Slashdot Mirror
Life on Mars? Why Not?
Guillaume Filion writes "IEEE spectrum has an interesting article about a new probe sent to Mars searching for life: 'Recent missions to Mars have focused on the search for water, past or present, as a surrogate for life itself. But now a British-led team is working to renew the search for life directly, fueled by doubts about the equipment that prompted NASA to declare Mars a dead world some 26 years ago.'"
When a team is "fueled by doubts," I can only be pessimistic and assume a negative outcome. I'd much rather be fueled by something a little more positive.
The anti-salmon
I hope they find life and rush it back to Earth!
Just think of all the death it could bring!
Go now! Make SARS look weak!
...but it died for lack of water.
www.rdex.net
That's a funny title. Reminds me that I want to collect a list of funny dismissive things like that. Why not? is a good one. I also like How about that. (As seen in that new phil jackson commercial for something)
Mars: Dead or Alive?
A miniaturized marvel of engineering aspires to rewrite the textbooks about life on the Red Planet
By Barry E. DiGregorio
Recent missions to Mars have focused on the search for water, past or present, as a surrogate for life itself. But now a British-led team is working to renew the search for life directly, fueled by doubts about the equipment that prompted NASA to declare Mars a dead world some 26 years ago.
If all goes according to plan, a Soyuz-Fregat booster rocket will lift off from Baikonur cosmodrome next month carrying an extremely compact and sophisticated life detection probe that might finally settle one of the most intriguing questions in science: did Mars once harbor microbial life-and is it still there?
The probe is hitching a ride on the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Mars Express orbiter as part of the agency's first home- grown mission to the Red Planet. Named Beagle 2[see photos], in honor of the HMS Beagle in which Charles Darwin made the historic voyage of discovery that led him to the theory of evolution, it was designed by scientists from Britain's University of Leicester and Open University in collaboration with Martin-Baker Aircraft and Matra Marconi Space Systems. Once the orbiter reaches Mars, Beagle 2 will be sent down to dig around on the planet's surface.
But even after it has dropped off its passenger, the Mars Express orbiter will not be idle. It will use a sounding radar called Marsis to search below the surface for water. It will have an ultraviolet and infrared spectrometer called Spicam to study the atmosphere over the course of a Martian year. And it will relay data transmitted from the lander back to Earth.
Did Viking get it wrong?
The first spacecraft with dedicated equipment to look for life on Mars were NASA's twin Viking landers, which touched down on the surface in 1976. Why send another now?
On board both Viking landers were miniature life detection laboratories, and some of the data they returned could indeed be interpreted as evidence for life on Mars. Yet the majority of the project's scientists became convinced that inorganic oxidants in the soil were responsible for the ambiguous data. The next year, NASA publicly announced its conclusion: that Viking had found no life.
Was the U.S. agency jumping to conclusions? In recent years, questions have been raised about the effectiveness of a key instrument-a combined gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer (GCMS)-that swayed most of the Viking scientists into the no-life camp. The GCMS failed to detect any organic molecules on the Martian surface at all, which posed something of a puzzle, as even the barren surface of the moon is host to some organic molecules. To explain the anomaly, scientists postulated a harsh chemical environment that supposedly made the planet self-sterilizing by actively destroying organic matter [see "Why NASA Said No to Life on Mars"].
To find out if this picture is correct, Beagle 2 is designed to search for organic material below, as well as on, the surface of Mars. In addition, it will study the inorganic chemistry and mineralogy of the landing site, says Mark Sims, the Beagle 2 mission manager who is based at Leicester University.
Without question, the Beagle 2 lander manifests an enormous leap of scientific engineering. It costs only US $40 million versus Viking's $1 billion, and weighs in at a mere 60 kg at launch, as opposed to 661 kg for each fully fueled Viking lander. In its set of scientific instruments are the first ever optical microscope to fly to Mars, as well as a gas analysis package (GAP) that will directly challenge or confirm the results of Viking's gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS).
Beagle 2's destination on Mars is a region known as Isidis Planitia [see map]. This relatively flat basin may have been formed by sedimentary deposits and was chosen not just for the chances of finding life there but with a view to the safety of the lander as well.
what could live on that planet. i assume if there was life on that planet, it would exist in a much different way and feed of different resources than our way
Information Technology White Papers and Research
A rerun of "Capricorn One" probably raised their doubts.
There may be things that reproduce and show signs of life on Mars, but we'll spend a lot of time trying to cram the stuff on Mars into the categories we have on Earth.
Hint: Chances are, no matter what we do, we're never gonna see a green spectral line or test for clorophyll.
Instead, we need to examine soil for the most basic types of life we know of... creatures or cells similar to viruses, bacteria, and amoeba.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Oh, what's that? The probe sanitizer was on leave before packaging and launch? Ah, well, maybe it'll grow up to be like it's parents...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why do we assume that life on other worlds would have the same requirements as life on earth?
We were either created for this world or evolved into what we are by it. Doesn't it make sense that life on other worlds would be fit for theirs in the same way?
Why is water so damn important? Couldn't life be based upon a different liquid than water? A different solid than carbon?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Perhaps it was your mom.
Or at least not as we know it. Here on earth, life is so all encompassing that there isn't a place we have gone that we haven't found evidence of life. It doesn't matter whether you go to the deepest ocean, or the hottest volcano, there are either living things, or obviously formerly living things. So either life on mars has not reached any sort of detectable level, or died out long ago.
OTOH, personally I believe that life was created on earth and not elsewhere, but I believe that it is our responsibility to explore to build and to discover.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
What difference does it make if there's some bacteria or whatever on Mars? How does this affect life on Earth? I'm all for space exploration and pure science.. but I'd spend my dollars on getting humans to Mars rather than finding out whether there are bacteria there.
If life had existed in the presumable oceans on Mars back in the day, then it is possible that there is life in the water vapor in the atmosphere (just as there is life in our atmosphere). Of course, I'm not sure that there is much (any?) water in the atmosphere on Mars. Furthermore, Mars didn't overheat, and there is not as much water in the polar ice caps as we had expected. To me this indicated that most of the water must have gone down below the surface; it could have easily brought microbial life down with it, as Earth has much microbial life beneath the earth.
...were known to be flawed, before the rockets were ever launched. Many of the tests that would have been conclusive (such as those produced by Dr Carl Sagan) were abandoned, due to budget constraints, political concerns (finding life would have made it much harder for Congress to keep slashing NASA's budget) and the greater need to impress the mass media than the scientific community.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm really hoping that they land near that "face" on Mars that the Weekly World News always shows. ;-)
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
First off, I had heard about some of the semi-positive results of some of the Nasa experiments that were ignored, don't have a reference.
But I remember a letter sent my some professional gadfly comic...I want to say Joe Bob Briggs but I don't think that's it...who wrote to NASA saying something along the lines of "So you burnt up this soil sample to check for signs of life on Mars? That could only prove that there WAS life on Mars...you just killed it!"
(Sorry for the lack of references, the book I got that from is at home)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
-Laz
Life on Mars
First off, the article is worth the read. They are going to do a pile of cool things, and with the PAW robotic arm, they'll be very adaptive based on what they discover. Tres' cool.
But I must object to the following:
Clearly, if the British lander does find life on Mars, a scientific symposium will have to be convened to sort out who may have discovered it first: NASA or ESA.
Must we? Could we for once view science as the continuous stretch of micro-advances that it really is? Whether it's flight, or the TV, or beer the credit for doing it "first" seems to overwelm the real credit that I will lavish on the Brits at the end of the mission, and that is: the credit for doing it well.
yeah!
if there's anything more important than my ego, i want it found and shot! now!
-r
Honestly, NASA will probably never learn that - it's impossible to learn such a negative. For instance, it's impossible to 'learn' that there is no God - you cannot scientifically disprove God's existence.
On that same token, it's impossible for NASA to 'learn' that there is no life outside of Earth until it has visited all of the other planets throughout the Universe.
So, no, NASA will never learn that there is no life outside our planet - but in their quest, they will probably learn many other things (perhaps even useful ones).
Nice way to justify a multi-million dollar project. But I think a conspiracy angle would have been more effective. Maybe how the government is covering up a bunch of photos taken of a martian Marti-Gras party. Of course, part of the mission prep would be to test how much martians can drink before they get drunk! Where can I get a test subject?
I bet you'll have a tough time determining if it is life or not when a Martian comes and blasts your ass with his ray gun. I'm sure that categorizing the little green man will be a real dilema for you.
Umm, I believe we have already proven that life exists in the void of space. IIRC, wasn't MIR 'infected' (yes, it was a bad case, from what I heard) with a type of mold that wasn't terrestrial to our planet?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
You're probably referring to one of the "bugs" that made MS push out NT4 sp6 ;)
-r
That is, the Brits and everyone else in the European Space Agency.
hahahahahahaha oh man hahahahaha you made an anti-M$ joke on slashdot! hahahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahah fuck you're my hero hahahahahahaha
Mold? Yes. Alien mold? No.
Do we always have to scream "FIRST!"?
Only if it's followed by "POST!"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
WHY NOT?!!!!
Because it would shake our religious and moral philosphies to their very core! Because, everything we believe in would be proven wrong!! What's wrong with you? Lord, man, I'm shaking just thinking about it.
Oh, I thought you said wifes in bars.
never mind
Best Windows Freeware
just as long as they find something. I would dearly love the idea that there's something else out there and that we're not it, because if we were it that would truly suck.
Didn't Val Kilmer et al. visit Mars just a few years ago? As I recall, they found that Mars has a breathable atmosphere and little bug thingies living there. Why don't we explore other uncharted areas, like the Gamma quadrant?
In Canada, we don't fancy things like socks
I read a book by Stuart Kauffman (hope I spelt that right). He said he was asked by NASA to help design probes to send to Mars to look for life. He told them not to bother, and his reasoning was:
All life takes in energy and matter from the environment, extracts energy, and produces waste. This process causes chemical imbalences in the atmosphere. Therefore to test for the presence of life, you only need to determine whether the atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium. Mars' atmosphere is, and has been for many millions of years.
Apparently this line of reasoning upset NASA, because they wanted to go to Mars, so they made their probes without his help, and when they arrived on Mars, found no traces of current life.
If they send more probes, they could very well find evidence of past life, but there is nothing going on there at the moment.
However I remember reading a story a while ago on Slashdot about how the atmosphere of Venus is operating far from chemical equilibrium, and that there may be some primitive life in the 400 degree acid in the atmosphere. Maybe someone should pay more attention to Venus...
What would lead you to that belief? All life needs to exist is the right materials, many of them quite plentiful in the universe; the right conditions, which Mars might not have had, but which many other places in the universe probably did; and enough time to get things done, again, Mars might not have provided.
As it is we have only looked at nine planets out of the possible trillions in the universe. How can we say that life has only existed here? Sure, we can not say for certain that life has or does exist elsewhere, but that's more a lack of evidence than proof.
And just looking at the pervasive nature of life, the fact that it will live anywhere it can makes me believe that it exists elsewhere if conditions allow.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
- Water is highly polar, and therefore has the ability to dissolve ions. Without ions, complex chemistry could not take place.
- Water is liquid at a "reasonable" temperature, meaning water in liquid form is not hot enough to destroy most complex molecules.
- The density of ice is slightly less than that of water, so ice floats on top of water. This is vital, because it allows bodies of water to form a frozen cover which protects against further freezing. This is not common among substances.
- Water blocks ultraviolet light, which would otherwise destroy fragile molecules and organisms.
- Water has a very high specific heat, making it ideal for carrying out chemical reactions -- exothermic reactions can dump their heat into the water, and endothermic reactions can draw their heat from the water. This allows energetic reactions to occur without raising the temperature too high.
Basically, water is a very unusual substance with many favorable properties, and it's likely that life will take advantage of water, if it is present.That's not to say that life cannot exist without water, but it certainly makes life much more plausible.
As for non-carbon-based lifeforms, people have been pondering that for decades. Carbon is interesting because it can bond with itself pretty much ad infinitum, forming complicated structures. It also combines readily with oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulfur, the halogens, and a host of other elements. Complex life based on some non-carbon element would have to have the ability to form long chains of atoms, branching structures, and structured which curl up into specific shapes (i.e. proteins and enzymes). A carbon-silicon combo might work.
Friends, I have never been able to figure out why so many allegedly educated Americans have had the wool so completely pulled over their eyes when it comes to things such as "extraterrestrial planets" such as Mars. Other than the ridiculously amateurish "photographs" of Mars that leftist scientists have fabricated using their citrus-colored iMacs, there is no -- repeat, no evidence that such a planet actually exists.
I am an astronomer myself, and I can tell you from personal experience that there are lots of different stars in the sky. There are stars of many different sizes; some stars are very large. some stars are very small, and there are many in between. And these stars are of many different colors; some of them are yellow, some of them are blue, some of them are green, and yes, some of them are red. So tell me: When leftists look through their telescopes and see what is plainly a large red star, what possible motivation do they have to claim that it's a "planet?" Furthermore, why would they go so far as to claim that such planet harbors, or once harbored, life?
First and foremost, they make this claim because it is difficult to disprove. "There was once life on Mars!" they say, and the general public swoons over this "important finding" because they are in no position to dispute it. Then, in a couple of years, they'll come out and say something like: "Our analysis of this meteor leads us to believe that the beings on Mars had an evolved civilization that included taxpayer-funded education and universal health care, liberal sex education standards, and widespread access to condoms." Once again, the gullible public will believe them. The leftists will claim that the "enlightened" Martians had everything from advanced genetic cloning programs to a One World Government. And then they'll ask the question: "Why don't we have these things here in America?"
I'll tell you why we don't have these things in America: because they don't work. There is no Mars. And if there is no Mars, then there can be no Martians. And if the Martians don't exist, then neither do any of their socialist government programs. Hint to the liberals: The next time you want to try to bamboozle the moral community, you'd better come up with evidence that's more concrete than a handful of red-tinted pictures of the Arizona desert and a couple of still shots from James Cameron's latest turkey of a "space sci-fi epic." I'm sorry to say that we're not quite as stupid as your strategy requires us to be.
I've posted this info before and I'll do it again. Furthermore, I do realize that this story is mainly about a European scientific experiment.
The Chief Scientist for Mars Exploration at NASA Headquarters is James Garvin. For those of you who bemoan the lack of jobs/future for CS majors, check out Jim's educational background. A degree is just a piece of paper. Knowledge, curiousity, and intelligence is something entirely different.
BTW, do anyone of you remember the panorama pictures of the Martian surface taken by Viking I? Jim manually classified every rock (yes every sticking rock!) in some of those pictures.
Ray Bradbury, CS Lewis, and Orson Welles were found hibernating under the polar ice cap.
All three apparently retreated off to the ice caps to hibernate after being bitterly disappointed at what they found on Mars; Welles didn't find anything to drink, Lewis didn't find God, and Bradbury was devastated over the lack of people with shiny coins for eyes.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
I mean, if rocks from Mars made it to the earth, then for sure some rocks made the trip the other way. Bacteria would probably survive something like that. They wouldn't necesarily grow, but still there would be life.
How about a BBC article
The fungi that did the damage, Novikova said, included members of the genera Aspergillus, Penicillium, and Cladesporium - all very common on Earth.
Davak
Bush would declare it an axis of evil & send some nukes over...
If we find evidence of past life on Mars it will mean that in one out of two known cases life on a planet has gone (pretty much, at least) extinct. I would hope that the Gaia hypothesis is right, and that a living planet's biosphere really is self-regulating and not succeptable to such catastophic failure.
It certainly woulnd't the end of the Gaia Hypothesis-it might be that loss of atmosphere on a low G world is one of the few things life can't prevent-but it would certainly be a point against it.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
There is one universe in which life exists on mars, and one in which it doesn't, and one in which /. decided not to post this article and one in which I get modded up for this post (but probably not this one)...
click here
Barry DiGregorio wrote a great book discussing alternate ways to interpret the Viking results, "Mars the living planet". It presents the pro-mars-life view very clearly along with the lame NASA politics around which was formed the official declaration that Mars has no life.
Get them back for all the years they've been doing it to us!
there may be life on Mars
there may be life elsewhere in the universe
SARS
weapons of mass destruction
Columbia's breakup
vitamin supplements are good
vitamin supplements are bad
[insert Viagra mantra here]
Sure am glad I pulled the plug on media access.
Tired of information overload...please hand me the low-pass filter.
>> ...to test for the presence of life, you only need to determine whether the atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium...
What the hell does that mean?
Chemists, meteorologists, and others who actually know what they're talking about are invited to comment.
I Am Not A Chemist...thank God.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
It sounds like a quote from Zoidberg, hurray.
Life on Mars, why not.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Uhm, this was British made, and funded by Britain (like everything else in Europe) this is a project of the BSA ;) Not a non-existant ESA.
Don't say I didn't warn you!
Blacklists work pretty good for me. The MTA responsible for my email drops the connection from blacklisted IPs instead of accepting and segregating messages. And the few spams that do get through are forwarded to the "abuse" address of the netblock from which they came -- no repeat offenders for 2003 so far. I don't see what the big deal is, everyone just needs to do their part.
How many of you actually report the spam and how many of you cry and throw tantrums about the X number of spams they got today without doing anything about it?
This is from memory so forgive me if I miss a few details. Given any gasesous chemical mixture at a known mean temperature and pressure it is trivial to calculate the chemical equilibrium using Gibb's free energy calculations. We can easily determine the composition of Mar's atmosphere and thus know whether or not it is in chemical equilibrium.
I'm very skeptical as to whether such calculations could rule out the possibility of miniscule amounts of microbial life easily given such issues as temperature variations due to heating from the sun.
:%s/doubts/donuts/g
It was an easy two letter typo.
due to the fact we have sent things there. I know that anything that might have survived has not yet had time to spread, but you never know.
There are so many buggers here on earth, do we know for sure that our missions were clean?
Blogging because I can...
There better not be any Vogons.
Click here out of morbid curiousity.
The Science Channel had a good documentary on the moons of the solar system -- 95 Worlds and Counting. Basically, it's a lot more likely that we will find life on one of the moons (e.g. Europa).
The only other info I could find on the program on their website was the VHS they had on sale here.
Life was Created By Him on Earth because the Bible says so, thats why. No "proof" is needed.
Life on Mars? Why Not?
Well what if there is life on Mars from Earth? Lets suppose the probes sent to Mars had living cells on them when leaving this planet. They would almost have to had contained living cells since Earth is full of tiny single cell organisms; some of which do not use oxygen. Would it be possible for us to have caused contamination of Mars and there actually be living cells on Mars from ~30 years ago?
The NASA findings with the Viking missions were that there was no evidence for life on Mars. That doesn't mean that there wasn't any life, it just means they had no evidence for any. Big difference. NASA never stated unequivocally, "There is no life on Mars."
James Lovelock, one of the true ninja hacker lords, has suggested that of all planets in the solar system, only Earth looks like it harbors life, because only it has an atmosphere that is out of chemical equilibrium.
Lovelock, a atmospheric chemist and inventor who made his fortune on the ion-capture gas chromatography detector, is the author of the so-called Gaia Hypothesis. Romantic name aside, it's the idea that the presence of life alters a planet's environment to be more favorable to life. (The idea and name have been appropriated by eco-mystics who take it to mean that there actually is some sort of earth deity, but that's emphatically not what Lovelock is saying.)
On our planet, many atmospheric gases are grossly out of equilibrium. For instance, although the atmosphere is about one-fifth oxygen, there are detectable traces of methane, mostly from termites and "the farts of ruminants". If life were not continually renewing the methane, it would combine with the oxygen, and disappear in a few hours.
Of course, the presence of oxygen itself is an anomaly. It is so reactive that if it were not renewed by photosynthesis, it would bind with the copious free carbon lying about.
Lovelock gives many other examples in his excellent book, Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth. (He also mentions that the presence of fluorocarbons, like Freon, in the atmosphere is a clear sign, not just of life, but of intelligent life. Since you can determine atmospheric composition by spectrometry through a telescope, this gives a way to detect civilization if only you can image a planet hosting it.)
There's a clue in the simple appearance of the planets from space: compare the complex and constantly-changing appearance of the Earth's patchy clouds, liquid-water ocean, and of course its wildly varying landmasses (including snowcaps, yellow deserts, chlorphyll-green jungles, and seasonal temperate forests and grasslands), with the dead, relatively static appearance of any other planet in the system. Our nervous systems have life-detection circuits built in; honestly now, do you see any when you look at Mars?
The key is that Earth is alone in all the solar system in having a disequilibrium chemistry. This doesn't mean that there wasn't life elsewhere at one time; it may not even mean that there aren't small, isolated outposts that support some life, but not enough to control the entire planet. Certainly, life on Earth had to start that way.
Nevertheless, although there may indeed have been a time, early in its history, when life florished on Mars, it seems dead now.
In the wrong hands, sanity is a dangerous weapon.
Find the warmest and the most "livable" spot on the Mars, take some die hard plants from the Earth, drop them off there! If there's no life, let's bring it there already. By the time humans get there, they may get a tiny bit of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Seems to me if I was on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I'd have some satellites sent to Mars to photograph everything. Considering how resource hungry this administration is and how forward-thinking their military battle plans are, they should be identifying every valuable resource that might be easily tapped. I'm thinking they need to find as much gold as they can if they ever hope to defend our planet from those pesky metallic beings from the planet Mondas if they ever wake up...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Sorry but you are wrong. Proving or disproving the existence of life outside Earth can potentially be accomplished scientifically by mathematically modelling the processes that we know lead to its development and seeing if they hold true against a previously proven model of the universe. It may not be possible today to do this, but it may well be in the future. Proving or disproving the existence of God on the other hand is impossible because by definition it lives outside the known rules of the universe. Anytime someone comes up with something that disproves the existence of God (as defined in the Bible, for example) such as Evolution, the zealot religionists come up with illogical jabber like "intelligent design".
On that same token, it's impossible for NASA to 'learn' that there is no life outside of Earth until it has visited all of the other planets throughout the Universe.
Bad logic! At the first discovery of life on any planet, you would no longer need to search other planets to DISPROVE that 'there is no life outside of earth'. Think, man, THINK!
thought I would post this... since the subject reminded me of it...
Words and music by David Bowie
It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
For she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
It's on Amerika's tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
'Cause Lennon's on sale again
See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibeza to the Norfolk Broads
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
To my mother, my dog, and clowns
But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It's about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
The same stuff that makes fireflys flash and glowsticks work was supposed to be used to detect the presence of DNA on mars a while back. I don't remember the time frame but 10 years sounds about right.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
You make a good point, though it makes me think immediatly to the idea that SETI only searches a very specific and small fequency range because it's what we would/do use.
Granted there's more logic in expecting other life to evolve from water as we did, than other species using the same radio freq we do.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Chemical equilibrium means that the sustance in question (in this case the atmosphere) is not reacting with itself.
For example, if you have some acid and mix it with a metal, you get a reaction. That mix you have is not in equilibrium at the start. But after it reacts for a while, it will use up all it's potential energy, and stop reacting. It's then in chemical equilibrium.
Then I would take a testube of bakteria and spray it in the mars atmosphere ...then i would take measurements etc and claim my way to glory and of course kickstart a whole new alien industry...:D I dont see anything "BAD" in it :))
MARS Acute Respiratory Syndrome!
and remember, as you die from MARS, GNU Not UNIX!
On the other hand, the sandworms were the source of spice, a substance that had pharmacological activity in humans. I am hard pressed that a silicon or silicon-carbon based chemical would be useful as a drug.
A couple things against Lovelock's ideas. Didn't the Earth have a reducing atmosphere for billions of years until "blue-green algae" (cyanobacteria) got a toehold? Don't know about Antartica, but the extremophile organisms at thermal ocean vents and in hot springs don't seem to be regressed evolution from more normal bacteria but seem to be a more primitive, ancient form of life -- the hot springs are perhaps closer to the early Earth and may have been where life started. Was life always in control of its environment from its most primitive stages, or did that kick in with the oxygen revolution?
Interesting, the article doesn't mention, but was any found on the outside? If it was, that's a pretty good example of life not needing water to go about its daily business :)
Terra Forming is Star Drek sci-fi. Obviously there will be no rapidly evolving "life" as we understand it on the present Mars.
If there are single celled organisms or even clustering goo, it will prove to be of little scientific interest. Even the genetics of these oganisms will be useless: UNLESS we find that these organisms contain code that closely resembles similar organisms on Earth!
Then the implications are that just maybe we are the Martians.
Mars exploration is crucial to our understanding of natural science. The benefit is employement for large numbers of brilliant, dedicated and hard working humans in fields other than defence!
JFK was right and not a bleading heart liberal.
To wean us of defence we need great scientific and engineering projects that span boarders.
Now that communism is creaking and China is slowly seeing the light, what is wrong with international space exploration. I believe common goals for humankind are a necessity if we are to survive. Even if these goals prove to be wrong they are still better than rabid scientific militarism.
Lets smoke the pipe of peace for real!
The alternative is big clouds of radioactive smoke.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Ingenous rationality from the nation that pioneered using pencils in space. (think about that statement a little more closely before you hit me with a salvo of "nasa used pencils too" posts)
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Article said it could affect earth...oh my god...it's the red weed all over again...oh my god, they're coming....ARRRRRGGGGHGHHHHH
" Past life on Mars is the only object of any rational exploration of the Red planet.
Terra Forming is Star Drek sci-fi. Obviously there will be no rapidly evolving "life" as we understand it on the present Mars."
Well, I think establishing humantity as a multi-planet species with long term survivability is rational and Mars is the place to do that.
As for terraforming, we could warm the planet by 10K in a matter of decades. This would release CO2 from the soil. CO2 as a greenhouse gas would continue the warming process, which would further accelerate the process, eventually warming the planet 50K in fifty years. This would also raise the pressure to levels where humans would need only breathing gear, not full pressure suits. This would also make building habitats much more simple, as they would no longer need to maintain a different pressure from the outside. In around a thousand years Mars could have a breathable atmosphere. I'm pulling this from Robert Zubrin's Entering Space. It's long term, but not bad for creating a second home for humanity. And with resources focused on terraforming, we might be able to do it even faster.
And no, what we will or will not find is not obvious.
"If there are single celled organisms or even clustering goo, it will prove to be of little scientific interest. Even the genetics of these oganisms will be useless: UNLESS we find that these organisms contain code that closely resembles similar organisms on Earth!
Then the implications are that just maybe we are the Martians."
It would be of HUGE interest. If we can find life on our next door neighbot, then intelligent life is almost certain to be out there. Unless we happen to be the first to reach that stage, my favorite unlikely theory. Finding life of any kind is the most important discovery ever.
And I absolutely agree that too many of our bright minds are eaten up by the military-industrial complex, though what light China is seeing I don't know.
It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired. - Robert Anson Heinlein