Evidence Found of Lake, Catastrophic Flood on Mars

angkor points to this article on spaceflightnow.com, excerpting: "Scientists 'have discovered a large former lake in the highlands of Mars that would cover an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.'"

Comments

the bible was right...

[RogueProtoKol]

... except the massive flood which lasted 40 days and 40 nights was on mars not earth! now i wonder what happened to noah and all the animals?

fire water burn

[ComaVN]

Of course, it would be more useful to cover arizona and colorado with a lake at the moment.

What does it really matter?

[olethrosdc]

I think I ought to summarize the current 'mars' situation. I don't have anything against exploring mars, etc, but it seems to me like people are trying to make worthwhile stories out of trivia.

I think we have been bombarded with the "news" of water on Mars for long enough so far. First it was the polar ice cape water residue, which was quite important. Then there was the hydrogen-trace confirmation, which is perhaps not so important, though it does show that there might be water close enough to the surface to be extracted. However this particular data is completely irrelevant unless there are plans to actually go there and extract water.

Now they have finished a high-resolution altitude map. They used this to calculate the possible origin of the water that shaped a valley, and traced it to something looking like a lake basin. Again, nice, since people theorize that if there were life on mars, there would be a higher chance that it had existed at a lake.

But, is this important? As far as I am concerned, the answer is no, unless someone decides to actually send a mission to the planet to gather hard evidence. Which currently seems impossible, considering the amount of money wasted on the ISS (which has no clear function IMHO).

Re:What does it really matter?

[Boiling_point_]

But, is this important? As far as I am concerned, the answer is no, unless someone decides to actually send a mission to the planet to gather hard evidence.

An awful lot of useful data is gained by remote sensing Mars - just like on Earth. You don't have to touch down in order to learn.

Different forms of matter have things called spectal signatures - the particular pattern of all the different wavelengths emitted/reflected. You can use these signatures to work out what sort of stuff rocks are made of, how old they are, what concentrations they're in and in what patterns they lie.

On Earth it's arguably more interesting, since you can tell different types of vegetation and settlement patterns just by measuring, say, the infra-red or ultraviolet you can see.

Research on Mars isn't about Martian life, all of the time. It's not even about terraforming and possible future human settlement - it's about taking science developed and theorised on Earth and applying it in new and challenging locations. By finding evidence of a huge body of water on Mars, we now know that all the theories of Martian geohistory (is that a word?) that rely on a small volume of past surface water are less likely to be true. This sort of stuff might be important in ways we don't know yet.

...it seems to me like people are trying to make worthwhile stories out of trivia.

Sure, plenty of people like to think of the possibilities and implications of teeny lifeforms sprouting up on a nearby planet. Fewer people, but they are out there, are just as fascinated by the basic interactions of huge universal systems and forces - of things on a scale millions of orders of magnitude bigger. Sometimes the news doesn't need to be dramatic, if you've got your eye on a bigger picture anyway :)

Re:What does it really matter?

[Anarchofascist]

... there might be water close enough to the surface to be extracted. However this particular data is completely irrelevant unless there are plans to actually go there and extract water.

I don't understand your lack of understanding. I'll try to put it into simple terms:

A: Water on Mars makes Mars more interesting to visit, because where there's water there is/was life.
B: Water is to rockets what petroleum is to cars.

Therefore, these discoveries make Mars easier to return from, and make it a more interesting place to visit. Therefore it is more likely that one or more countries (probably the Chinese at this rate) will want to pay to send people there.

Texas

[selderrr]

What is it with texas these days ? ./ seems to measure anything extraterestrial in STU (Standard Texas Units).

Just for clarity : is this a metric unit ? Can we count in Millitexi, picotexi, GIGATEXI (drooldrool) ?

Re:Texas

[Rhinobird]

No it's an English unit. See there is the base Standard Texas Unit (STU) which is sub-divided into 4840 square Rhode Islands (RI). Each Rhode Island is of course 160 square Country Miles. (as opposed to a regular mile) Each coutry mile is divided into 220 City blocks. Eventually you end up with smidgeons and skoshies.

Re:Texas

[JabberWokky]

One Belgium is .346 of a Texas in standard notation, (if following the Mornington rules) although can be .347 in high season.

Y'all should just adopt the Southern Standard of Measurement. In the American Deep South, we only have one unit, the yonder, which can be applied to any distance easily... since the space between any two points is always equal to precisely one yonder. The wrench is in the toolchest over yonder, and the city of San Francisco is over yonder thataway, and eta Ursae Majoris is up yonder.

The square yonder doesn't exist. Area is generally defined by it's boundaries - trees, roads, creeks, churches and bars. Don't even start to ask about a cubic yonder. Volume is the domain of women, who use a wide variety of terms such as smidgen, speck, dollop, drown and drop, all used only in cooking and baking.

--
Evan

Rlated Article on BBC

[Gopher971]

The BBC website has a related article about the formation of the Ma'adim Vallis. It can be found at News.BBC.Co.Uk

Hmm...

[muzzmac]

I'm not interested until they find a Martian nudist beach.

I love those Martian chicks!

That's easy

[Ethelred Unraed]

... except the massive flood which lasted 40 days and 40 nights was on mars not earth! now i wonder what happened to noah and all the animals?

That's easy. Noah's Ark was a spaceship. Duh!

Which reminds me of a German cartoon (http://www.nichtlustig.de/) recently: one sees the Ark in the background, and in the foreground is a small raft with a prophet-like guy and two unicorns. The caption reads "Noah's rival Ishmael was rather less successful", and one of the unicorns says to Ishmael, "By the way, we're gay."

Cheers,

Ethelred

New mexico???

[sofar]

'the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.'

FYI, the European version of the article translates this into:

'the size of France'

This isn't news...

[Cally]

it's olds for nerds... images from as far back as Pathfinder showed conclusive evidence of catastrophic outburst floods. That's why Mars Odyssey carries the gamma ray spectrometer which is tuned to look for the hydrogen signal from subsurface water in the first place.

From the fringe

[Alien54]

Of course, elements from the fringe have been arguing there is/has been water there for ages. It seems that it is only now the the official scientists are starting to say "well, there could be", or even "look at our new discovery."

Examples of how strange this get are seen here. Ignoring the junk science nonsense, the pictures are interesting. If you scroll about halfway down, there is one mars photo, conveniently linked to the nasa archive, that looks for all the world like an actual sea shore. So much so it is startling.

Of course, the real scientists are taking their sweet time coming to any conclusions (insert plausible reason here), which is driving the hobbyists and others right up a wall.

Trying not to flame here.

[ZigMonty]

I'm trying not to flame here but how many times are they going to announce the existance of water on Mars? Do we really need to hear about the latest dried up lake? New Scientist had a good editorial on this recently.

NASA seems to alternate between press releases of "Water/Life on Mars", "Yet Another Module of a Usless Space Station Launched", "Some 'Kids' Program" and "30 Years Since We Last Did Something (Orbit/Moon etc)".

I am a firm believer in space exploration but I'm really starting to loose faith in NASA. The search for life in the universe is important but should it really be the program's primary goal? IMHO, we should be trying to commercialize space (for humans not just satellites). NASA should help corporations build space hotels, start charging a $million a flight and fund their science that way. The Mars fossils aren't going anywhere! With a good space infrastructure looking for life becomes much easier.

Reply, don't mod.

Rhode Island

[overunderunderdone]

As a resident of Rhode Island I'm terrified of the possibility that one of those floods "the size of Rhode Island" or wildfires "the size of Rhode Island" will someday actually happen IN Rhode Island.

Re:And plenty of code space for more.

[Christianfreak]

I know I've asked the this question before: But why is it that everytime there's a story about life on other planets we have someone start talking about the "religious zealots" and how this is going to upset their faith? Like for some reason everyone who is religious will just pack their bags and go home and never give religion another thought.

Well here's a thought... the vast majority of religious people (like the vast majority of the population) probably don't care if there is/was life on other planets. For those that do care the vast majority of them welcome the idea and want to know more about it (myself included).

Yes there are some religious people who are short-sighted and have to put God in a box and declare that everything happened a certain way. For those of us who are not short-sighted its fairly easy to reconcile faith with science. We realize that God is much bigger than any science or logic. The Bible doesn't say that Evolution didn't happen, it just says that God had a hand in creating all that is. For all we know he used evolution to do it and put billions of life-forms all over the universe!

Finally all this begs the question, Why do you care if some people believe that God created the world in a certain way? They have free speech, they don't seem to be here bothering you. If you believe their wrong fine but why bring them up here where has nothing to do with the topic at hand?

Is it because you are equally short-sighted and believe that all religious people in the world believe a certain way because of the acts of a vocal few?

The problem is that "religious zealots" are ....

[DG]

...so damned dangerous.

If you (and possibly your community) are the type that have a quiet, personal faith that sustains you during the difficult parts of your life....

...well, even though I (and many others) may find the first principles behind it (that there is an invisible, omnipotent and omniscient being who created us all and who has rules for us that we must all abide by or be consined to the flames) absurd, there's no law against the absurd, and you're not hurting anyone. There's no reason for anyone to piss in your cornflakes.

But you unfortunately - on the surface - share the same faith with a bunch of people who twist religeous writings to serve their own ends, and who simultaniously use these twisted interpretations to absolve them of any responsibility for their actions.

Somebody with the absolute conviction that an otherwise unconsciencable act is sanctioned by their God is a VERY dangerous person, the same way that a psychopath or sociopath is dangerous. The normal rules of conduct no longer apply.

So you get people who feel very strongly that "abortion is murder", but believe that killing doctors who perform abortions is just fine (because it is sanctioned by God,and thus not "murder")

And so on and so forth. There are so many examples that I don't think it's necessary to trot them all out. You don't have to search very hard to find examples of religiously-motivated abhorrant behaviour.

And this behaviour is very much inter-faith. All the major world religions preach peace, tolerence, understanding, and a virtuous life, and evey one of them has bred fanatics who have killed, raped, burned, and opressed (from individuals to entire populations) in the name of their God.

A common theme amongst these fanatics is an insistance on the absolute infallibility of their scriptures and the letter of these scriptures (or at least the part of it that they feel gives them leave to do whatever it is they want to do) Anything that can debunk or disprove these scriptures makes is more difficult to gain converts and continue spreading the disease. A world with no religious zealots would be a very fine place indeed.

So it's not that anyone believes that "all religious people believe a certain thing because of the acts of a vocal few" but rather that "the acts of the vocal few are so damned dangerous that they have to be contained somehow".

Note that you don't necessarily have to be burning witches or firebombing abortion clinics to be dangerous. If you seek the supression of the teaching of truth (because it contradicts your scriptures) you are dangerous. If you seek to deny people certain rights (because your scriptures claim such people are hated by your God) then you are dangerous. If you seek the supression of certain books or works of art because you feel they are counter to the wishes of your God, you are dangerous. Etc etc ad nausium.

Probably the best illustration of what I'm taking about here comes from the fine folks at The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/onion3734/god_clarifies_ do nt_kill.html

The fanatics are the ones speaking for you, like it or not. They tar you with the same brush.

DG