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.

Startup Opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't there ice on Mars? Where there's ice, there's usually something frozen (oft water...).

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 ... oh I've said too much already...

Once you sign the NDA, we'll talk... Drop an email to ac1@slashdot....

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.

Hi-resolution images of the fissure.

[Mortenson]

Here are a few images of the fissure courtesy of the Mars Global Surveyor:
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.

Re:Consider the fact

[skilef]

Although we are limited as humans in our theoretical resources, there are strong indications that the chances for carbon-hydrogen based life on mars are bigger than for an unknown form. If you look at Mars' atmosphere, you see a 50x higher concentration of carbondioxide compared to earth. If you combine the fact that life needs some kind of energy (geothermal, sunlight) for its metabolic pathways, and that those sources for energy are available at places where water and carbondioxide are present, carbon-hydrogen based life seems to be the most plausible form. Because of the low temperatures on the surface there is a bigger chance for finding some kind of subterranean thermophilic lifeform than anything on the surface.
The chance is very small however; therefore, I think it's more important that the presence of water enables us to create colonies on Mars in the near future: water can be used as a source of energy and offcourse to quench our thirst..