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Hellish Vision of Mars Unveiled
mvladivostok writes "Yahoo has an interesting little article in which it is suggested that Mars may not have once been a warm, wet and hospitable planet that somehow lost its atmosphere; instead, it is suggested that the dead planet was occasionally bombarded by melting meteorites that carved out its distinctive craters and valleys. An interesting read."
It's got water, that would make future colonization that much easier/more feasible.
Question everything
At first I thought this article was about Doom 3.
From the article:
If earth is anything to go by, I thought evolution of self-reproducing organisms would require quite a few million years and a primordial soup...
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
"instead, it is suggested that the dead planet was occasionally bombarded by melting meteorites that carved out its distinctive craters and valleys"
Wait a minute, isn't that the same as earth and the rest of the planets? I mean, mercury doesn't get this kind of attention.
While it's certainly possible that Mars would have been bombarded this way, it doesn't appear likely for two reasons:
For one, there is no evidence of any other planetary body which would have gotten a significant infusion of water this way and it seems unlikely that Mars would have been the only target.
But the most important detail seems to be to just be a question of quantity. Regardless of maturity, in order for deep riverbeds such as appear on Mars to form you need a lot of water flowing for a fairly long time (years, not days). To get that water from impacts would mean that a LOT of such impacts need to have taken place over a (cosmologically) short period; which makes the first point above all the more noticable.
Even if Mars did get significant amounts of water this way (or had enough of it melted out by side effects) the water wouldn't have been around long enough to make geological constructs unless there was an atmosphere allowing it to remain liquid long enough to flow around for years.
I'm surprised someone at NASA would publish national-enquirer quality science like that. More likely, Yahoo misread the paper to extract the nice sounding bits.
-- MG
The same thing was happening on Earth. Earth gets smacked, life gets crushed, picks itself up, and tries again. Thankfully, life has yet to crush itself.
Mars has always been a mystery to us humans, right from H.G.Well's War of the world , to the recent Red Planet, we've been fantasizing about Mars. The Pathfinder has been the most exciting Mars project yet !!! It's interesting to read theories as in this article, but then that's what they are-theories. I wonder if we will ever be able to CONCLUSIVELY prove such theories. (other than using a time machine ;) )
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
does rain precipitates differently in lower gravity? Certainly it would look a bit different hitting the ground, right? Maybe the Drops have to condensate bigger, so these giant raindrops come down at a half the speed of earths raindrops, like some boy-band video slow mo. Or maybe the raindrops are much smaller and it's a miniature version of earth rain. I wonder.
Mars has a denser atmosphere than Earth. While spaceborne objects would be a nice explanation for these formations- if a bit uncreative- it forgets the element of the atmosphere, which is the only reason Earth doesn't get pounded into rubble every meteor shower.
Such objects tend to burn up in the atmosphere- and those which don't are rather uncommon, even geologically. What would be likely to make it through a thicker atmosphere?
I think this is a long shot, personally. It's a possibility- but for it to be a real possibility, this would have had to somehow occur before Mars had its atmosphere. Which is not impossible- far from it- but not particularly consistent with the data.
Admittedly, it's possible that the atmosphere was carried in a solid-frozen format on said bombardial objects, but that's even more of a stretch.
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
"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"
Spare me your "theories" of a harsh surface! If our democratically elected President believes we can breathe there, we can!
Why bother.
This article is not quite clear in its interpretation of the research- the main source of the water would be ice on the planet, not on the meteorites.
For a better article head to the bbc website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2546923.stm
The gist is that large impacts by asteroids or other bodies would heat water in subsurface ice, leading to massive flash flooding. They are speculating that very large impacts would have planet wide effects for short periods of time. This isn't that contrived, as there is evidence around small martian craters that suggest that ice has been melted leading to mud flows around the crater rim.
However, this doesn't explain why the northern hemisphere of mars looks like a dessicated ocean floor, which suggests a relatively long period of warm conditions.
Okay, so the only currently relevant conclusion they are reaching is that life on Mars (if there is any) would have evolved to bloom and spread at massive speeds, like an even more extreme version of our desert plants. I can *kinda* see that since if there's usually no life in most places there's also no competition for anything that gets there. Given the Martian wind levels and a presumption of heavy rains then fast propagation is possible.
Thass nice. So what?
Well, it seems to me that if we begin to terraform Mars, or in fact, even build a base there that heats the surrounding area and spreads some moisture just by mistake, then we may get some sorta Martian kudzu spreading everywhere. Sounds fine to me.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
BBC version
:).
a little nicer one the eyes in my opinion and has a picture too
Down in the corner there was a standard disclaimer to the effect that if you found any inaccuracies in the map during use, NASA and the USGS weren't responsible.
Use?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The first half billion years of earth were likely a molten meteorite hell too. Also most of the earths surface- the surfloors are recycled every 100-200 million years by plate tectonics, perhaps 20 times or so overall, wiping out much of the hellish scars.
What? I don't believe the article has anything to do with religion. I find it truely sad that someone can't offer an opposing scientific theory because it doesn't meet with other people's preconceptions.
Isn't that why the creationists are so annoying??? Because they can't make evolution fit with their preconceptions so its a lie?
The Anti-Blog
Why do people who can't read keep getting modded as "insightful" here at /.?
>Doesnt anyone think we'd notice the pothole
>left by a 150 mile wide asteroid?
Please READ the article:
"Segura and colleagues used photographs of the Red Planet's surface and computer models to show that large asteroids or comets hit the planet 3.5 billion years ago."
That's 3.5 *billion* years. Almost any impact crater from 3.5 billion years ago on the surface of the Earth would have long ago been eroded away, uplifted by faults into mountains, or subducted down into the mantle. In any case, they'd be difficult or impossible to identify now. Very little of the Earth's surface from 3.5 billion years ago remains intact. On Mars, it's a completely different story.
There are a handful of large craters on Earth that are still identifiable after around 2 billion years, as this article makes clear. But the giants formed by large impactors from early in our solar system's history have long ago been erased (or at least thoroughly obscured) from the surface of this world.
Our moon on the other hand has plenty of gigantic impact scars left over from before 3.5 billion years ago. For example, the gigantic Imbrium crater on the lunar surface is around 700 miles in diameter, and was formed about 3.85 billion years ago. There are several lunar craters in excess of 500 miles in diameter. Our moon is also home to the largest known impact crater in the solar system, the colossal 1,300 mile wide South Pole-Aitken Basin.
I refuse to believe this. Mars had an atmosphere and environment and ecosystem EXACTLY like the Earth, only much, much better. There were over a hundred trillion different species of animals and over nine hundred trillion different species of plants. The vegetation was lush and full everywhere except the oceans, which comprised twenty seven and a third percent of the planet's surface. Over a period of twelve thousand years, the people of Mars became incredibly intelligent and had built underground caverns of terrifying proportions in which they constructed enormous cities without damaging any of the plants above ground. All of their actions and technologies fit precisely within the balance of their planet's ecosystem such that no pollution or impurities took place. They began to explore other planets and had arrived at the farthest reaches of the universe. Then, a Martian child saw an interesting stamp on a little Martian girl's school desk and thought it looked cool, so he took it without telling anyone. The girl found this out and a fight broke out between her and the boy. As she could not prove who had done it, she became very angry and involved her parents. The boy's parents thus became involved in the argument and a family feud resulted. This escalated into a citywide riot, which resulted in a war between two neighboring cities, which had further involved their governing states. Within a matter of days after the stamp had been stolen, all of Mars was engulfed in a massive and horrendous world war which caused all the underground caverns to collapse onto the cities they contained, destroying them and the vegetation, and ending the fine balance in the ecosystem which made Mars such a nice place to live. The only remaining Martians alive were three astronauts on a Martian spaceship, a man and two women, who found themselves marooned on Earth when their spacecraft broke down while in orbit of the Earth's moon. They made an emergency landing, expecting that a rescue mission would be launched within a matter of days. That mission never took place. The astronauts thus reproduced into the human population as we know it today. That was approximately fourteen thousand years ago.