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NASA Says Mars Once "Drenched With Water"
NASA is currently holding a press conference (carried live on NASA TV) where they are discussing findings from the Mars rovers. They are saying that the crater that the second rover has landed in has convincing evidence that it was once drenched or covered in liquid water. They cite the tiny spherules, odd holes in the rocks, sulfur in the spectrometric analyses, and evidence of an iron sulfate hydrate (a hydrate is a chemical compound which includes water molecules in the crystal lattice). Update: 03/02 19:45 GMT by M : CNN has a story, or see the NASA press release.
if there was life to swim in those seas.
Very true. If there was life in this 'ocean', then it's very likely fossils are in sedimentary rocks in that region. If there are no fossils? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it'll be a really curious coincidence.
If we brought back 10 tons of mars rocks, the chances of getting a fossil are still slim to none. Talk about needle in a haystack. Not to mention the fact that you have to land near some of it to begin with.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Non-christian religions.
For example, as a Taoist, I fail to see how this would in any way effect my religious beliefs.
However, if I believed in a creator-god and in the uniqueness and specialness of human life in the universe, then yea, that would cause some issues. Thankfully, not all religions are like that.
The next find I expect is simple life living on Mars.
Water != life
How can any religion survive that revelation?
I don't recall the Bible saying that there was no life anywhere but Earth. I've always believed it was possible that simple life could exist elsewhere. Intelligent life would throw religion a curve, though... I haven't thought as much about that.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Well here goes my karma...
...because no religion is dependent upon the earth being the only planet with life on it?
How can any religion survive that revelation?
I have discovered a truly marvelous
As far as Christianity is concerned, where in the Bible does it say life only exists / was created on earth?
Even though I am an atheist, I must disagree with what you say. The revelation only refutes a portion of the Judeo-Christian(-Muslim?) tradition of the creationism story (which could easily and eventually be modified and bent to the new evidence). But in terms of philosphies, especially in regards to how we treat one another and our surroundings, abundant life in the universe is a non-issue. Other religions like Buddhism aren't touched by the news either.
My $0.02...
[ insert your own witty .sig here ]
This is a troll if I ever saw one but I'll bite.
The idea that God created the universe with countless planets, stars and habitable worlds is not in conflict with at least Catholicism. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of other religions who would have no problem with such an idea but I'm no religious scholar.
If I recall correctly, nowhere in the Bible does it say that Earth is the only world in the universe or even the only one with life, intelligent or not. It's kind of an open question.
Please give me a verse if I'm wrong.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Why would most religions care?
Christians (at least _informed_ Christians, yes there are some) in particular, would not be disturbed to find that God had created life in more than one place. Why shouldn't He? It's not like the Bible says somewhere in it "Oh, and by the way... this planet is the only one with life on it."
C.S. Lewis discussed the subject fairly completely in an essay decades ago. In case you don't know, he was a famous and very influential Christian author, as well as writing some science fiction and fantasy. Besides writing a non-fiction essay about it, you could view his "Space Trilogy" fiction as an examination of the life-on-other-planets issue with a Christian background.
The more interesting question (also discussed by C.S. Lewis and many others) is how different religions would react to the discovery of _intelligent_ life somewhere else in the universe.
Microbes on Mars... scientifically, that's amazing. From a religious point of view... well, it's "just" another example of a Creator God at work.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Why would finding life on Mars take away faith in a divine being? Surely a god could have created life there too...
Of course, I understand your criticism, which is, I think, directed mostly at dogmatic adherence to ancient traditions without questioning them. However, religion will survive, I am sure. Religion and science are not mutually exclusive. Science is concerned with one aspect of our reality - the quantifiable, and predictable. Religion is concerned with all those things that you cannot quantify - love, anger, thought, the experience of death, wonder, awe, consciousness. They are both parts of our reality, and neither can be used to explain everything.
Unlikely, the uncertainties of the atmospheric entry result in a landing footprint that's (IIRC) a few thousand square miles. The chances that we could get a new rover down within driving range of an existing rover is pretty small. By the time we've got rovers capable of driving those sorts of distances or landings that are accurate enough to make that plan practical, I think that we'd have enough experience that there wouldn't be much to be gained from going back and looking at the old rovers.
Why do you seem so eager to see religion eliminated?
Is it by any chance because they are always so "in your face" with their bible thumping and telling you that you're going to hell and all that?
Because if so, aren't you doing exactly the same thing as what you hate about them? Being intolerant of other people's values?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"Swim" is a sufficiently vague term to apply well.
Don't forget that bacteria can leave fossils too.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There is no place in the Bible that claims that Earth is the only source of life in the universe. In addition, by "religion", you are most likely referring only to the three major monotheistic ones: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Plenty of Christians believed that the earth was not the center of the universe even back when this was the prevailing worldview. The Bible itself does not stipulate that Earth is the center of the universe. Aristotle believed that Earth was the center of the universe (plenty of his contemporaries disagreed), and his works became "canonized" as the only view during the Middle Ages, along with other great thinkers of the ancient world such as Ptolemy, who used an overly complex method to explain the orbits of heavenly bodies, and Galen, who was the first doctor in the West to link the nervous system to the brain, but based all his findings on pig anatomy (couldn't dissect humans back then).
Having a religion does not exclude common sense. In persisting in this belief, many atheists (or at least ./ atheists) are often more intolerant and ignorant than followers of organized religion.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
Do you honestly expect every single thing God created to be written down?
And Sirius begat M-551, and M-551 begat Polaris, and....
Someone's going to say "Life elsewhere would be pretty important."
Sure, to you. Probably not so interesting to most people living 4000+ years ago, who would have been quite shocked to discover that there was more than one continent, or that the world was round.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Excellent point. I think my fundamentalist brethren tend to forget that when God came to Moses, he wasn't dealing with a Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking -- or even a Galileo. He was dealing with a guy whose claim to fame was running away from a life of luxury to tend sheep. At the best, Moses' idea of the universe might have dealt with Egyptian gods, and a universe whose origin was a direct result of some rather kinky onanism.
God came to Moses in a way Moses could understand, in a way that his fellow shepherds and stonemasons could understand.
Imagine Moses up on the mountain, getting the first four books of what we now call the Old Testament from the Almighty:A bit cheeky, but the point is: God comes to us in a way we can understand. That's different for an illiterate goat breeder in 2000 BC than it is for a nuclear physicist in 2000 AD. Whether you choose to believe doesn't have as much to do with how God appears as it does with your own faith.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
NASA has never lost a human in space, so sending them on a 1.5 year mission is actually safer than throwing them to orbit.
Excuse me ?, I hope you are some kind of rocket scientist and can qualify that statement.
I'm no expert myself but I reckon that taking into account the fact that humans have never travelled interplanetary before it is probably a little bit more difficult than you think.
No Manned Missions should be sent to Mars until we are reasoably certain that no life presently exists on the Red Planet.
Fossils can wait. We don't need to contaminate Mars with the Earth Bacteria that a manned mission would introduce until we are sure there is a very low probility of finding living independantly evolved life.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Let's play a little game. Pretend you are God (pick your denomination, doesn't matter). You are going to reveal your existence to the primitive people living in your world and get some serious worshiping going.
Now since you created everything, you understand how cells, quarks, thermodynamics, astrophysics, and non-Euclidian geometry work.
HOWEVER, do you really think you are going to get into that with people who are struggling with the concept of simple tools? I don't have any particularily strong feelings on the topic either way, but it seems awfully silly when everytime a scientific discovery is made, someone points out that because the $RELIGIOUS_TEXT didn't deal with it, then that religion must be bogus. The arguement really then becomes: "Because the Bible did not explain every single thing about the universe around us, it must be bogus".
Of course the excuse, the same that is used to explain the story of Noah, is that god created life elsewhere but it just wasn't written down.
Oh perhaps it was and was lost, or we just don't know about it. When was it ever said that the Bible was a complete and comprehensive history of those times. To believe that you would have to believe there were only a few hundred people in the world at the time. Or perhaps the Bible (like any religious text, or history for that matter) doesn't tell the personal story of every living human on earth at the time.
Finkployd
My kids are growing up in a conservative Christian household and I am highly encouraging them to choose what they want and what they're good at for a career. I hope that they want to study science, but will support them every step of the way regardless of their decision.
I know that doesn't help you any, but I thought you should know that Christianity and a love of science are not mutually exclusive. Any belief system (or lack thereof) will have a few bonehead adherents, but that doesn't mean that's the norm, or even particularly common.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Couldn't the machines and devices we have sent have just as good of a chance to contaminate Mars than humans?
It's kind of unfortunate that God wasn't more accurately predictive. I'd be much more inclined to believe if, for instance, God had provided some information that wasn't known at the time, but was later proven or discovered to be true. Like, "the world is round." Why didn't he mention that to the people living 4000+ years ago? Maybe drop a hint or something? It might have helped them out a little. Why not provide a piece of true information that is unlikely to have been known or invented by an author at that time?
The reliance on faith (God won't provide proof because he relies on faith to bring people to him) is a sticking point. The same data can be just as validly analyzed as "non-existence".
Apart from welfare money, that's the best spent money in the US budget for years.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I'm sorry, what the hell does finding water on Mars have to do with religious belief? I don't see anyone of any religious faith claiming that there was no water on Mars because their religion says so.
Celebrate the finer things in life
The problem is, that RTGs are huuuuge, for space stuff, and they really don't generate very much power, and introduce all sorts of cooling problems, cause they get hot.
Don't be ridiculous. An RTG with twice the power output would have weighed far less than the batteries, solar panels, and mounting. Not to mention that 5 pounds of PU is pretty small (remember, atomic number in the 90's). Cooling is the least of their concerns on Mars. (Or getting it there, for that matter). They had a working RTG system for the Mars rover. NASA just backed off of it because of the outrage over Cassini. (Insert comment about stupid tree huggers with oatmeal for brains who can't even take 10 minutes to find out what the hell they're protesting over. And that also goes for that whats-his-name physicist who complained about Cassini. "Oh no! A little plutonium in an indestructible box that has had flight testing during several accidents is going to kill us all!!!! Run for the #$*%#$*%$%$ hills!!!!")
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'm really not trying to flame here, honestly, but if the above is taken as an axiom, or even a good rule of thumb, what exactly is evidence of absence? Is it proving that if something, Y, did/does happen/exist that could not possibly happen if X happened/existed?
Just curious, that seems like a very far reaching stipulation to me.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
The ISS and Mars have the forest. Hubble needs a tree.
The cost so far for this most recent mars mission is over $800 million. Budgeting through further missions is set to exceed $15 billion. The ISS outdoes even this, with an expected cost of near $30 billion to finish the station, and estimated operating costs of $1.5 billion a year once completed.
Hubble needs about $100 million for a single shuttle launch. $200 million in equipment has already been constructed and is only waiting in a warehouse for a mission.
I don't deny the importance of the ISS and Mars missions. All these projects have significant importance for science, technology, and society as a whole. Hubble is about far more than "getting to see a black hole". We have made dramatic advances in astrophysics with the help of the telescope. We have gained immense insight into the depths of our universe, to an extent that won't be possible again for a very long time.
Taking relative cost of the three projects into account, Hubble is by leaps and bounds the most effective. Do the math. Fixing the hubble will only take 0.2% of the cost of the ISS and Mars missions. Given the advances in science and technology we have extracted from Hubble, the return on this small investment is tremendous.
That's why I sigh.
The Origin of life is one of the most important questions facing Science. We have made some good gusses about it, but we are handicapped by only having life from one planet to study. Finding Independantly evolved life would shed light on the questions of how common life is in the Cosmos and how it started. That is far more important than any information that can be gained by having Humans on the Surface of Mars.
We need probes designed to answer that fundemental question, does life presently exist on Mars before we land Humans there. If we find that there is little likelyhood of Martian Life then it's time for Human Exploration. If we finf that there is life on Mars it needs to be carefully studided before we contaminate the planet with the Bacteria that a manned mission would introduce.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Yeah, that's kinda the same thing as discriminating against racists. What was the question again?
See, the funny thing is that "We the people" do all sorts of things. "We" are supposedly responsible for Iraq, right? Not France, England, and Russia, who made the mess in the first place decades ago...no, "we," the people of the US of A.
No one could get to Mars on their own. No one person could even design a system capable of leaving the earth, flying to mars, landing on it, and scouting the ground there - not all of their own ideas. No way. And those that could even do it with someone else's ideas - those who could put the ideas together and make them work...guess what, they wouldn't have the money to do it.
So yes..."we." Ass. Collectives do things all the time. "We" make open source work. "We" went to mars. "We" are hated by the baathists.
We.
It should have absolutely no bearing on Christianity. IANACL (I am not a canon lawyer), (I'm a lay Catholic) but as far as I know, there is nothing in Christian theology that would be seriously upset by the existence of life on other planets, even intelligent life. That being said, it would seriously shake the faith of some people who think that the earth is 6000 years old, and that the check out date is soon, but the existence of extraterrestrial life really shouldn't be seen as a threat to Christianity.
I couldn't find any bang-up-to-date specs for RTGs, but those fitted to Galileo and Ulysses weighed 65 kilos, which is a sizeable chunk of the rover's 185kg. Don't forget that any rover using an RTG would need a major redesign so as to shed heat during the flight to Mars. It might have required the use of a Titan IV rather than the cheaper, but smaller Delta to get it to Mars.
Of course what we need is someone to approach the Russians about using a Proton to send 4,500kg to Mars - then we could have some serious exploration!
Agree with you completely about the senseless scare stories sent around before the Cassini launch, you'd have thought NASA had a glowing chunk of plutonium mounted on the nose cone.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Sorry you're wrong, isotopes are chemically almost identical, but you can separate them using chemical processes. Uranium is routinely enriched using chemical techniques. They may also be separated physically, the heavier isotope tending to have slightly higher boiling points and very slightly lower reactivity. The processes that incorporate carbon into living tissues favour the lighter isotope of carbon over the heavier.
The depletion of carbon 13 in plant tissues is one method of determining nutrient sources for herbivores. Since different groups of plants have slightly different photosynthetic pathways they produce slightly different depletions of carbon 13 (so-called dC13) in their tissues which can be traced through into animal tissue.
And a quick scan of the Beagle 2 page shows that they were trying to get a C12/13 ratio from Mars.
If life did select -12, then radio-carbon dating would simply say that all dead things are exactly the same age.
And why is that, when radiocarbon measures the amount of carbon 14 in a sample?
Since the c-13 decays (known half-life) then the current ratio of c-12 to c-13 implies the time passed between death and now.
Oh dear. carbon 13 is perfectly stable. You're thinking of carbon 14 which no one has even mentioned in this context as yet. C14 dating is hardly ever used in geology because the half-life is too short for all but the most recent of sediments.
Best wishes,
Mike.