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Flowing Water Discovered on Mars
Dolphy writes "BBC News has the latest big scoop on the Mars phenomenon. Researcher Tahirih Motazedian apparently uncovered proof quite some time ago of flowing water and surface change on Mars."
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How long before they find the first Martian Starbucks? Probably right next to the McDonald's and Walmart.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
ya, just release some alge or other brackish tolerant plant and wait a few million/billion years.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
Higher res images
(o) <----put that karma right here :P
Until we stop looking at pictures and send some more probes and people over there. It can be done, and we'll finally know for sure.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
1. Beach resort
2. Evaporate it for salt
3. Water fights
4. Endless discussion about life on Mars
5. Experiments to see if fish could live on Mars
Brought to you by the Artificial Idea Factory.
"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."
- Vice President Dan Quayle, 8/11/89
Although its exciting, It would seriously hinder us from engineering Mars into a livable planet. If we discover life there, people will have a big problem with messing up the eco system. I am all for dumping tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, warming the place up, and planting a bunch of trees. It would still be a long time before the environment would be safe for humans.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
That black stuff looks more like oil to me... Maybe mr. Bush will rush to Mars next.
Meanwhile, even at the poles, Mars does not go below -150 degrees, so there is no place on Mars at which nitrogen will turn into a liquid.
All of this speculation really gets us no closer to any valuable knowledge than any probes, robots, or analysis from the past.
We really need to get some actual PEOPLE there to gather some real data. This photo interpretation is only a little bit better than Rorschach Ink blot for crying out loud.
The only real good that comes out of this is hopefully it will generate interest in the nimrods who don't see the value in getting some people on the planet.
To quote Arnold: "Get your butt to Mars!"
-Michael
Threshold RPG
Second, the remarkable thing about water is that based on simple chemical rules it should not be a liquid at ordinary temperatures: ammonia, with a similar MW, is a gas. It is the strong hydrogen bonding between water molecules that gives it the high melting and boiling points, and the very wide range between them. The ideal liquid to sustain life has a wide range between MP and BP, dissolves a wide range of substances, is itself mostly unreactive, is made from elements common in planets, does not react with oxygen, hydrogen, carbon or sulphur in the liquid state at ordinary pressures, and is easily formed in chemical reactions (which implies a small molecule). Water fits the bill extremely well. Another liquid which is quite good is ethyl alcohol. The other small molecules (ammonia, nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, methyl alcohol, hydrogen cyanide) all fall down badly or one or more of the criteria.
Water may not be the only liquid that makes a suitable carrier for life, but it would be really hard to find a more suitable one. Human experiments to use alcohol instead are rarely successful for very long.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
It's a nice idea, but, as usual, the details don't seem to reinforce the headline much. I can't blame Slashdot (much) for being sensational this time--the story submitter copied the headline from the BBC article. Although the submitter did manage to make it just that tiny bit more sensationist by removing the quotes from the word flows.
The article says how the observed phenomena do all these various things that water should do. As Eric points out, water is not the only liquid. More generally, the question of importance is: what are the other possible causes for the observed phenonena? All we've really got are Dark Streaks and possible Dynamic Fluid Flow. That's not really so much to go on. Sure something's definitely happening down there, and it could be water or some other fluid--but that's all we know right now.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
OK one step further: Martian Atmosphere
So we're talking carbon dioxide. Pressure is 7mb or 7hPa or 0.7kPa (earth pressure beeing around 1000hPa or 100kPa)
Here's a phase diagram of CO2
So at such low pressures, CO2 is vapor at diurnal temperature ranges. My theory seems not to hold. Please go back to sleep.
The problem is that martian gravity isn't strong enough to keep a thick enough atmosphere for complex animal life. IIRC every martian spring the frozen C02 at the poles vapourises and migrates to the equatorial regions, where it heats enough that some of the gas achieves (a very low) escape velocity. Mars is constantly leaking gases, and oxygen, being lighter than C02 would escape even more easily. You may be able to generate a thick C02 atmosphere for a short time, but once the temperature started to rise you might start loosing gas faster than you could produce it.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
darn, eh?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Maybe Mars will be a great place to try our hand at terraforming, but whether there's life there or not, we'll see outrageous political battles over the attempt. Let's go anyway! Perhaps it'll have to be some far-off planet that gives us the chance to really engineer the place without massive protests by people on Earth who aren't doing anything themselves. That's no reason not to go to Mars and see what we can find out about the place with actual people there on the ground.
And sure, [i]t would still be a long time before the environment would be safe for humans." Hey, this planet isn't all that safe for humans in the first place. Let's go.
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
Hmmmm... I find your ideas intriguing and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
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While that is true about water, it's also true about ammonia! There's quite strong hydrogen bonding in ammonia, which is why its boiling point and freezing point is so much higher than methane which genuinely doesn't have any hydrogen bonding. Methane has molecular weight of 16, ammonia of 17 and water of 18, so all these hydrides are quite similar in that respect. Their boiling points at atmospheric pressure are -161.6C, -33.4C and 100C respectively.
I fail to see why a life-sustaining fluid must not react with oxygen at ordinary pressures. (I fail to see why it need not react with the others noted for that matter, but oxygen is the odd one out.) Oxygen is such a viciously reactive gas that it reacts with almost anything that isn't already heavily oxygenated. There is only free oxygen in the Earth's atmostphere because it has been generated by living organisms which have reacted water with CO_2 to produce useful stuff and a nasty toxic byproduct. Organisms capable of withstanding the corrosive atmosphere came much later and those which actually require free O_2 even later.
A biology that didn't use a hydrolysis reaction wouldn't produce a oxygenated atmosphere and ammonia would very probably serve well as a working fluid. An ammonia-water mixture would possibly be even more suitable.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
Define "short time". Are we talking a million years? 10,000?
Even if the atmosphere only lasts a short period on a geological timescale, it would still give us plenty of time for useful colonisation. Maybe even enough time to develop a way to make the teraforming permanent. Remember how old our civilisation is. A couple of thousand years is a very long time.
With the life we know, this indeed holds true. But I'm sure there could be life based on any number of weird building blocks, we just don't have them here.
With a little application of the anthropic principle, why should we expect other life-bearing planets to be wildly different? I agree with your point that we shouldn't be looking just for what we have here, but we have two reasons to do that: 1. we know our data is good, and 2. we really don't know what else to look for.
In fact, it reinforces my total agreement with you that [D|R]NA is not necessary for life. I believe that a good minimum for definining life is just adaptive behavior, i.e. evolution. Of course we aren't inclined to say things like evolutionary algorithms or simple adaptive chemical processes "are" life... but perhaps part of the problem with that is that we simply haven't let these things go on long enough to recognize them as life.
In a universe this vast, it seems impossible to me that we could be the only life. One thing which I expect we'll find if we explore the universe in greater detail is that it's full of weird things. The weirdness of life doesn't come across when we sit at home in ultra-introspective mode, categorizing the minute differences between insects as though they're legendary incredible differences. The weirdness will come across when we're confronted by complex interrelated chemical and physical processes on other worlds, and our biologists won't want to call it life, while the rest of us will (or vice versa).
For once a little manifest destiny would have been just fine. Instead, we're peering through expensive telescopes, while our ancestors are pointing at the leaning tower and asking us why we aren't dropping things from the top of it.
--
Daniel
This is a very big fantasy some people have.
There are a couple of reasons Mars has an atmosphere 1/100th of our own.
One reason is because Mars has less mass than the Earth. Hence there is less gravity to "hold" onto a thick atmosphere like what we have on Earth.
Secondly, Mars did have a denser atmosphere at one time, but was probably eroded away by the solar wind. The loss of a strong magnetic field probably didn't help things either.
To prevent the erosion of some future atmosphere, you probably would need to restart the magnetic field. Maybe you could drill down to the core and plant a big bomb to restart it.
So terraforming is still (extremely) hard after all. I didn't get into the astronomical amount of energy required to do it either.
So it looks like that if you wanna live on Mars you're gonna have to strap on some airtanks.
And don't forget the long-johns either, because it's cold there too.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Mars is constantly leaking gases
Sounds like my dad after a couple of burritos
Johnkoerner.com
now we just gorra remember to bring the following with us:
thanks for the info, I'll get back to ya:)
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So I was wondering. If there is, in fact, water on mars. And if because of that, there was life on mars - microbiotic. What would we do?
Aside from all of the theoligical implications, what would our response be? Would we collect it to near extinction ala early biologists (let's kill it, stuff it, and put it under glass) or would we just leave it alone? Would we bring it back here (unlikely) and if so, where would we put it?
I always kind of assumed that if we found life, it would be more simple than science fiction has postured, but i never really thought of the implications of that simplicity.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
qualye quotes (like gore quotes and bush2 quotes) are more often false. snopes does attribute this one to him though.
>
>How, oh wise one, would you get back? Where would you find someone skilled enough to go to Mars that was willing to go there to die? Much less a whole crew?
How would you get back? You probably wouldn't. So what?
Skills 1? Spaceships fly themselves for the most part. Martian colonists on one-way trips are spam in a can until they land.
Skills 2? After spending six months in a can reading geology textbooks, they break out the pickaxe and start digging and taking pictures. Any of us reading this could do more in five minutes on Mars than has been done in the past 30 years.
Volunteers? You ask for them.
"Congratuations. You're going to Mars.
Since there's nothing on Mars to spend your money on, we are going to pay one person of your choosing your "salary" of $100K/year for the rest of your life, or until you come back, whichever comes first.
We will put you on the cheapest spaceship money can buy. Some of you will blow up on the pad. Some of you will have air leaks and suffocate or freeze en route. Some of you will burn up on re-entry. But at $50M per launch, some of you will land on Mars.
Your mission, en route, is to read about rocks and learn how to use a microscope. Once there, your mission is to break big rocks into little rocks and tell us what you found.
Your ship has an RTG (or better yet, a small nuclear reactor) that provides your capsule with electricity to break water into oxygen for you to breathe, alcohol to drink, and hydrogen for you to refuel your engines with. If you manage to find enough water, you will also be able to use that hydroponics lab to grow food for a while.
Some of you will figure out how to get enough food, water, heat and oxygen out of your setup to last for months, maybe years. Some of you will live long enough to make it to the point where we've already landed half a dozen unfueled crew and sample return vehicles.
We will pay you or your beneficiary $100,000 per pound of Mars rock that comes back. The return vehicles can carry 500 pounds. Whether you launch that thing with 500 pounds of rock, or 350 pounds of life support, your 140-pound ass, and 10 pounds of rocks, hey, that's up to you.
I won't lie to you. Many of you will not be coming back, but we will see to it that you have one hell of an adventure."
Every day, people sign up for what is fundamentally the same deal: If you're willing to do something you believe in, even knowing you might die, we will give you the equipment to do it. Soldiers have vastly better odds of survival than my Mars colonists, but keep in mind that they do it for a tenth of the pay.
Believe me, a faster-riskier-cheaper manned space exploration programme would have no shortage of volunteers.