believe.
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Wrong. This is the stance of the Roman Catholic Church, which is larger than any other Christian denomination by an order of magnitude. The principle that all truth comes from the Bible and that it is *literally* true is known as the sola scriptura heresy, and is limited to a handful of Protestant branches.
The truth here is the reverse of what you believe.
You forgot the politics of the Reformation. Sola scriptura is a Protestant idea that the lay person can access the word of God in the vernacular bible. The Catholics call this a heresy because truth is what Rome says it is, not what silly lay people want to believe. On the other hand, Bible literalism allows you to be fundamentalist when laying down the law. It's always about power.
But that's going way off the point. Yes, some Christians can be good scientists, much as it grieves me to admit it.
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Someone needs to sit you down and tell you how babies are made. It's going to be a shocker.
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You would never accept a new vaccine because someone had a vision in a dream and then woke up and wrote down the formula.
Seemed to work for the structure of benzene
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You would never accept a new vaccine because someone had a vision in a dream and then woke up and wrote down the formula.
Seemed to work for the structure of benzene
And also the design of the AC motor.
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How about accepting a new theory on the structure of a molecule after seeing a spiral staircase while tripping on acid?
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Religion demands that you take the word of some unknown person having a revelation thousands of years ago as the truth for some pretty important questions.
From this statement, please consider you may have a limited understanding of religion, likely prejudiced based on what you grew up with, rather than something you've studied scientifically?
Would it shock you to learn of at least one religion which tells potential converts, "Don't take our word for it just because we (or someone thousand of years ago) says it, here, read this information, think about it, then test what we're saying by asking God for yourself and get your own answer directly from God about th
Re:Let's face it... (Score:5, Insightful)
For the sake of all that is Holy, don't take those Answers in Genesis wackos as speaking for all Christians. Science and Christianity are compatible.
Uh, no. They are not. More generally, science and religious dogma are incompatible. One is a rational approach to knowledge and understanding, and the other is a collection of text purporting to be of divine origin and authority. Those two things are pretty much polar opposites. Now, if you want to argue that "scripture" should only be taken as metaphor... yada yada yada, OK. Fine. Please get all your Christian buddies to do so and then we'll talk. Until then, I will, quite accurately, place most of them in the "picks and chooses the 'word of God' to suit their need" group.
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For the sake of all that is Holy, don't take those Answers in Genesis wackos as speaking for all Christians.
The no true whacko fallacy?
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Evolution is a theory, of course, created to explain a great many observations. It does extremely well. The key word there is "macroevolution", which is a term I've never seen used by people who have any understanding of the science.
Re:Let's face it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look at this article from Answers in Genesis" [answersingenesis.org].
Do you actually know any fundamentalists? They are the people most likely to believe in alien abductions, crop circles, astrology, etc. They don't really care that these beliefs may be incompatible with scripture (which they mostly haven't actually read). Besides, I don't see any incompatibility between the Bible and ETL. God could have created ETL the same time He created life on earth. It would be no more "proof" of evolution than all the other overwhelming evidence that is already ignored by fundamentalists. Some Mormon fundamentalists have an affirmative belief in ETL, and see no incompatibility between that belief and the Bible.
The discovery of some bacteria on Mars is not going to cause the collapse of religion, and will make no difference at all to most people's beliefs.
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How so? At no point does the Bible state that God only created humans nor does it exclude the idea that he created beings not in his image. I'm no biblical scholar nor a Christian but I don't see where it is incompatible or anything. It doesn't even extend to beyond the Earth so far as I know, except for the heavens which can be defined in a variety of ways. I have read the entire Bible but I didn't really understand all of it so I may be missing something. I should probably read it in a format other than t
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There are incompatibilities between the bible and the existence of certain types (eg advanced intelligence) of extra-terrestrial life
The Bible already has massive incompatibilities with reality, so I don't think ETL is going to add much to that. Also, I don't think the slime oozing from Martian rocks is going to have "advanced intelligence".
particularly when you consider all of the factors and implications of sin, and especially human sin.
What? Why would sin be any different on other planets? If you see intelligent ETs as possessing no sense of right and wrong, then they would be equivalent to animals, which few people see as sinful. If you see them as human equivalents, then they would be capable of sinning just as humans are. Ei
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original sin is basically what causes entropy to exist.
Since I have never heard of this link between entropy and sin, I doubt if many fundamentalists are going to be aware of it either, if they even know what entropy is.
How can that not have enormous implications for another civilization that did not evolve from humanity or vice-versa?
1. Maybe each planet has their own original sinners.
2. Maybe Eve's original sin extended guilt throughout the Universe (possibly faster than the speed of light).
3. Maybe God created extraterrestrial life to test the faith of believers.
4. Maybe fundamentalists just don't ponder deeply about hypothetical inconsistencies in their belief system.
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Since you asked...
If each planet with life had their own original sinners, then each such world would ultimately need to receive a saviour, where the bible suggests that God had only one son. It is not consistent with how much God is alleged to love mankind to suggest that he could have reasonably died multiple times on separate worlds because that diminishes the significance of his death on any one of them. Further, Christs death would not have been sufficient redemption for people who were created
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using one bad source of data to stigmatize a group is bad .. both ways
Most Christians do not have an issue with the possibility of alien life.
The Bible has many different interpretations for many different people. And hey, the Pope says aliens are possible. So, that's Catholicism, covered, and most Protestants do not even care about the issue. Cause this is not an issue.
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Does this mean Christianity is now falsifiable?
Their version of it is. Considering The Bible is actually self-contradictory in places if you take it literally, you don't need to wait for science to do that though.
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Yes actually, that book says if Jesus didnt live again, then it's a complete waste of time and to examine the evidence to decide for yourself.
And how do you suppose one should attempt to falsify that?
If you look at the evidence - and despite what you are about to say, there most certainly IS evidence to look at - and say yes, He did live again.... well that's going to be interesting for you, isnt it? But this notion Christianity is not falsifiable is garbage.
At the very best all you can do is say that some people from the first century WROTE that some other people had seen Jesus alive again after he died, some 40-50 years prior. It only works if you trust everything they wrote as being accurate. You can appeal to other events recorded in the same gospels, but now you've just increased the number of dubious events with no means of verifying any of them.
I think there is at best a lot of uncertainty surroun
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Re:Let's face it... (Score:4, Funny)
Then they will go to heaven.
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"God created the heavens and the Earth"
I don't see why the fundamentalists even need to deny it. They already believe God created Mars, the earth and basically everything, what doctrinal notion is violated by the idea their creator also put some bacteria on Mars? Intelligently designed of course.
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...what doctrinal notion is violated by the idea their creator also put some bacteria on Mars?
None that I know of--but I'll bet you a house payment they will come up with one!
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Nobody's going to "flip their shit". The fundamentalists will simply deny it, just as they do evolution, with convoluted tales of how the scientists have made mistakes.
Even the fundies have pretty much given up to claim the earth is flat, that the sky (firmament) is a dome with hanging lights, with the heavens above and waters above that again, that hell is underground and that you ascend/descend in a anything but a proverbial way. There's only so much ridicule religious dogma can take before it becomes a liability they conveniently disregard or re-interpret in a way more compatible with modern science and society. The most convenient hand-waving for everything in the Old
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This is why religious indoctrination is child abuse.
All the proof we need (Score:2)
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If they actually believe this, and this is not just another publicity stunt then they should be immediately start planning a mission that will send several probes to this location to observe this phenomena and collect data. But they probably just want billions of dollars to try to send people to Mars.
Re:All the proof we need (Score:5, Funny)
Cruz/Palin 2016 - Restoring America from the Liberal War against common sense
Nah.
Cthulhu / Dagon 2016 - Why vote for the lesser evil?
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Cthulhu gave up and went home after seeing how much the 2016 Republicans outclassed him in both evil and inhumanity.
Must have been steaming mad. Now that might explain the loss of the Antarctic Ice Shelf and Global Warming.
It Bush's fault. I just knew it.
Re:All the proof we need (Score:5, Informative)
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it's a standard aspect of propaganda. it's why we have the term "half-truths": they are literally half the truth
if reality is:
"john shot david. david shot john back before he collapsed"
the propaganda will say:
"david shot john"
completely true. but completely without context, leading to erroneous conclusions about what happened. but better than a lie, because it's actually the truth (half).
truth taken in pieces is far superior to lies when manipulating pridefully ignorant minds
the only antidote to simpletons
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Well, it's Hitlers all the way down anyway.
Re:All the proof we need (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically they are a passenger on the titanic saying "This ship can't be sinking, my end just rose 200 feet!".
--credit to a meme image I saw a while back:
http://d.justpo.st/media/image... [justpo.st]
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Basically they are a passenger on the titanic saying "This ship can't be sinking, my end just rose 200 feet!".
--credit to a meme image I saw a while back: http://d.justpo.st/media/image... [justpo.st]
Woot! I like it!.
Every single cherry picked bit of data the deniers pull out of their keister just spurs science on to explain and debunk their stupid idea that if one bit of odd data is odd, it means they've brought down the millions of pieces of correlating data. Wonder why they don't get some scientific types to prove it's wrong - wait, I know this one - a conspiracy.......
Creationist tactics - and I don't doubt many are creationists.
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And _that_ is their evidence that global warming is a lie: taking a small part of evidence out of context, wilfully mis-interpreting it, and ignoring almost all the rest of the evidence.
Well - they are experts in lying, so they expect that everyone does.
I keep telling people Deniers, are just new versions of creationists. Same tactics, same lying, same denial of some pretty basic physics.
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don't worry, they will be. by a warming planet with more violent weather and less stable food sources
Re:All the proof we need (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All the proof we need (Score:4, Informative)
The parent is drawing their own conclusions from the article. Here is a key quote, but please read the whole article. It is actually quite good.
At this point, it’s time to ask what the heck is going on here. And while there may not yet be any scientific consensus on the matter, at least some scientists suspect that the cooling seen in these maps is no fluke but, rather, part of a process that has been long feared by climate researchers — the slowing of Atlantic Ocean circulation.
The Atlantic ocean's circulation patterns for that area are driven by density differences. Warm water from further south moves north along the surface and when it gets to Greenland it freezes as sea ice. That process greatly increases the salinity, and therefore density, of the remaining water and so it sinks and circulates south again.
This loop is critically important for certain favorable climate features of Western Europe.
If this is in fact what is occurring then this isn't evidence against climate change, it was one of the more extreme predictions OF climate change.
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If this is in fact what is occurring then this isn't evidence against climate change, it was one of the more extreme predictions OF climate change.
I think the creationist - errrrrm - denialists's answer is "That Michael Mann is such a fucking Jerk! So much for global warming!"
Sorry, I keep getting denialists and creationists mixed up - probably the identical tactics.
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Likely not. AGW pseudo-skeptics aren't big on reading at all. The Koch Brothers give them all the information they'll ever need. AGW pseudo-skeptics are like Creationists, and frequently invoking nearly identical arguments. Stupidity and dishonesty can be remarkably cyclical.
So... (Score:5, Informative)
Using neat imaging technology that allows them to determine the chemical compound of a substance by looking at the light reflected from it
The author has never heard the term "spectroscopy?"
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Considering the audience, it's best to keep it simple [xkcd.com].
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No, because journalists assume that their entire audience is dumbasses.
Better hurry up (Score:3)
only two more "signs" to go (Score:2)
Old news! (Score:2)
Hey NASA! Pics or it didn't happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I wanna SEE some water, not pictures of where we think water used to be, where it was 10 minutes ago and left just before we got there....I wanna see water...real flowing, sparkling, water.
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And then, I want to send a lander there to extract it, put it in little plastic bottles and sell it for $1+E08/liter: "Martian water. Sustainably sourced from a planet unspoiled for 4 billion years."
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Mmmmm.... salty.
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Water saturated with perchlorates? No, I would not want to be that first human.
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It would be like drinking rocket fuel [wikipedia.org].
The ultimate energy drink!
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It would be like drinking rocket fuel [wikipedia.org].
The ultimate energy drink!
Great, as long as plants crave it.
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very interesting:
over the rails (Score:2)
Ah
Send a Rover (Score:3)
So what ? (Score:2)
Isn't it like the 3rd or 4th time? (Score:2)
Is it just me or this is the 3rd or 4th time NASA confirm water on Mars? Or is it the fact that it's "flowing" water? Wasn't that already confirmed already?
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There was indirect evidence of flowing water (those river beds that have been photographed many times). My understanding is that while briny water was the best explanation even for those observations, there were other possible gas outflows that could have theoretically produced similar results, so what we have here appears to be the first direct observation of surface flows of water.
It appears to be brine, very salty water (Score:2)
We could send cucumbers to Mars and manufacture pickles
Like a movie once suggested: The Pickle [imdb.com]
Flowing water around the triple point. (Score:3)
Pretty interesting really, my first thought was that the pressure was too low, but the Martian atmospheric pressure is right near the triple point of water [wikipedia.org]. For liquid water to be there the pressure must have gone up above the nominal 600 pascals to 611 or higher, and the temperature above 0 deg C.
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That's for pure water. Perchlorate enhanced water can remain liquid at much lower pressures and temperatures. FTFA:
Ojha and his co-authors interpret the spectral signatures as caused by hydrated minerals called perchlorates. The hydrated salts most consistent with the chemical signatures are likely a mixture of magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate. Some perchlorates have been shown to keep liquids from freezing even when conditions are as cold as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 70 Celsius). On Earth, naturally produced perchlorates are concentrated in deserts, and some types of perchlorates can be used as rocket propellant.
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You caught me not reading TFA, although it does raise the question when/how the salt was dissolved in water in the first place.
I wonder if the authors are suggesting that the rocket fuel for a return trip can come directly from the surface soil.
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For liquid water to be there the pressure must have gone up above the nominal 600 pascals to 611 or higher, and the temperature above 0 deg C.
Note that the atmosphere is so thin, in the craters it can be double that. Compared to earth's nominal 101325 pascals, it's still just ~1%. Still, it's a lot more than nothing if you want to make a CO2-rich atmosphere for plants or split it chemically to make oxygen.
Canals!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
So there were canals on mars all this time!
Atmospheric changes ? (Score:3)
If these signs are indeed water as we know it here on Earth, what does this tell us about the overlying upper Martian atmosphere? Any signifigant changes to what we have previously analyzed or hypothesized ? Is it possible that another type of atmosphere or environment could exist under the overlying crust ?
I'm probably too cynical (Score:2)
I want to apologize first for probably being too cynical, but I have to say this.
Applying Occam's Razor to the question:
Which of the two scenarios are more likely?
A. There is water on Mars.
B. There is a government agency, that a lot of people work for, who need money from a Congress that is in the middle of a budget battle, who have concocted a publicity stunt in order to justify their continued existence.
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Dude, that's religion racism.
Fuck all religions.
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"Dude, that's religion racism."
Because religious beliefs are encoded in your DNA, right!
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Also, after a quick search, I found "religionism". I should have searched before my original comment and I'm sorry to have annoyed you.
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And you're still a great teacher! Your friends/wife/kids must absolutely adore you!
Oh wait, you're probably single and friendless with such an attitude.
Re:Not to sound like an ass... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's hoping something like Tardigrades evolved on Mars too, if so, they'd probably still be revivable today even after a couple billion years.
An opposing opinion: http://www.popularmechanics.co... [popularmechanics.com]
"If Mars is equally lifeless, that will make exploring--and later settling--the planet much easier. We can go there and return without this particular worry, and we can introduce Earth life without concerns that we'll damage indigenous creatures. Astronauts won't have to be quarantined, and the environmental impact statement, or its interplanetary equivalent, will be easier to determine. On the other hand, if there is life on Mars, things get a lot tougher."
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They've had strong suggestions of flowing water (all those small geological remnants of rivers), and even some suggestion that water was flowing at this period in time, but this is the first time they've been able to definitely demonstrate seasonal flows of water. Previously, so far as I understand it, the "river beds" they've shown could have been explained by CO2 outflows or something similar.
What makes this exciting isn't so much surface flows, because frankly I think any life would be wiped out by the p
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The discovery says nothing about past or present life, but it does mean that there WILL be life on Mars.
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Those damn tardigrades though. Ain't nobody messin with them. Not even entropy.
Cute little devils too. I've got a lot of them living in my roof gutters.
Dunno if you saw this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12... [bbc.co.uk]
http://serc.carleton.edu/micro... [carleton.edu]
Since they've already survived in space, I suspect Mars would not be too difficult. I'm just not certain how much oxygen they need.
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The oldest paper I know of on the topic was presented to 4th Annual Mars Society Convention at Stanford University on August 24th, 2001 and has far more content. The pdf http://palermoproject.com/Seep... [palermoproject.com] is from this page
That's a year after the Malin and Edgett paper in 2000, "Evidence for recent groundwater seepage and surface runoff on Mars" [sciencemag.org], which was published in Science and got a lot of attention. Or this one, from 2002, which suggested that the reason the water carving the gullies was liquid was due to salt content suppressing the freezing point: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n... [nasa.gov]
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ACK! ACK! Brand