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Water on Mars - Clues to Life?
PHPee writes: "Reports of water on Mars say that huge amounts of water gushed through the surface of the red planet fairly 'recently'. (Recently being as little as 10 million years ago)
This is big news, because it may lead to finding some simple forms of life on the planet.
For more info, check out:
(story #1)
and
(story #2)."
That's what all of the canals were for...
Duh.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Apart from being fastinating and a sign that further evolved life forms may exist, are there any potential advantages for finding extraterestrial bacteria?
Indeed this is great, but I wouldn't qualify it as *news*. I thought it was relatively well established that there was proof of water on Mars. Nothing new has happened since then, but hopefully we will go up and take samples sometime.
Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, is also thought to be one of the prime candidates for life in our solar system.
Truth be told, a goephysicist friend of mine told me why they look for life and water on Mars. It is to estimate the likelyhood of more life in the universe, and to determine the practicality of creating human colonies on other planets. If water and life are common, then the entire idea becomes far more practical. If water is abundant and available, then we can move out among the stars at a much faster rate than current science has estimated.
Wherever you go, there I am...
Isn't there ice on Mars? Where there's ice, there's usually something frozen (oft water...).
... oh I've said too much already...
Who's up for bottling the stuff and reselling it here on Earth?! Forget that $1/bottle outa the New York tap stuff, we're talkin' $5,000 per bottle, extremely limited supply, right off the space ship! Hasn't been touched since man kind migrated off of Mars when it blew out of an opposing orbit from Earth and
Once you sign the NDA, we'll talk... Drop an email to ac1@slashdot....
Since its on Mars, theres no telling what kinda lifeforms you may find. We should be very careful, just because the lifeforms in our ocean and on our earth are simple, does not mean what we find on mars will be.
Second, are we even looking? The only way we will know if theres life on mars and i say this all the time, is to drill. drill several miles into the ground and see if theres water. If there is, you could have a whole ocean of life down there and for all we know it could be intelligent. If not, well then we may not find anytihng but sand, but until Nasa decides to check we wont find anything.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
There's always much speculation about the origin of live. The three main theories as far as I know are:
1. Biblical: God created life
2. Alien: Life came from fragments of comets and meteors travelling
3. Self created: Life self created from the primal mess, which created the first aminoacids.
I was thinking, what is your opinion about us, humans being, start launching around organic materials into space. Can we be the creators sometimes? I think our satellites and probes (read, Voyager) are already travelling and carryin some organic residues around, no matter how clean we build those machines.
Sometimes I stop and I think, in millions of years our propes may crash in some remote plantets. The chances are near zero. But imagine that it crashes, some bacteries or virii survive and start propagating in an enviromentally friendly planet. If they evolve, if they generate intelligent life, will they still look for the origin of their lives, and perhaps contaminate around other planets?
Vibriting thoughs.
That we may find a form of life which simply cannot be classified by anything we have ever seen on earth. What do we do if this happens?
People expect to go on other planets and find the same lifeforms you see on earth, bacteria, and mammals, and so on, what if you find a lifeform thats unlike anything, like a gas or liquid based lifeform, or something just totally weird.
Scientists should at least be ready for it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The reason that this news is important is that the time span for geological activity for water movement on Mars has been reduced from around 2 Billion years a few years ago, down to 10 million years. If water was free flowing on the surface of Mars only 10 million years ago than the possibility of finding evidence of life on Mars increases immensely.
Just you're average nitpicker.
THIS is better.
From whose perspective is this stuff written? The Grand Canyon?
Well, that would have been Naoh's flood. Seems when the Bibles were passed around, there was a screwup and we got Mars's bible.
/our/ bible, they worshipped the wrong things and had the wrong commandments, and overall just really pissed their God off.
Of course since they were following
When they built the great Face, as instructed in page 23 in their bible, and completed orgy ceremony Part B, subsection 42, it began snowing
carbon dioxide and that was the end of them.
Flood volcanism on Earth occurs about every tens of millions of years," McEwen said. "The last such event was 10 million years ago
so, what kind of event could have happened 10M years ago, leaving traces of unusual water floods on two planets?
Perhaps an alien expedition taking samples?
In Murphy We Turst
So drink your past...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
what posseses someone tom think this this drivel is actually funny, you need a reality check
Nick Hoffman of LaTrobe Uni in Melb, Aus. has a "White Mars" model where the active fluid agent is CO2 rather than water. I was impressed by a lecture he gave to an academic audience. I suspect most people (including those who fund space research) would prefer a Mars with water (for existance of life, etc), but an equal (or better) model should get equal an equal chance. Hoffman's website is here.
What are the Polar Ice caps on Mars made of if not water ? Carbon Dioxide ? If so surely that's fairly conclusive proof that there is water on Mars which has to have been liquid or gas at some point.
Hmmmmmm
We should have some major precautions in case we do find a bacterium or some other such life form when we do begin exploring mars more thoroughly. We can't have something that could destroy mankind taking root here or being used for ill purposes. IIRC, there was something about a location being set up for extraterrestrial life in a previous slashdot posting. Hopefully this spot is set up to be highly secure.
On another note, it definitely will be strong evidence for life being universal if we find living organisms on any other body outside of earth. It allows us to determine that there are other orbit zones and climates outside of our own to support life. That would increase the number of planets outside of our solar system that we would believe could support life and thus bolster the theory that we are not alone.
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
Dan "What a waste it is to lose one's mind" Quayle
(source)
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
here here here and here
No signs of life there, some say that these ones show life: "Banyan Trees", "Hot Spring??", "Leopard spots"
Personally, at this resolution, they could be anything, but they are still fun to look at.
we might actually one day hope to find intelligent life in this solar system?
finally!
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
That's fine and all, but what I really want to know is how these "simple forms of life" end up getting to Earth and acquiring jobs as managers and politicians...
The security was compremised when the location and its exsistance were revealed.
If you want something to be secure, then dont announce it. Dont even say it exsists, put the samples in some super secret underground base that no one knows about and send scientists into it, if an accident happens, nuke the underground base killing all the lifeforms
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This is big news, because it may lead to finding some simple forms of life on the planet
Like marketing executives?
We don't know, over 4.5 billion years, the odds may be 99.99999% or 0.000001%, we just don't know.
In the case of Earth&Mars, the odds are probably close to 100%, if only because it has been shown that bacteria could easily survive the trip from the one to the other, and we know of a mechanism (asteroid impact) capable of "soft-launching" rocks from one to the other.
The life would be of the same origin of course. The odds of life emerging independently on both rocks are totally unknown, because for now we have a statistically useless sample of 1.
According to Popper's falsifiability criterion, the claim that there is life on Mars is unscientific, because it can never be disproven. Thus, the only scientific claim we can make here is "There is no life on Mars" and hope that we are proven wrong.
Just some food for thought...
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I still find it cute that certain scientists believe in the possibility/likelihood of:
1. A bacterium surviving the impact of a meteor hitting Mars. The size of that meteor must have been considerable to survive through the Mars atmosphere.
2. Some piece of rock being thrown back into space, and at sufficient speed to overcome Mars' gravity and low enough to not melt because of friction against the air.
3. That piece actually having a surviving bacterium.
4. That piece actually hitting Earth.
5. Scientists actually finding that unlikely piece of Mars on Earth, in dirt.
6. Finding that that highly unlikely piece of Mars contains unknown form of life.
7. Finding a president who actually believes you are on the right track and is ready to pay for your continued research.
Out of these I find step 7 the most probable.
"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it"
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
If you had even a modicum of journalistic integrity, you'd STOP posting this same stupid article over and over.
I swear, I'm more sick about hearing the possibility of water on Mars, than I am of seeing CmdrTaco's poorly written commentaries. When you can post this article without using words like possibly, may/maybe or could, then maybe we'll listen. Until then, shut the fuck up.
Just because there is evidence of a few, "recent", cataclysmic water-flow events on the surface of Mars, why does this get introduced as "evidence of life"? The article says that there was at least one geothermal related surface water flow event 10M years ago. This does not necessairly lead to the conditions for life to develop.
On earth life developed just a few million years after the planet got cool enough to sustain it, but it still took millions of years. In a stable environment. With liquid water constantly available. And plenty of sunlight to pump energy into the system.
One flood on Mars, even every million years or so, does not a life-cradle make.
So there's water on Mars for us to exploit when we get there, good deal. But life on Mars, will have a tough time of it. And, yes, I know that different chemistries might produce life, but for the moment we have a pitifuly small sample size, so I'm going to have to stick with the good old carbon-based model for now.
Also if there is life on Mars, should we invent our own "prime directive" and leave the planet alone? After all in a few billion years, the stuff could evolve to multi-cellular organisms.
Given humanity's track record as a whole, I think not. We exploit things to easily to let ethics get in our way. If the first probes in the 60's and 70's had produced evidence of Little Green Men or any civillization at all, we'd be selling them Coke and Beenie Babies right now. To pay for it, we would have negoiated "mining rights" and hauled off all their easily extractable resources.
So what is all the excitement about? There's not much chance of life even with this latest story, and even if life does exist, we probably will kill it (or at best, put it in a bacterial zoo) the first chance we get.
This is sooo not new news.
Watch any science space TV show about mars or the planets that has been produced in the last two years+ and you will see that we've known this for a long time.
I can't believe this made slashdot... sigh.
The scientist quoted did use an ambiguous phrase, but when mentioning Earth 10M years ago I'm pretty sure he was referring to floods of lava, not water.
The proposed floods of water 10M years ago at Cerebus Plains on Mars were preceded by large, flood-like flows of lava that left a large area covered with a flat lava plateau. Presumably that volcanic activity provided the energy to melt the ice (or, the water could have come up as gas dissolved in the magma).
More details in the U of Arizona press release
These eruptions aren't quite like a normal volcano in that they produce such gigantic amounts of highly fluid lava so quickly; doesn't make a cone, it's more like, well, a flood!
Even if he didn't mean there were lava floods at that location on Mars, what I'm pretty sure he is referring to on Earth is the Columbia River flood basalts, which cover most of eastern Washington and Oregon. They erupted about 12M years ago, and covered that whole region in lava a couple of thousand feet thick. Some flows made it all the way to the Pacific, 300 miles from their source. Even bigger examples are the Deccan Traps in India (65 million years ago), and the Siberian Traps in Russia (250M years ago). Same sort of thing made the "seas" (mare) on the Moon, 3+ billion years ago.
Volcanic activity on Earth warms the oceans. It is speculated that there were oceans on Mars but that the volcanic activity was not enough to stop the oceans eventually freezing. So there's probably a great deal of water on Mars under the surface. Most of it's probably frozen but towards the centre things get hotter and ice will melt.
;-)
Maybe this explains the worm trails?
Sig pending!
I think a more interesting question might be, where exactly did all this huge quantity of free flowing water go? What cataclysmic thing happened to make it all dry up or freeze underground?
Simple lifeforms? We've got plenty of those here. My goodness I cannot believe that we spend so much time and money studying the variables of the universe, like the subject says who cares or gives a rip? I sure don't. I don't see how this is going to help us at all. It is amazing that the same liberals that support space exploration don't support a Star Wars like Missile Defense program. Sure we can look for others planets to bail out to in 5 million years, but we can't protect the planet we live in now. Anyway, that is a little off topic, but I just hope that people realize the absurdity of space exploration and space research of any sort. Beam me up scotty!
Why do you people have to turn every astronomy story into a "chance for life in outer space" story? NEITHER of the two linked stories has a SINGLE WORD in it about relating or reflecting life in outer space.
Frankly, you're never going to find any other life in outer space, so you should just start dealing with it. Even if you disagree with that, at least stop warping every astronomy story that comes down the pike to fit your sci-fi fantasies.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
i don't know much about astronomy... but i don't know why it's such a big deal if there's water on another planet. An organism will only survive in it's surroundings, and on earth, it happens to be h2o. If life does exist on another planet it will only exist because it's been able to thrive on it's surroundings... whether it be water, gatoraid, etc. So are we only looking for other organisms similar to those on the earth? I believe that life exists on all planets.. but we may just be looking for the wrong thing. Alien organisms are thriving on substances uknown to us. Just an idea..
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
Water on Mars? Now we can send the next batch of Survivor to the Red Planet.
I think we all know why water gushed out on to the surface of Mars; one of the pipes supplying water to the subterranean civilisation must have burst. I think it is obvious from all the facts (ie. 1950s B movies, War of the Worlds, wild speculation) that there are people living under the surface of Mars where it is toasty warm.
Also, I can bend spoons with my mind.
It's an amazingly huge leap to say if there's water there might be life. That "might", when subjected to just a tiny bit of mathematical analysis, is so mind-bogglingly minute that it's not worth considering.
Look at it this way: the smallest number of different proteins that is guesstimated to get life going is 400 for a minimum cell. Ignoring all the non-protein components of a cell, now consider the amino acids. There are a lot more than the 20 we need for life, but let's be generous and assume that somehow all the amino acids in some lipid-isolated droplet are the 20 we need for life. Since they have to be one enantiomer (aka one chirality) to be in proteins for all but the simplest one of the amino acids, that means you've got 39 possible choices, and you need to get them in a specific order.
So just one protein of less than average size (say 300 amino acids), assuming there are no other chemicals interfering (i.e, say inside a droplet with exactly the right composition), is going to have odds of one in 300^39. That comes out to one in 10^96. Since there are only 10^78 ATOMS in the UNIVERSE, clearly it is not in the realm of "chance" to say even one protein could happen by chance.
Then molecular evolution would require 400 more different proteins, each rather specifically structured, to be in the same droplet at the same time.
And consider further that proteins denature rather quickly outside living cells, when exposed to pH swings, temperature, salinity, and other variations.
So the odds of finding life arising somewhere by blind chance is, well, so close to zero that it's absurd to consider. Or to put it another way, it takes more faith to believe it happened by chance than to believe in a creator.
Got Wisdom?
The odds are staggeringly worse than you set forth - there are less atoms in the universe than the odds of life arising by chance.
A very simple illustration, take:
1. A frog.
2. A sterilized blender in a sterile room
3. Puree the frog for 1 hour.
4. Irradiate the pureed frog with gamma rays
You've now got all the elements for life in exactly the right ratios in one place. What happens when you do that? Life does not spontaneously form... it's just a bunch of dead chemicals.
Further proof: if you managed to get only the 20 amino acids necessary for life into droplets all around the world, and started trying to assemble them into a protein, the odds are roughly 1 in 10^96 that you would be able to do that. Even if you tried once for every atom (10^78) in the universe, you would need to beat one in 10^18 odds. For just one protein - then you need about 300-400 more to get the right mix of proteins for a theoretical minimum cell. Then you need DNA, RNA, ATP, lipids, minerals in the right valence state, etc. to get the minimum cell composition.
So no, the odds are so fantastically against it happening by chance that to say it happened that way takes more faith than believing a creator was involved.
Got Wisdom?
There may be evidence that there WAS life on Mars, but there's no chance in Ohio that life still exists there. Even if it did, I'd be some little wiggly bacteria thing. Big deal.
I find it truly ironic that society will hail the possibility of the existence of a water molecule on another planet as a potential discovery of life, but society wants to call a growing, living unborn child something less than living. Talk about situational ethics...such hypocrisy isn't fooling anyone...
cabodog77
"It's such a fine line between clever and stupid." -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Imagine a pile of all the parts required to build an airplane. If a hurricane hit this pile, it would be ludicrous to imagine that a functional airplane would be formed.
This would be as ludicrous as imagining that a fully functioning single-celled organism could be created by microwaving amino acids.
That is why NO EVOLUTIONIST BELIEVES THAT LIFE BEGAN IN THAT MANNER. If you want to attack their theories, learn the theories first. Start with The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
You know there's a theory that there use to be a larger planet in mars' orbit and mars was it's moon, and this planet exploded creating the astroid belt and mars was thrown into its present orbit. The explosion changed mars' landscape. Their evidence for this theory is the craters on mars that only apear on one side, the side that was facing the larger planet.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
I agree with your analogy - as Fred Hoyle put it, a tornado in a junkyard does not assemble a 747.
I was a dedicated, hard-core evolutionist for over forty years; I know the arguments very, very well on the evolutionist side. Dawkins is not the greatest example, he has been debunked many times rather handily; Behe and others have done so.
We do apparently agree that random chance was utterly insufficient to create life from random chemicals.. but Dawkins and others need natural selection to operate in order for things to improve, and if starting from scratch, you need at first an accurately self replicating system before natural selection can take over from randomness and pure chance.
Without the order imposed by a self-replicating system, randomness is the only operative force.
And chance just won't do it.
Got Wisdom?
NASA has dug itself into a huge corner by playing up on layman's desire to find life "out there". The fact is nobody really expects to find life on Mars. Or anywhere else in the solar system. Telling people that they have new evidence for life lets them keep their funding, but does not approach the topic honestly.
Is finding life "out there" the ultimate goal of space exploration. No! Finding life would be a big deal but it cannot be the driving goal. This is for the same reason that going to the moon cannot be solely for collecting moon rocks. Answering the question would stop the program right in its tracks..now what?
Finding water on Mars is a big deal because it vastly eases human outposts. Air and rocket fuel can be synthesized more easily, not to mention the need for water itself.
Here's a question to wrap your brain around... It has been proven with atomic clocks that people on a space craft orbiting the earth at high speed experience a slightly different timeline than people on earth. In other words, the clock went at a different speed (slower) on the ship because they were traveling faster, proving Einstein's theories, at least partially.
So what happens if you are on a different planet that orbits at a different speed and travels around the sun at a different speed?
Would this also make everything go haywire once we get the technology to venture out of the solar system, since we will be traveling very very quickly to another star system, and then when we slow down to get there, maybe 5 years passed on earth and only 4 on the shuttle?
Just wondering...
This space available at a low monthly rate...
What exactly distinguishes the tracks made by molten ice from the tracks made by, say... molten rock? When somebody says "Oddly enough, this water was behaving _exactly_ like lava!" I have to think... maybe (D'oh!) it WAS lava!
The time scale is a little different (10 million vs. ~65 million years), but the "lots of water gushed over the surface of Mars" bit sounds familiar:
http://www.enterprisemission.com/tide.htm
xGSV Negotiable Ethics (Culture)
os0l0m0n
& as requested
Of course Banks can get much better visuals than Trek because he's a novelist and they have a _much_ bigger budget for special effects <grin>.
Pardon me, but isn't Black Label just Yankee piss?? I seem to recall trying it once, and 'twas indistinguishable from dull and dirty tap water. Mind you, your South African supply may not have originated in the States... As I recall, an entire 24-case wasn't up to the task one night so I've boycotted that brand ever-after.
:O)
As for Redd's, I'll have to do some research.
For a real treat, the (unfortunately) seasonal Wet Coast Winter Ale from Shaftebury is the only contest to Guinness I've encountered.. Available only in British Columbia, as far as I know, and it sells quite quickly. Last year the entire stock was gone by mid-December. Beware the 8.5% alcohol
We agree that random change was insufficient to create a single celled organism from amino acids & a lipid bilayer. In fact, all evolutionists agree with you. Since you misunderstood the evolutionist argument in this manner, I assumed that you were not familiar with it. Dawkins is the first person to suggest that natural selection must already be in place for something as complicated as a single celled organism to come into existence. I don't see how that point could possibly debunk him.
Of course you need a self-replicating system. That is why people searching for the origins of life tend to look for simple self-replicating systems. Not single celled organisms.
There are a number of candidate simple self-replicating systems. None of them are particularly impressive, but it's imaginable that they could have lead to RNA and protein chains. We may not have discovered the correct process. We may never. This does not make evolution false.
You might feel that Dawkins has been debunked. But you also seem to think that all of evolution has been debunked. Evolutionists certainly haven't abandoned Dawkins because of something Behe said. No one has ever brought up Behe in this sort of discussion with me after they had heard the counterpoint. A good starter is here. That review's mousetrap argument is pretty lame, but the rest is ok.
Behe's irreducible complexity argument has been asked and answered many times before Darwin's Black Box. Just because one scientist cannot imagine an evolutionary pathway does not mean that one did not exist.
Still, Dawkins' books aren't flawless. No one's ever complained to me about him, but in a simple reading of any of his books, a number of little details rubbed me the wrong way. None of those details, however, are essential to his conclusions. I only brought up his book because he has a good discussion of Fred Hoyle's argument (and yours).
Anyway, I would love to continue this conversation in email. I think it's a little out of place on slashdot, but I'll leave it up to you as to where we should continue.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The way I see it, some parts of Mars are a *lot* hotter *now* than where I live gets during summer (they're consistenly up at ~20 ***centigrade***!) and *I've* got liquid water :)
:) (original nasa image is here
:) (taken from same nasa image as above)
:/
Seriously, it's not like it's too cold for water all over the planet, and from looking at the hubble pics I'm pretty convinced those clouds have got liquid in them. More stuff for your perusal though...
Big image, sorry... Look at the bottom though - this is by *far* the most convincing pic of a lake I've found yet.
More lakes, this time cropped appropriately
Oh look, a waterfall... I suppose that's not really liquid either
I had a link to the tech specs for the ships they were putting up too and I'm pissed that I've lost it because it had some pretty incriminating stuff on it (the colour cameras they've got up there just now don't 'do' blue IIRC) - I'm convinced there's liquid water up there right now and they're holding back on telling us...
And I can't believe those damn martians get hotter weather than me
1 + 1 = 3
p.s. What about those sand people on Star Wars? They seem to be ok with breathing sand.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Really? But the biggest canal was neither formed by water nor carried significant water.
Since these scientist chappies are getting so good at finding water on a completely dry planet (and explaining away global floods on another planet which is covered in water to an average depth of 2.7km), perhaps they can figure out where that much lightning came from? It certainly explains all of those rocks you see strewn around in Mars lander images.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...well, since Carl Sagan was involved in both Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2, I for one am glad that this may eventually lead to (you got it):
"Billions and Billions of Carls..."
I still find it cute that certain Anonymous Cowards believe in the probability/likelihood of:
1. A man surviving the impact of a woman being hit upon by him. The size of that man's ego must have been considerable to survive the initially chilly atmosphere.
2. Some diamond rock on a ring not being thrown back at him in space, with sufficient charm to overcome the gravity of the situation and at sufficient speed to overcome her initial emotional inertia.
3. That man actually having continuing charm.
4. That man actually hitting on the woman.
5. That man and woman actually finding heaven on earth at least once.
6. That woman actually containing an unknown form of life.
7. That life one day growing up and posting on Slashdot.org.
But unlikely events occur often, even though any single unlikely event remains unlikely. The error is failing to recognize that unlikely events remain unlikely. Casinos survive on this misunderstanding: If I roll heads three times in a row [(1/2)3=1/8], then the likelihood of rolling another head is not [(1/2)4=1/16] but only 1/2. It's very unlikely that you and I would exist, but much less unlikely that, now that we do exist that I should make fun of you.
Well... not exactly. The CO2 is about 50x more common in proportion, but remember that there is also 100x less pressure (7-10 millbars versus roughly 1000 millibars) so the total amount of CO2 around on Mars is about 1/2. Low atmospheric pressure complicates things even more by boiling off most of the volatiles which would generally be considered useful for quite a big stretch along the putative road to life.
After an initial flurry of excitement, the original Miller-Urey experiments which produced some amino acids also highlighted a number of problems on the way along said road.
Agree. And let's do it properly, by building a Beanstalk now that it is technically feasible. Or is that the mistake the Babelians made? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The talkorigins crew repeatedly stuff up bigtime and would rather crawl up their own asses than admit either error or defeat. The possibility that Santa Claus exists does not equal the certainty, but that is how their logic generally runs when arguing in favour of one of ``their'' points (for examples of such begging-the-question, where does the hypothetical lipid layer in their non-self-reproducing HypUrCell come from, why does it form a layer rather than disperse, what powers the lipid-generating reaction, how does one get from a fat-bubble to the complex, filtering, active membrane in the prokayote below it, where did the primordial peptide come from, and do they also believe in sympathetic medicine - with which their HypUrCell comparison bears a more than passing resemblance?). Arguments against opposing points are generally pretty abusive. You get a lot of the tone (with the offensive language distilled off) from their article.
Try this essay for balance. If you enjoy sarcasm, this one is amusing as well.
I can't resist my own separate dig at this page, it's just asking for it:
If you covered the entire Earth with amino acids useful for generating Ghadiri's peptides - and never mind sources of raw materials and sinks for elimination, decay and other factors - a nice sticky layer a third of a millimeter deep, odds are even that you would get one after a thousand iterations of the whole planet. If we inject a sliver sliver (and no more) of reality into the scenario, and reduce the total area of entirely-composed-of-useful-amino-acid-only lakes on Earth at any one time to that of the Great Lakes (roughly a quarter million square kilometers vs 500 million square kilometers) we're up to two million planetary iterations per peptide. How fast do these processes iterate? What happens when we account for impurities? How about dispersion in a hypothetically (but not realistically) neutral medium like ocean water? How long does a peptide hold together? How many peptides do we need in order to be useful for the next stage? Note that I'm focussing on just one putative stage, not stacking them as the article accuses all opponents of doing.
The idea of making GSVs transparent was a good one, I thought. The idea of stations with rank upon rank of GSVs parked inside them was a bit breath-taking... the human mind doesn't accept scale very well, but the Port of Fremantle, just down the road from here, is about the right size to be a GSV docking cradle, and I can mentally replicate that to car-park quantities.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not sure quite what to make of this, since the original links spoke of water gushing from cracks and flowing through channels on Mars' surface (unrelated, as you might expect, to Lowell's original canali).
That too. Many ancient records speak of either a global flood, or at least something much bigger than a local flood, something overwhelming. Science in general won't take these records too seriously lest they be seen to undermine naturalism/materialism or even (horrors!) support the dreaded cult of Creationism. At least, that's the only reasonable conclusion I've seen. A succinct way of putting it is, ``it's too scary to take seriously''.
Whatever happened to ``investigate, and let the facts fall where they may?''
As to the big canal, the only natural force which fits all of the characteristics (flat bottom, steep sides, subcanyons tending to intersect perpendicularly, no clear source or sink, pairs of parallelish canyons, sausage-strings of canyons blending to craters) is a lightning bolt. A nice big lightning bolt. A good time to be elsewhere... a good event to watch from a distance... maybe a few dozen planetary radii... maybe further...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yah, and be sure follow the threads through to their termination. TO runs the gamut of dud debating techniques, there are constant examples of any class of mistake imaginable (the dialogue with Remine illustrated most of them) and they ``win'' most arguments by begging the question, as you are about to do. (-:
Oh, and by publishing before all of the outstanding answers are in, and calling their claims unanswerable.
Seriously, very few people have a real understanding of what a billion items, a cubic kilometer, or a nanometer actually is. A nanometer sounds really small, but how small? How do you visualise something invisibly small?
You can measure mark out a square kilometer on a flat patch of land and use that to imagine a cubic kilometer, but that doesn't really give you a feel for what a cubic kilometer really involves. Now scale to parsecs.
This is why a lot of quantitative arguments don't come to satisfactory conclusions. When you see 1:10E50 as a probability, at some level of awareness you're almost certainly reading it as 1:50, which doesn't seem that unreasonable.
You've just illustrated a point rather neatly. (-:
Why did you insist that the grounds of debate be materialism? Why reason with on hemisphere tied behind your back? Is it some kind of religious conviction?
I've never seen ``we're here'' explained without ``and then a miracle happened'' or more often ``and then a whole passel of miracles rode onto the scene, shot the inconvenient facts, and rescued the hypothesis''. I'd be delighted to see you make a worthwhile attempt. (-:
You see, your statement is both begging the question, and a tautology. Begging the question in that you assume your point is true and insist that I prove it, and a tautology because you've said, in essence ``here is a problem that has no materialistic solution. give me a materialistic solution.''
After that, maybe we can negotiate ethics... (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing