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Evidence Of Water On Mars
mondrian writes: "Space.com is reporting that NASA will announce next week it has found evidence of water on the Red Planet." And an Anonymous Coward writes: "The BBC is reporting that NASA has found unconfirmed evidence of water springs in the Valles Marineris, the deepest feature of the Martian landscape. Apparently this is liquid water, not the frozen water that most were expecting to be found at the poles. If confirmed, the search for Martian life will take a big change in direction because of this."
If there were to be life in that pool, regardless of what evolutionary level, can you imagine what the benefits to science would be? Einstein's visit to the Galapagos yielded the results it did because the ecosystem was almost completely isolated from the outside.
Anything found in the pits of Mars would be completely isolated from Earth's biosphere. Not a couple dozen miles of ocean - completely isolated. Would it have DNA? Cell membranes? Mitocondria, which many theorize to be a symobite within the cell, almost a seperate lifeform? Does the lighter gravity of Mars let the cell size be larger? Does unicellular life have more possibilitites on Mars because of this increased cell size? Or is it all a question of surface area? Or, is there no life at all?
We can conclude nothing about life on other planets because we have only one sample. Earth. Surely it's a bargain to go to Mars and double the sample size, and if there were to be life on Mars, it'd likely be here.
Millions of questions, and maybe a few answers...
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
That water probably follows a high tide/low tide like we do, (maybe with not as much enthusiasm, but hey)... Which will erode the rock and strata around it, giving us an excellent way to guage the planets evolution. Just like we do with our ice core samples in Antarctica.
Given a lack of Oxygen in the atmosphere, and much of it tied up in an iron oxide mineral (hence the color red), theres a good possibility that IF anything died in that water, it would be preserved for quite some time.
Now that we have a starting point, we can start searching for water migratory patterns from and to that body... Discovery of underground springs, sedimentary layers, and possibly even point to an extinct water cycle on that planet. With a river cutting channels through rock, the study of that planets formation will become much easier, as (just like earth) you can begin to add plate tectonics into the picture sooner. Underground springs and aquifers could, using nanotechnology, be explored providing a map of the martian underground.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
The following message was received from a radio telescope in South America and decoded using a massive experimental cluster of Palm computers:
Hello. This is Mars. We noticed you've been looking at our water. Feel free to visit, but be prepared to pay our very expensive water park entrance fees. Also, there will be an airport fee assessed for each passenger landed on our planet.
By the way, that last probe you tried to land here is in our custody. We already patented spacecraft 4,000 years ago, and we will naturally expect to collect royalties on the numerous patent violations you have committed over the last few decades.
In addition we have noticed several transmissions made by past probes of sounds and images which had been previously copyrighted.
Finally, we have taken note of the large amounts of space junk produced by your planet. As 90% of our population are attorneys, they have really been looking forward to such an attractive source of lawsuit revenues.
Please enjoy our planet. Bring your own sunblock, and try not to pollute the water.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
No one else seems to have thrown this out, so I figure I may as well. Does it seem odd to anyone else that at a time when the Mars program is coming under attack from all sides for ineptitude and wasting taxpayers' dollars, NASA releases this startling evidence?
And, in case you didn't read the article, they're not finding rivers, lakes, or even pools. They're talking about some seepage, either from the floor of very deep canyons or the sides of cliffs in said deep canyons. Not be over cynical, but NASA has a hard time locating a probe correctly on the surface of Mars. Is it really accurate to say that they can detect tiny amounts of seepage? I have a feeling that these findings are quite ambiguous and one possibility is that they're seepage, but it's neither the only nor the most likely of possibilities. Couple that with the extreme thinness of the Martian atmosphere (which prevents liquid water from existing at the average elevation) and the fact that the atmosphere is not that much thicker in the canyons and you have the makings for an incredible disappointment the likes of which haven't been seen since Viking.
But leave it Slashdot to blow it out of proportion. Perhaps we should wait until NASA actually makes the statement until we make plans for wakeboarding on a foreign planet, no?
The above post should be read to the tune of Baz Lehrman's "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen" speech.
Insightful, yes, funny, but when you're 11, you shouldn't be reading on /. all day. Go out and program! Write your own version of Pac-Man, complete with homing missiles, explosions, and profuse gore.
(Rant: )
Once you start on Slashdot, there's no going back. You start getting Karma, then you start craving more. First you post stuff that's insightful, maybe informative... after a while it trickles down to a few points of "interesting" here and there. "5"'s become rarer and rarer, then you do the unthinkable.
You resort to humor. All out "hope they don't think this is a troll", karma-whoring humor, the kind that only flies on Slashdot.
And before you know it, Slashdot is your browser's home page, and it starts taking up all of your free time. All of a sudden, there's precious little time to program, and you can forget about keeping your pretty GPA above C-level :-).
I broke 90 today. Karma that is. Weeks ago I've stopped reading /. all the time, but the Karma keeps pouring in. I feel dirty. I'm a karma whore. I've only been on this frickin' forum since November, and I'm at 90+ karma. I could troll all day and all night for a week and still post at (Score: 2) by default.
I've moderated 6 times, mostly on weeks when I was too busy to post.
People think I'm funny, insightful, interesting (and overrated, but those moderators suck! ;).
These are presumably rational adults, and I'm not even 18!
It's with this in mind, that I've decided to take a vacation from Slashdot. That means checking /. no more than three times a day. Three shall be the number of the checkings, and the number of the checkings shall be three. Check thou not 4, neither check thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out!
Okay... sorry, just letting off steam.
And that also counts checking my "User Info" to see how much Karma I've gotten. Honestly, the stuff's pretty much useless once you reach 25, and can post at Score: 2. Of course, it's always nice to have some padding in case the moderators get bitchy.
And no more than 1 post a day from me, either. Maybe two if I'm on a roll. But that's it, except on days ending in "y". Then three's the limit.
I'm gonna sit down and program, play video games, go with friends to see movies, maybe get a <gasp> j-o-b, and maybe find a like-minded member of the female species to play videogames with, or whatever it is you're supposed to do with the opposite sex.
I'm going to code a decent game or two this summer. Maybe just one if I actually succeed at finding that elusive MOS. (You can bet your ass they don't hang out in chat rooms!)
I'll update my personal web page. Read more books. (An even 50/50 between reference manuals and sci-fi/fantasy novels).
Just as long as I can refrain from posting to Slashdot. Hey, maybe this means that I can finally disable cookies on my browser. (Mozilla's still crashy, even M16, so I can't use it for day to day stuff. M13 was good, though, and I did use that as my main browser for a time.)
Maybe I'll even update my Sourceforge project.
Whatever I do, I've just got to stay clear of this forum... it's addictive. As one reader's sig says, "I miss my free time, Rob". I agree so wholeheartedly it's not even +1, funny anymore.
I do have a suggestion, though. Weight the karma based on the posts you're trying to achieve.
If you think too many people are clowning around, make a "funny" post worth .5 karma and an "informative" post worth 1.5. If you think it's getting to dry, post a silly story and reverse the above. Change it around, but keep posters aware of the current settings.
And get rid of that damned "overrated" markdown. Moderators should be given better tools than "overrated" to articulate exactly what is wrong with that post.
Finally, kudos to the best change I've seen in /., that is the change of the default threshold from 0 to 1. ACs (and, yes I'm being hypocritical right now, but bear with me) keep getting lamer all the time.
So, I'm out of here for a while... tomorrow I'm going with a group of close friends (some of whom are actually, Females, to see Titan A.E., regardless of what Jon Katz may think of it [IMO, Katz himself is proof that just because someone bashes something/someone, it doesn't mean that they deserve that criticism.] Jon, kudos for Hellmouth and Geeks, both of which I strongly identified with. Keep cranking out stuff like that, and leave movie reviews to videogame-playing, anime junkie coder types like CmdrTaco :-).
And a big kudos to the Geeks In Space. Love the show (and no, I'm not taking a vacation from listening to GiS! Crank out that episode 31!)
Ahh... in the morning I get to decide whether to use SDL, Clanlib, or GGI for my game. So many choices, so little time. And, of course, it'll be GPL'ed so all y'all can enjoy it :-).
Good night, Slashdot. See you less often, for the time being.
But please don't take it personally. (It's not you, it's just me... I think I need more space... it's too much of a commitment... can't we just be friends? ;-)
Feel free to moderate me into oblivion, or to leave it at the default AC score of 0. It really makes little difference to me, and honestly the impact you'd be making either way is negligible. Nobody reads at zero anyway, unless they want to see posts like this one.
Perhaps we need to get rid of "topics" as they're known, and have a giant message board for all stories. That could get interesting.
Your poster geek-in-training, the kind who's going to keep free software alive as the old demigods fall off the 'Net... signing off.
all jokes about the polar lander aside, nasa has a pretty good record of knowing what they're talking about. if they do announce this, they deserve at least initial trust.
I hate the "let's settle everything here on Earth." line. It's lame. First off we never will settle everything here on Earth, nor should that be our main concern. If we concentrate solely on survival, making sure every human on planet Earth is well-fed, clothed, and safe from danger. What have we become? What would we give up for this? Our art? Our exploration of the unknown? Our soul? That which makes us human and not animal? Second, far more money is spent on wellfare, social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment, and other social services than are spent on space exploration. In fact, the amount of money spent by the US government every year on "helping humans on planet Earth" is probably far more than has EVER been spent on space exploration, including the Apollo program.
Currently there is a little robotic spaceraft orbiting Mars. This spacecraft is called the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). It cost about as much to build, send to Mars, and operate as 1 or 2 top of the line fighter jets. It's entire cost is less than one dollor for every person in the United States (this is not on a yearly basis, this is a fixed one time cost that pays for the entire multi-year mission of MGS). Personally I think this is a very small investment for something that gives us so much information about the majesty and diversity of even our little corner of the universe, what the chances for life are in the rest of the universe, and even what it means to be human.
If you won't give your dollar entrance fee to this great exploration (actually it's more like half a dollar), then I'll gladly take up your share.
Additionally, I would like to point out that we do not need a moon base, a space station, warp drive, flux capacitors, or what-all to get to Mars. There are very good designs that can allow us to send humans to Mars for well under 40 billion dollars (US). This seems like a lot of money, but keep in mind that this is the whole cost (including adjustments for expected cost overruns, etc., worked out over over the length of such a program, this comes to less than 4 billion dollars per year) and it pays for over a decade of exploration (and many person-years of people actually living on and exploring Mars!). The US spends somewhere near 300 billion dollars every year on defense, and over 1 trillion dollars every year on social security etc.
context map of what /might/ be the general area.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Here's an interesting point: When people talk about whether water would be liquid or solid on mars, they're referring to pure, 100% distilled water, not brine or any water with salts in it. When there are dissolved substances, the freezing point is depressed, so water could be -10 C during the day and still liquid.
Also, on Earth, there is a plethora of water below the surface, although you would not want to drink it. It's usually saturated in salts like calcium or sodium chloride, carbonates, and sulfates. However, even 10 km below the surface of the Earth, in hot conditions and high pressures, 0bacteria thrive in these conditions (as they do in the Hydrocarbon deposits as well).
Given that Mars has plenty of surface evidence of (geologically) recent free flowing water, the scientific community would be remiss to assume that subsurface water does not exist. It likely has a lot of brine belows it's surface, perhaps rich in Iron salts.
Also, there are moons of Jupiter, like Europa (which is basically 10 km of ocean from what we can see on the surface) and Ganymede (with a lot of hydrocarbons) where conditions that bacteria and simple one celled life require exist. Given that we have already learned that bacteria in hostile environments on Earth (Antarctica, for example, in very dry and cold conditions) can hibernate for millions of years, it's conceivable that rocks knocked loose from Earth from the occasional large meteor (i.e. asteroid or comet) could transport bacteria to Mars and elsewhere. I think that if life did not evole there, it was transported from Earth by this process (or perhaps even the other way). Some people have speculated that bacterial or similar life found on Mars or elsewhere within this solar system is completely different from that found on Earth -- I would postulate that it is probably no more 'alien' that what we might find in the ocean near black smokers, that big underice lake in Antarctica (can't remember the name), or a barren, cold, high altitude mountain.
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