Slashdot Mirror
Ice Detected Underneath Mars' North Pole
TheSync writes "A Reuters/Yahoo story says University of Arizona and Russian scientists have detected water ice uniformly distributed in the soil of Mars' north polar regions. The amount of hydrogen detected indicates ice of 80% to 90% of soil volume. Data was used from the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey." It's worth noting that their study only detected large amounts of hydrogen; so much hydrogen that ice is figured to be the only form it could be in, although I kind of like the idea of Mars' pole covering a huge pocket of hydrogen gas.
Then again, if you were to use life on Earth as an example, you could argue that life can always persevere in the presence of water (from thermal vent-driven ecosystems devoid of energy from the sun, to environments that have been trapped under ice near the artic circle for a hundred years).
All we need to do now is send Schwarzenegger up there to turn on that ice melting machine.
Considering that Mars has permanent polar ice caps (the permanent part is water ice, there's a CO2 ice part that expands in the winter), this is hardly a surprise.
-- Alastair
However, this hydrogen is something that the next generation will get to use, not mine. We need to figure out if we still have what it takes to get to the Moon, when the Chinese try next year.
Why slashdot? Why not?
Oh...kay. Call me strange, I've never really considered a "big pocket of trapped hydrogen gas on Mars" much of a turn-on, but to each his own.
...
so when does the mad rush to build your own hydrogen farm on mars start? selling tickets on my spaceship! but seriously, now we have the possibility of being able to send a manned mission there, and then they can gather their own fuel for the way back! well, once we figure out that whole hydrogen fuel cell engine. . . or something. . .
This confirms my belief that Santa Claus could indeed be living on Mars.
Start the reactor!!!
Yup, we have known that the Martian poles freeze over seasonally. The dispute has been over whether or not the ice was composed of all CO2, largely of CO2 (like the Martian ice we have found elsewhere), or of the hydrogen variety.
We have plenty of water here, I read somewhere that like 60% of the earth's surface is water. Why do we need to get water from other planets? Looks like a waste of time to me.
We can also hypothesize that they discovered slushies millions of years before us, and that they would've given us a run for our money at the Winter Olympics.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
If they want to prove the voracity of their claim that copious amounts of hydrogen must be water, why don't they try this experiment on Earth. NASA did this with the Galileo space probe. It was equipped with some kind of spectrometer that was supposed to detect particular elements. When it was far enough away, they tested it on Earth to see if they'd get the readings they were expecting from other planets.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Don't be ridiculous, as we all know, Martians instantaneously combust in the presence of water.
I heard the same thing about 10 years ago... How is this report any different?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
But honestly, who cares? To have life, you
need earth, fire, and sky, too. They
obviously don't have earth, as we are on Earth,
and that is Mars. They can't have fire, as their
minimal sky doesn't have enough oxygen.
So they don't have the four elements necessary
for life. I'm just going to stay here and figure
out the first two digits of pi on my abacus.
In soviet russia... Ice on mars detects scientists.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Astronauts have again found ice on mars which scientists speculate could be evidence of life, just as they have on previous missions.
Dj
I think I has to be pure hydrogen.
We all know that it is a very light gas and would rise to the north pole... duh!
So now we have purified water, mineral water, distilled water, rain water, tap water, spring water, and now martian water. It's a Bobby Boucher dream come true.
Ok you all are so screwed!!
I just applied for a patent to collect all the hydrogen on mars.
I find it somewhat unlikely that a huge pocket of hydrogen might be underneath the surface, but there's a simple way to check. Just crash a probe into the planet. If Mars ruptures and starts lurching around the solar system like an untied balloon, the theory might have some merit.
This avenue of research should be explored as soon as possible. This is in keeping with my conviction that our scientific dollars should be spent in the most entertaining ways possible.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
They could pack Strom Thurmond in it until they're ready to bring him back from the dead!! /me watches karma wither away.
If you where on mars would you be able to detect life on Earth?
Mars has lots of ice?
Good, now we have a far place to stick that stupid Linux penguin!
Then again, if you were to use life on Earth as an example, you could argue that life can always persevere in the presence of water
not exactly true. actually, pretty far from true. life as we know it on earth does not exist on its own. life begets life, and so on - you end up with the tell-tale evidence of the existance of life: chemicals which react with eachother in abundance in the atmosphere. mars is chemically dead, meaning that all chemical reactions that could have taken place have.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...although I kind of like the idea of Mars' pole covering a huge pocket of hydrogen gas.
You need three things for combustion. Fuel, got that. Ignition source, sure. Oxygen, don't got that. Maybe you could process it with the CO2 in the atmosphere to make hydrocarbons, oxygen, or even alcohol, (for the astronauts of course) but that would require energy to produce and there wouldn't be enough oxygen to fully combust any of those products. Hydrogen alone isn't good for much. Maybe if you sent a factory over used solar power to generate stuff (which was part of somebody's plan to get to Mars...) it could be useful, but just hydrogen has limited usefulness. I doubt it would be worth shipping back to earth to fuel the hydrogen economy either unless we're looking for hydrogen prices like $100 per cubic meter, cubic foot, mole, or whatever. Yeah, that'll work...
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Earth has ice at its North pole, too...GOSH, the similarities!
Ice = Oxygen/Hydrogen
Oxygen/Hydrogen = rocket fuel
Rocket Fuel = launching point for further operations from the Martian surface... Also, it would make it unneccessary to haul water to and from mars (saves a lot of cost if we ever decide to inhabit the planet)
If we ever decide to go to mars, i hope to see some permanent settlement.. no use in going and coming back in 3 days
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
ya, if they do, they are one-up on the french.
Natural-Selection Be
An adaptation of the best scene in Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe to explain exactly what's going on here. Enjoy.
The telescope aperture opened.
"Hello?" said the man.
"Do you run the observatory?" said the planet Mars.
The man smiled at it.
"I try not to," he said. "Are you wet?"
The planet Mars looked at him in astonishment.
"Wet?" it cried. "Does it look as if I'm wet?"
"That's how it looks to me," said the man, "but how you feel about it might be an altogether different matter. If you feel a giant hydrogen pocket under each pole makes you dry, you'd better get some."
Hang on a sec while I go get my dart gun, with which I plan to resolve the issue that Mars is just another Hindenburg waiting to happen.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
Could it be the original Russian water substitute that they are detecting, Vodka?
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
HOCKEY!
And Canada will be happy to represent Earth in the Solar Cup Hockey championships.
I wonder if Don Cherry will whine as much about the Martian way to play as he tends to do about Europe?
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
...detected water ice uniformly distributed in the soil of Mars' north polar regions. The amount of hydrogen detected indicates ice of 80% to 90% of soil volume. Who really cares. Even with ice deep in Mars' polar region, it doesn't mean anything. We already know there is ice there. And think about how difficult it would be to get at it if we needed it for a future exploration mission. Sounds like too much hype for too little a discovery.
It can't be hydrogen gas trapped beneath the polar caps. Molecules don't get much smaller or lighter than H2, and it surely would have wormed its way through any polar layer and into the atmosphere by now. And I can't imagine that it would be cold enough for the hydrogen to be in liquid form, so that pretty much leaves water as the most likely candidate.
Note that IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), so no flames please for anything I might have overlooked.
You need ice to make a martini. Let's go to Mars, get drunk, and screw! a new power supply in. What?
Isn't it funny that you are saying that you need evidence to back up a principle? I could make up a whole bunch of "principles", and then call everyone else "doubters" and, heck, I could publish a public education textbook.
Martian scientists have just found definite proof of solid ice on the poles of earth, now bringing up the possibility of life. A scientists was quoted as saying "This is exciting news, if earth has solid ice, then it is possible that ice burrowing intellegent lifeforms such as ourself. We always new earth had liquid water but everyone knows it is impossible to life in melted ice, or even in a gas atmosphere."
They found the ice I planted...soon they'll find the lost civilization, then the obilesk on europa, and then unlock the mysteries of artificial intelligence. Creating a new super race of robots that will wage war on them and enclose them in a reality emulating matrix to power their metal bodies. Yes...it's all coming together nicely...muhah hah hah
Wass all this hogwash 'bout InSync and Russians and Mars waterbeds?? Soil in my pockets?
You trying to con me mista. Yes sir.
You liable to steal the heat of a hot plate... the grease off a biscuit.
Mama didn't raise no fool!
While going into space on top of a roman candle is a horrible inefficent way of doing things, it's the technology we master today. What technology we master when we are setting up a launchfacility on Mars we can only speculate about, but lets assume that the elsewheredrive isn't yet avilable and we have to make do with LH and LOX (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen).
However, it'll cost far less, energywise, to launch something from Mars than from the earth. Mars has a escape velocity of just 5.03 km/s^2, compared to earths 11.19 km/s^2. And as we all know that Ek = m*v^2, the energy needed to deliver something into interplanitary space from Mars will be roughtly 1/5th of what it'll cost us to launch it from the surface of the earth (launching from the moon will cost under 1/20th of launching from the earth - but there is no readily avilable supply of water on the moon as far as I know).
Having seen that there is indeed some sence in building and launching oldfashion chemical rockets from the surface of the red planet, lets consider just how to split the water into oxygen and hydrogen, before we compress/freeze it. This takes, as pointed out, a whole lot of energy. Fortunatly however, bang smack in the middle of our solar system we got a gigantic nuclear furnace pumping out more energy than even the western civilisation can waste. True, Mars is somewhat farther from the earth, and the Solar irradiance is just 589.2 W/m^2 (or about 43.1% of earths), but Mars contains large open deserts and has less problems with clouds than earth do. Large solar farms should solve the problem, and I'm fairly sure that Mars itself can provide the necesary materials to construct them.
All information about Mars in this reply is taken from Nasa's Mars Fact Sheet.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster ... nevermind.
As of 10/06/03, I hate COBOL developers.
It is through electrodynamism and these pockets of gas that the Martians would hurl their cylinders toward our Earth! We should be steadfast in our study of Mars, for surely they are studying us just as intently; Perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
- I am made of meat.
You choose to believe creationism until proven wrong. The only problem with that is it is, and will always be, impossible to prove creationism wrong. I could say I choose to believe Japanese speaking kangaroo's with badass superpowers live in black holes and I will continue to believe this until proven wrong. It's a pretty safe statement considering it's impossible to prove wrong. I am not saying creationism *is* wrong or you and others should not believe it, but I think the statement "until proven wrong" is illogical. I am not an athiest like many evolutionists, and I am also not monotheistic like most creationists. I like to think of the universe and "god" in monistic terms, that is existence as a whole is "god", not some guy on a cloud. From this point of view, IMHO, evolution is a form of creation, and in my simple mind, makes the evolution and creation debate kind of silly. To come back on track though, belief in something that cannot be proven wrong because it hasn't been proven wrong yet is not a method of choosing beliefs I would recommend to you or anyone unfortunate enough to read what I have to say.
Beware blue cats moving at
Mars' polar cap covering a pocket of hydrogen gas. This is a potentially explosive situation! :-/
If life simular to that on Earth were found on Mars, it wouldn't prove anything, but would be strong evidence that one of two things happend: 1. Life started somewhere, and moved between planets (metiors or viking spacecraft); or 2. As you suggest, life in both places came to be for the same reason. Either multi-celled organisms "adapted" to life on Mars, or God created multi-celled organisms on Mars -- I don't think your theoretical discovery would favor either of those theories over the other.
I'm curious why you suppose that a creationist (like myself) would have a problem with creation happening in more than one place? If God created Mars and Earth (and every thing else that is not "formless and void") and God created life on Earth, then why would it be hard for Him to create life on Mars? (or anywhere else?)
If you begin with the assumption that you can explain the universe without any supernatual intervention, then evolutionary theory fits most of the data pretty well (better than anything else.) If you don't begin with that assumption, and also have "evidence of things unseen" (which, by neccesity, is unscientific) then the origins question becomes a theological question, rather than a scientific one. If you want to know the truth, I think you need to consider both, and that is going to make the question harder.
While Empedocles was close, certainly you must concede that it is Talur who presents the more adequate account!
The four elements are:
- rock
- fire
- sky
- water
[whisper]that was a great episode by the way
you haven't played Sim Earth? I mean seriously, you gotta terraform that shit.. geeze, and i thought you people were smart.
Sig not found.
the real question is: is it strawberry or plain vanilla?
Visit Antarctica and see how easy it is to detect life at random points on the continent. Feel free to do it as we have done on Mars - by dropping one life-oriented chemical test on a random point, and by taking pictures from orbit.
And two-up on the Texans!
I patented the idea of ice under the Martian poles years ago.
Now all your Mars base are belong to me.
"Now only for the Gin, Tonic and Slice of Lemon", say Scientists...
Your comment was read and understood, but unfortunately I feel you may have been blinded to truth by ignorance, I pitty you.
,1910's, 1940's,50's,60's,and 70's for the rights you so easily cast aside. Your statements betray their great cause! FREEDOM
The quest for knowledge about outer space is one of the greatest goals we have as humans, it can and God willing, will unite and enoble us as a people.
Many brave Americans died fighting in the 1770's, 1860's
The very ideas that you expressed, were used as propaganda by Hitler during the 1920's in Pre-Nazi Germany. The first casualties of the second world war were the German intelligencia, and truth.
If the American Constitution means anything it is freedom of thought, with real social democracy for and by a free diverse people.
Without strong defence of these fundimental values advancement in the sciences, art, religion, literature and all that is noble is not possible.
These are two old comments that I made about the inportance of Mars exploration.
please read;
'why even bother?' ( a post ) from an article about the Chinese moon shot.
"mining materials from the moon is going to be more expensive than raiding Western Russia and mining in Siberia then shipping it back to China.
It's expensive to live there, to ship people there, and to experiment there (what to experiment on I will never know).
I can't see a financial justification to use it as a start point for Mars missions when there is nothing of use on Mars (even if there is water and "life").
Let's have our people suffer and wither away in the wastelands of undeveloped China and
build a moon base!"
My response to the post
Give me an economic justification for war, and then I might go along with your statement. The first casualties of war are usually not modern American economic theorists, though this might be a good thing.
Bullshit to your economics. Give us an economic explanation of the pyramids all around the world or European middle age cathedrals.
There is every economic justification for non-productive space exploration, it would employ millions and do no harm. Can we really justify our so-called western lifestyle? (I gag when I use the canned, mindless advertising word lifestyle)
The biggest burden on our technical, social, scientific and economic advancement in the West is our obsession and reliance on the personal automobile. It is outdated and needs replacement. It was important but like the horse it fouls our streets and costs us far too much in resources.
The Chinese have been spared the automobile obsession by economic necessity. As they open their society and discover their true value as a people, they will over take the West in all fields of scientific, technical and human social endeavour within the next decade.
As the first people to use fireworks in a non-destructive way, maybe that is what they have in mind. When you set off a nuclear explosion 40 or 50 thousand miles out in space all you get is one hell of a big flash. It is the use of nuclear technology within our atmosphere that is the real cause for concern.
And
The Reason for Going to Mars
There was flowing water on Mars. Was there once an atmosphere similar to Earth? These questions beg definitive answers. The existence of some form of clustering goo with DNA would be the greatest scientific discovery of all time.
If some form of life were found on Mars then the genetic study of that life would be crucial to our understanding of life, at least within our Solar System. There is the real possibility that life on Earth is genetically linked to something greater than Terra genesis.
Much of our common legends state exactly this possibility (Greek legends of Gods, Assyrian legends). These legends are so powerful that they became religions.
In short discovering that life originated off world would be the great
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Eeeexcellent...
Eeeeeexcellent!
I saw a documentary on this once on television. A geologist by the name of Dr. Schwarz N Edgar discovered the undergound ice reserves. He also discovered an alien contraption that melts the ice to create a Martian atmopshere but it appeared never to be used. Then he got chased by some mutants, pressed the start button and got ejected to the planet's surface where he took rather a long time to not die only to be saved by the new atmosphere.
Powered by onion juice.
You bastards got me again!
...that they haven't discovered all the people put on Mars by Alternative 3... ;)
Karma: Good. I'm hoping in the same way as pizza is 'good'...
I can see it all now, NASA will be attending/testifying at an appropriation hearing, and Sean O'Keefe will take a sip of water and start in after being introduced to the corporate employees representing their states:
"Good morning, I'm proud to be speaking with you today about the prescense of WMD on the surface of Mars--"
He'll pause a little while as a furuor erupts in the chamber.
"As I was saying, we have significant reason to believe that the polar regions of Mars holds an incredible volume of WMD, and that unless we're the first to plant out flag and setup a permanent base there, we stand to loose out on a significant opportunty now and in the future."
A flabbergasted senator, having just woken up to hear the acronym will suddenly have a flashback and decide to "make a difference".
"Is there any evidence that WMD's actually do exist, or is this more poorly wish-for evidence?"
"No sir, " O'Keefe continues a bit hesitantly, "we've analyzed the data and my people assure me that Martian WMD does exist, and in sufficient quantities--"
"Martian WMD? Holy Crap! Since when did the Martians get WMD?"
O'keefe shakes his head and holds up a hand to draw attention.
"Sir, I'm not sure--"
"Goddamn it? I asked when did this come to light? I mean, we haven't found it in the last three regimes we rolled and yet you're saying that the Martians are in on this? How much are you asking for?"
O'Keefe, for a brief moment runs through a thought experiment where he envisions the United States as a juggernaut of bold exploration, funded with the same passion that drove recent wars, the cold war, and brought sweeping innovations and discoveries decades ago. It would get presidents elected, generals promoted, and foster the complete and total government control of Space. It's a glorious scheme, but within a few heartbeats he realizes its just a dream.
"I'm sorry senator, but we're discussing Water, Massively Dispersed, within the sediment of the Martian polar regions. I apologize for the confusion. Apparently I'm using a term we were joking about earlier."
Even though the NASA chairman said it with a straight face, the senator feels like a complete fool.
"Ok, sorry about that, so you're asking for more funding for _another_ Mars mission?" The senator asks, unaware that he's scowling.
Two hours later O'Keefe will feel lucky to get out of comittee with enough funding to keep the lights on. Let's hear it for more wasted efforts from the government sector.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
The real surprise is not that there is ice there, but the fact that the presence of ice implies the possible presence of something more significant:
Scotch.
"from the water-water-everywhere dept."
:)
sounds like Samuel Taylor Coleridge quoted by Iron Maiden in "The rhyme of the ancient mariner"...
What do I earn ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
OK, so then the real question is: how do you get the satellites and spaceships off the earth?
I think your idea is interesting, but unless you move all construction facilities, the sub-contractors, the mining for raw materials, and the 1 Mio+ people working for them to Mars as well, you always have the problem how you bring your satellite/spaceship to the mars in the first place.
I'm sorry, this IS cool and interesting and all, but the hangup is that there is nothing cool to launch from Mars. You would not only have to build a factory to build rockets and fuel, but an entire semiconductor fab and satellite assembly system... obviously bringing satellites FROM earth to launch on Mars would defeat the purpose of launching from Mars altogether, since you would have to then escape 2 gravitational systems - Earth and Mars... While a good point, I don't see us using Mars as a launching point before we have a manned installation on Mars so as to oversee any Mars-based satellite construction/launch...
visit earth2willi.com!
Nope, it was that guy from Logans Run. He did it. Damn saboteur.
Does this mean I can set up a moisture vaporator farm on mars? (or was it binary loadlifters? But first I was going to Tashi station to pick up some power converters...)
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
Great. A huge pocket of gas, deep within the bowels of Mars. Don't light a match.
..Firing off a giant pocket of hydrogen gas on another planet this Fourth of July!
That "gigantic nuclear furnace" sounds like a disaster waiting to happen... I don't think we should use nuclear energy in a project for the betterment of humanity such as this.
We have to nuke it from orbit (the north pole). It's the only way to be sure.
Logic dictates that if it should make sence to plan on launching any sort of craft from Mars, they would have to be built localy - something which I could, and maybe should, have pointed out more clearly. I did point out that the solar-arrays could be made by local materials, but . I'm not suggesting that launching from Mars is something we'll do next year, but when humanity grows up enought to not just colonize our neighbours in space but consider interplantary and interstellar missions it would make sence to launch from Mars - if we indeed launch for the surface of a planet in the first place and not from a spacestation.
But for starters, they can use this idea to refuel the "return to earth" vehicle... Off course, there will be little or no time building massive solar arrays on the first few manned missions, but nucular power can be utilised.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Remember the poor Mars Polar Lander? Thing crashed and mission failed miserably. Live and on the Internet three years ago.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Now we need Arnold to switch on the ancient alien technology and make enough oxygen for the planet!
Just one kind mostly: geosynchronous, and with bootstrapping spools of diamondoid cable; then you don't need to waste so much energy on chemical rockets all the time.
--
Power to the Peaceful
On the other hand, the atmosphere is thinner would lead to less loss due to defraction. Plus, it may be easier to build solar concentrators in the reduced gravity (maybe even inflatable structures?).
science is a religion
I've read several papers by Professor Bradbury and they all unequivocally supply proof for, not just water, but intelligent life on mars.
Where's all the smart people I keep hearing hang out at slashdot? Jeez.
Yo, VIP, Let's kick it! Ice Ice Baby Martian Ice Ice Baby All right stop Collaborate and listen Ice is back with my brand new invention Something grabs a hold of me tightly Then I flow that a harpoon daily and nightly Will it ever stop? Yo--I don't know Turn off the lights and I'll glow To the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal Light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle. Dance Bum rush the speaker that booms I'm killin your brain like a poisonous mushroom Deadly, when I play a dope melody Anything less that the best is a felony Love it or leave it You better gain way You better hit bull's eye The kid dont play If there was a problem Yo, I'll solve it Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it Ice Ice Baby Martian (4X) Now that the party is jumping With the bass kicked in, the Vegas are pumpin' Quick to the point, to the point no faking I'm cooking MC's like a pound of bacon Burning them if they're not quick and nimble I go crazy when I hear a cymbal And a hi hat with a souped up tempo I'm on a roll and it's time to go solo Rollin in my 5.0 With my ragtop down so my hair can blow The girlies on standby Waving just to say HI Did you stop? No--I just drove by Kept on pursuing to the next stop I busted a left and I'm heading to the next block That block was dead Yo--so I continued to A1A Beachfront Ave. Girls were hot wearing less than bikinis Rockman lovers driving Lamborghinis Jealous 'cause I'm out getting mine Shay with a guage and Martian with a nine Reading for the chumps on the wall The Chumps are acting ill because they're so full of eight balls Gunshots ranged out like a bell I grabbed my nine-- All I heard were shells Fallin on the concrete real fast Jumped in my car, slammed on the gas Bumper to bumper the avenue's packed I'm tryin to get away before the jackers jacke Police on the scene You know what I mean They passed me up, confronted all the dope fiends If there was a problem Yo, I'll solve it Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it Ice Ice Baby martian (4X) Take heed, 'caese I'm a lyrical poet Miami's on the scene just in case you didn't know it My town, that created all the bass sound Enough to shake and kick holes in the ground 'Cause my style's like a chemical spill Feasible rhymes that you can vision and feel Conducted and formed This is a hell of a concept We make it hype and you want to step with this Shay palays on the fade, slice it like a ninja Cut like a razor blade so fast Other DJ's say, "Damn" If my rhyme was a drug I'd sell it by the gram Keep my composure when it's time to get loose Magnetized by the mic while I kick my juice If there was a problem Yo--I'll solve it! Check out the hook while Deshay revolves it. Ice Ice Baby Martian (4X) Yo man--let's get out of here! Word to your mother! Ice Ice baby Too Cold Ice Ice baby Too Cold Too cold (3X)
How ya like dat?
Patience my child. Patience.
that modern medicine is once again using leeches and maggots for treating some ailments. And I don't think we ever really stopped drilling holes in people's heads (though we don't do it to release demons anymore, we do it to release presure on the brain)
It actually would make a lot more sense if this were a hydrocarbon and not water. Ever read Thomas Gold's theory about the deep hot biosphere? I bet Mars is dripping with oil, but the petroleum industry would rather you not know that...
They don't have a pretty girl with orange hair, or Bruce Willis either.
Start the reactor, Quaid!!!
The last I read, one of the reasons Mars is in its present state is because it lacks sufficient mass to retain an atmosphere that will allow greenhouse warming.
Why then is the idea of terraforming Mars even considered? If we could generate a significant volume of CO2 into the atmosphere, won't alot of it either escape to space, or freeze? Mars is not a balmy place, given that it is about 1.5 times further from the sun than the earth. Given that is also almost half the radius of earth and an order of magnitude less in mass, is it really practical to attempt to terraform the place.
If a warming atmosphere were created, how warm would it get? There would certainly be far less sunlight than an arctic spring, with the suns energy significantly lessened from the increased distance. Would we not merely have a chilly, mostly lifeless planet? I doubt that a terraformed Mars could support much more than hardy steppe grasses, it would almost certainly be too cold for most animals and aquatic life.
Someone please educate me.
Everyone knows there is oxygen on Mars. All we need do is defeat Cohaagen and release it. Or was that what I did on vacation last year?
In otherwords...make a wormhole?
Keep in mind that water ice would have a FAR greater hydrogen density than hydrogen gas. I don't know enough to do the math, but hydrogen gas is probably off the table.
(I know the original comment was a joke.)
This Wired article points out the fact that, even during the middle ages, Christian scholars found that extraterrestrial life would not seriously challenge their faith. You can bet these guys weren't big advocates of evolution, either.
There was no concept of Scientific Evolution before the 19th Century.
I'll also mention that the Pope is an evolutionist, also noted in the article, although he almost certainly believes in creationism, as well.
You'd be quite wrong.
I don't know why people confuse the bizarre anti-rational, anti-evolutionary beliefs of a few nutty Fundamentalists from the US Bible Belt with the beliefs of Christians around the world.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Relativity is only a Theory, not scientific law. There is no proof that things cannot travel faster than "c", only mathematical implications that they cannot.
Water Water Everywhere But Not A Drop To Drink.
Anyone besides me getting sick of these "There's water on Mars!" Oh wait "There's no water on Mars!" stories?
Picky perhaps, but escape velocities are measured in km/s not km/s^2 (they are just speeds, not accelerations...)
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
Now we know for sure that there is a location for Gamete!
This is AWESOME!!!
:D
So now we don't have to carry hydrogen to Mars in order to make methane to power the rockets! This lowers the weight of the Mars Direct mission considerably, meaning more missions or more capabilities per mission (or more people). How cool will this be?
Now all we have to do is get those doofs at NASA off their asses and onto greater things.
Happy day.
I heard an interesting argument a few months back. I don't have a web source for it though, but this is the gist of it. Scientists can measure the shrinkage of the sun, so much per year, etc. Working backwards from that, it was only some few thousands of years (10 + - ) ago that the Sun would have been too large (with the resulting too high of radiation and heat, etc) to allow life to exist on the earth. I'd like to find out some of the math and references for that if anyone here knows of any, pro or con, I don't care. It's certainly one of the more unusual but perhaps checkable claims I have heard in this debate.
Yawn !
So they're 'fessing up to water on Mars. Oh my !
What's next ? Microorganisms in valley caves ? Or near to underground thermal spots ? Gigantic flow-tunnels near extinct volcanoes ?
"And now, for something completely different !... "
Last year, I was turned onto a book titled Rare Earth that proposes that bacterial life may be extremely abundant in the universe, but the factors that led to the evolution of higher life on Earth is a series of incredibly uncommon events.
It's a great read, especially if you, like me, have not been following the advances in Evolutionary Biology of the last 10 years.
I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars day before yesterday, and the first thing that came to mind when I read this news is that it's just SO obvious -- EVERYONE knows there's tons of water on Mars!
Talk about getting caught up in the story...
/Nanoox
I have my head stuck in the sand over the issue of the preview button!
Politics is derived from two words - poly, meaning many, and tics, meaning small blood-sucking insects.
Santa Claus DID conquer the martians!
All this talk about Ice on Mars. Now if they found a trapdoor, THAT'd be something!
I agree - first steps, not necessarily in this order, should be moon, mars, asteroids, and the moons of other worlds.
Once enough people get used to living in our solar system, all you gotta do is build a couple of big, honkin' ships to last ~ 20 years (that can travel at least 1/4 the speed of light) and carry enough supplies to start an asteroid colony or two. Then send a ship or two to the nearest star system (less than 20 years away at 1/4 the speed of light). There may not be habitable planets, but there's bound to be plenty of rocks to build into. Once begun, they can just use the resources in the system. By the time we can build such ships we'll certainly be adept at using interplanetary resources.
I think in a few more hundred years we could have human outposts in at least 1, if not 2 or 3 nearby solar systems. Those outposts will develop and branch out again after a while... We're still a young species, and we have the advantage of being able to plan ahead farther than any other species on Earth! I think we can forestall our extinction a bit, and without too much further advancement in our current technology, if we somehow become unable to advance far beyond where we ar now...
Cowboy Neal, with you, everything is gas. -Timon
Come on, I had to do it.
It is interesting, however. I get the feeling, though, that the US won't be leading space exploration any time in the next decade or so.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Now how about finding me some vermouth, gin, and an Olive?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
How do they detect hydrogen? It's not hot so it is not giving off any 'spectal lines' or anything. It's just sitting there cold as ice..
Eat at Joe's.
If life was pervasive on mars, we should have seen at least a few fossils by now. I was canoeing on a river a few weeks ago, every time I stopped to camp I found a fossil in every third rock I turned over. I do think there were life forms there, maybe similar to early life on earth. Life on mars may not have been as abundant as on earth, maybe it was restricted to a few 'fertile crescents' around waterways (if indeed any existed).
If oxygen were somehow leeched out of our polar ice caps, would giant frozen hydrogen deposits be left behind? Just grasping at straws here, there may not have been that much H20 on mars, if any.
TallGreen CMS hosting
I predict Martian bacteria will be similar to Terran bacteria, because they come from the same source- either Earth or Mars. On the average, there may be a meteor impact energetic enough to launch Mars rocks to Earth and vice-versa every hundred million years. (Physics & the asteroid belt favors more frequent Mars releases.) Fifteen Mars rocks have been found on Earth so far- probably many more have arrived in the eons. And these appear pretty young- less than a few tens of millions of years since impact.
Rock is a great insulator. Fresh meteorites are cold inside. At least 45% of the shuttle Columbia has been found in Texas, despite the rentry stress, including intact video tapes, worms, and computer disks.
The Martian surface may have stablized faster than the Earth after these planets formed. So life may have arisen their first, then seeded Earth via meteors. Life has been more abundant on Earth, so may have seeded Mars.
Terran life has been found in all kinds in extreme conditions. Its found in superheated geysers- above the 100 degrees centigrade. Its been found at the base of millions of years old glaciers in Antarctica. Its been found in the ice itself. Its been found floating on dust ten miles up in the atmosphere. Its been found in every deep drilling hole its been looked for, up to eight miles deep into the earth.
According to Southpark, the Mormon religion is the only one that will get you into heaven. You might have something here chief.
NEWS FLASH:
Under the huge sheets of frozen ice at the NORTH POLE the blazingly brilliant scientists at NASA have found more ice.
NASA Scientist: Who would of thought there would be ice at the North Pole? Let alone MORE ice under that? Wow! This is an incredible scientific acheivement.
this story is developing...
In other news burnt, charred and otherwise blackened rocks have been found to exist on the sun side of Mercury, developing...
>>Micro-evolution is generally well proven and
>>understood, however there is very little supporting
>>evidence for macro-evolution.
Micro-walking is generally well proven and
understood. You walk from the room to the train or to a car. even all the way down the street. However there is very little supporting evidence for macro-walking. I've never seen anyone walk hundreds, much less thousands of miles at once, so it couldn't have happened.
(with apologies to the orignal guy who posted "micro-walking" the last time a creationalist nut was around)
Haha.
I knew someone was going to do that!
YHBT. Sucka.
That was very well put.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
They're in my basement.
Here I sit,
Rectum a-flexin',
Giving birth to another Texan.
A) you assume I'm being 100% serious.
B) you assume our present technology and knowledge about the universe will not progress.
I stand by my original post. We'll break out of this solar system within the next 1000 years, and when we do it will seem simpler to us than we can imagine now.
The poster you're responding to is correct in this case, although your reasoning is valid in the general case. The problem is not just that we're dealing with a sample size of one inhabitable world. We're also dealing with a set that has been pre-selected to contain only those universes that contain intelligent life. That is to say, we can draw no conclusion* about the likelihood of life evolving on any given planet from the fact that we're here, since we can only ask the question if we're in a world where life evolved. We're filtering our set ahead of time. Now, if you have TWO worlds that have spawned life, you've got something to go on. If we know of one potentially inhabited world besides our own, and that one is or was inhabited, then we can say that the odds of life evolving on any inhabitable planet are probably very good, as long as we can show that the life evolved independently. Even then, we can't rule out the possibility that the only two instances of life just happened to evolve on adjacent worlds. It's just darned unlikely. *Well, okay, except the fact that the probability is greater than zero.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
It's not "my code" in the sense that I invented it, though. I didn't invent it, nor can I change it. Rather freeing, actually.
.. and that has to do with observable phenomena, such as the capacity for an individual or group of individuals to survive when they act according to a set of moral beliefs.
:) ). We _can_ say that "foo is really bad" if foo can be shown to cause actual harm to individuals or their society.
:)
yeah - I did mean "yours" as in "the moral code you ascribe to", rather than "the moral code you invented". But on your other points - Part of what I was getting at was that the moral code which you ascribe to has been reinterpretted over the years (by others, if not you). There are numerous examples of what was immoral (and not merely socially unacceptable) becoming no longer immoral, and in some cases actually moral. Admittedly most of these were "fringe" rather than "core" elements of the code.
As for being "freed" because you cannot change the moral code... is that because you are absolved of any responsibility for your actions as long as you follow that code ? If that is so, I'm sorry to hear it. Why? I hear you ask. Because to me that is giving up the responsibility for thinking about things - one of our greatest gifts.
I agree that "thinking it is right doesn't make it so", but at the same time I was making a case for reasons (other than "God said so") why something is "absolutely" right or wrong
Can we make statements like "foo is really bad" ? Again, don't make the mistake that I'm a pure Relativist (I was swayed by Cultural Relativist arguments for a long time, but I'm over it
I guess the next question is "why is causing harm bad?"
And there you have me. That's irreducible, because harm is defined in terms very similar to "bad".
Hmm.
As for the moral view of America (for example), that's why I suggested that the true moral position of an individual can only be observed through their actions. Someone may profess to be a great Christian, going to church every sunday etc. But if that person goes around killing people, can we really say they are a moral Christian ?
For a less extreme example, if you ask many Christians whether they follow the Bible, they will answer "yes, to the best of my ability". But if you observe their actions, you can find many places in the Bible which are ignored as required. If you ask them why they don't do "foo" as it says in the Bible, they might say something like "that's not relevant in this day and age".
It's the little things like that which suggest to me that even the Christian moral code has changed over the centuries. The basics are pretty clear (Don't kill people), but how many people now work on the Sabbath ? That's a pretty big breach of the 4th commandment, isn't it ? Lets not even get into the exceptions to things that are allowed in the Bible, but which would be proscribed in our society.
I guess I just don't see the necessity of an external entity/force to impart a moral code, when I can see that morals are really just the set of rules under which people operate to get along with each other.
In the same way that organisms have evolved into cooperative ecological niches physically, social animals may have evolved rulesets to govern their interpersonal behaviour.
It's no doubt easier to change ones mind than it is to change ones ecological niche, however. But it's surprising how rarely people do. Is that because its advantageous to us as individuals and as a species to think homogenously (to better function as a group) - with a few "mutations" every so often so that our "mental DNA" doesn't ossify ?
Anyway - now I'm raving.