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)."

Comments

Why we look for water and life on Mars

[InfoSec]

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.

Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars

[dgroskind]

In such cases it would be wise to adapt a Si-based form, which has quite similar characteristics to C when placed at a higher temperature.

The properties may be similar but they are in general still not the properties needed for life. For instance, when carbon oxidizes it produces a gas, which is a useful characteristic for breathing. When silicon oxidizes it produces sand, which would prevent breathing.

One could imagine very different organic chemistries but these would might not have anything in common with carbon chemistry and thus silicon would not be relevant. For instance, nitrogen and phosphorous can form the long molecular chains needed for DNA-like structures.

Life should be quantified in terms of energy and entropy instead.

One of the key characteristics of life as we know it is chirality, which is the property of a the mirror image of an object like a molecule to be a different shape from the object. Carbon-based organic molecules have this property but phosphorus-nitrogen ones do not.

Chirality suggests that organic molecules might need to embody certain mathematical characteristics that are fundamental to life. What we would need, therefore, is a mathematical definition of life.

Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

This 'generic' definition of 'LIFE' has bothered me for long while. It neednt be even 'biological' as we perceive it. There are so many 'forms' life can exist as we know and there could be millions of other forms which we dont know. Still, I dont understand why our 'scientists' tend to define 'life' as 'water' based or supported. One may argue this as to looking for our possible habitat. But defining life as something 'water' based or biological is foolish. IMO.

Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars

[lindsayt]

InfoSec's original post was not questioning whether water is required for any type of life. He was suggesting that for HUMANS (ie, carbon-based lifeforms from the third planet out from our sun) to colonize other planets, we need large quantities of readily available water. Of course the comment Ubi_NL has made may or may not be true (it's a valid theory, anyway), but it has nothing to do with the original post. Nobody can argue that humans will be unable to colononize space very effectively if we have to bring water with us. However, if the Universe is full of water, as Mars suggests, then it will be easy.

At the same time, presence of water on Mars does not really give us any clue as to whether or not there is water outside our solar system, since Mars and Earth both came from the same primordial mass...

Re:Why we look for water and life on Mars

[dgroskind]

I don't understand this at all..

for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself.

But the polyphosphazene polymers you provide a link to could easily be chiral...

I'm following Prof. Robert D. Minard (Penn State Astrobiology Research Center) who says they aren't chiral.

But why do we need a mathematical definition of life, or indeed any definition of life at all?

I was playing here with the previous post's idea that life might be more fundamental than its chemistry. There's a hint of this idea in Stephen Wolfram's theories. Coming up with a precise definition of life would only be pointless if it's impossible. The point would be that a mathematical description of life might give it the same standing as a natural law like gravity or entropy: The Law of Life.

Origin of life

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why this news is important.

[Gopher971]

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.

Re:Why this news is important.

[shessel]

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

I didn't get the impression that water was free flowing 10 million years ago. The last paragraph makes mention of an ice dam close to the surface, with the built up pressure exploding it outward to create the mesas. That, to me, indicates a surface too cold for water to cut any channels (maybe an ice flow, though -- just a thought). There's an older, interesting article (Nov 2001) that talks about this sort of thing, and refers to the meteriorite found with fossilized bacteria from Mars. Maybe it came from one of these geyser blowouts?

Re:Alien bacteria

[GSV NegotiableEthics]

Apart from being fastinating and a sign that further evolved life forms may exist, are there any potential advantages for finding extraterestrial bacteria?

Looking at signs of life that evolved on another planet might tell us a lot about how early life on earth may have evolved. The problem with life on earth is that it's a palimpsest--a tablet overwritten so many times that the original message has been effectively erased. We can be sure that modern proteins didn't just happen by accident, but on the other hand we don't yet know how they did come about. If signs of life should turn out to remain on Mars, particularly if that life took a different turning than life on earth did, it would show us one more trace through the maze, one more way of existing than the one we know about. And we'd learn a lot more about life in general.

Re:What happened (Flood vulcanism on Earth)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Life on Mars...no no no no no!

[rufusdufus]

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.