More on the Mars Ice Cap

bfwebster writes "In a striking example of how a preliminary (but wrong!) scientific conclusion can persist for decades, Space.com has a story about how the south polar ice cap on Mars is mostly water, not mostly carbon dioxide (dry ice), as has been stated since the late 1960s. The new finding is based on analysis of Mars Observer readings that show that the souther polar ice cap is too warm at certain seasons to be dry ice. This finding has negative implications both for those claiming that liquid flow structures on Mars were caused by C02 instead of H20, as well as those who were hoping to use all that CO2 for terraforming."

Comments

Re:slashdot's editors censor posts

[jericho4.0]

The parent is not flamebait. Click on the damn link. Slashdotters got fucked over by the editors.

Re:Terrorforming......

[macaries]

You sound like an old fart. Did you bend down or something? I

Negra Modelo

[rice_burners_suck]

Dude, who cares if this ice is CO2 or H2O or C2H6O... It doesn't make any damn difference! What makes a difference is: Are there any of those friggen little green dudes cruizen around over there? If there ain't, then we should build a huge space ship outside of Earth's orbit. It would be so enormous that it will be bigger than the moon. Actually, we'll build two of them. In the first one, we'll put lots of soil and plants and stuff inside. In the other one, we'll put tons of oxygen and all kinds of other good stuff that a planet's atmosphere needs. Once that's done, we'll fly the damn things over to Mars and dump it all over the land over there like a couple of big dump trucks. Plants will start to grow, and guess what? Within a couple of weeks, Mars will have a human-friendly ecosystem and we can start building cities over there and polluting it to our liking. That'll be cool. There will be a whole Internet put together over there, with IPv6 from the start, of course, and there will be only one 1200 baud modem connecting that Internet to the one here on Earth. This will allow for fast data transfers and will keep the economy strong. Of course, Mars will belong to the United States. In effect, Mars will become the 51st state. I imagine Venus being the 52nd, after we nuke off that heavy cloud cover, making it possible to actually live there. The official language of Mars will be Spanish, by the way. So, yeah, Texas won't be the biggest friggen continent in the U.S. anymore. Oh, well. But at least my address will be:

837750 Negra Modelo Drive, Apartment 933
New Houston, New Texas 5F88C,
Planet Mars, U.S.A.

Just wait until we have the whole friggen universe populated. Then, people's addresses will look like:

9938 Negra Modelo Drive,
City of the Second Moon,
New Africa
Planet Nubecula 998-BJ2-98881-5,
Holmberg IX Galaxy UGC 5336,
God's Universe

We'll be using IPv83 by that time, with 16384-bit addresses. Your internet address will be something like: 881.89579827897.90213409.2394823480932840923840928 490283490829048.176.1489728728.1984278192749082374 .9042308.20582095240783017582756982458723894.20957 24867982.12398637854.1846364.148.43276.12489.24098 729856293764.249872983:9283479823239874892374:2348 7432897492874.982377923647923.2348723.32846329.283 47382 (note: address truncated), or more simply, http://www.rice_burners_suck.2ndmoon.newafrica.nub ecula.holmberg.ugc5336.universe.com.us.

Re:Negra Modelo

[rice_burners_suck]

The other 95% of the people on this planet can take a long walk on a short pier. You wanna live in America? Learn Spanish and don't tell us how you do things in your country. If it's so great over there, why did you come over here? This is the greatest country in the world. I blindly believe EVERYTHING the leaders of this country say because they have my best interests in mind and don't care at all about themselves. So there might be some problems, such as that of importing so much junk from other places. But hey, it can't be perfect, you know. Still, this is the best place in the world.

By the way... I LIVE IN MEXICO, D.F. (That's like D.C. to you gringos out there. And yes, some Mexicans DO speak English.)

Re:Negra Modelo

[spammeister]

You wanna live in Canada? learn French. It is SO Great here, and I don't wanna go there. The government hardly has my best interests in mind and all they care about is themselves.

Guess what, it's -20C up here right now (yes a lot more people use Metric than Imperial) so be happy where you are right now :)