Slashdot Mirror
NASA Says Mars Rocks Formed in a Salty Sea
NASA has made another announcement, live on NASA TV, regarding the discoveries of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. They believe that the rocks examined by Opportunity were actually formed in water; that those rocks were actually sediments laid down in a shallow salty sea. They've already had outside scientists examine their data and those scientists concur with the conclusions. NASA has a story with explanations and some photos.
"Space-tourist" was name calling... not the best form of discourse, I admit, but nonetheless meant as a characterization of you, not your position. The point is that the people who drag out the "species survival" argument are, in fact, usually space-tourist wannabees (or lovers of "exploration" and "the human spirit", which are just romanticized words for tourism), who know that their simple desire to go to space, or see others go to space, just to go, won't convince other people, so they try for something else.
A huge asteroid could hit the Earth next Tuesday, but it won't. The interarrival time for asteroids big enough to cause mass extinctions has historically been in the tens of millions of years... and it's unlikely that even a Cretacious-sized impact would cause the complete extinction of the human species. A hundred years, or a thousand, is not a significant time on that sort of scale, and you have to start to worry about other factors... like what you're giving up if you devote resources to manned space flight, and who you're taking those resources from.
The second point is relevant on the same timescale you have already introduced. There's a much better than even chance that, if you were to check back right before the next Cretacious-sized asteroid impact, you wouldn't find any species that you'd recognize as "human" just because of normal evolutionary drift. You'd therefore have nothing to protect.
You did not, of course, read my third point at all, since you missed the direct statement that "individuals are inherently valuable". Let me spell it out for you again. INDIVIDUALS ARE INHERENTLY VALUABLE. Species are not, or at least don't fall into the same class. Sit down and think about it for a while; it's not that difficult a distinction.
That means that not only am I not going to kill myself, but I wouldn't let you kill anybody to preserve an abstraction like a species.
Well there people here thinking on searching for microbial Life. Many may think they need a microscope for that. First I should note that if microbes exist then they should leave a trail... And that trail may be as big as to be visible from above:
g
Life on Mars: Giant Fossils
Second there's the chemistry of rocks. The more deep we study them, the better we get into their evolution. In some cases the "phases" or "cycles" of processes around certain minerals can be done only with the help of microorganisms.
Third there are fossils. Even if Mars would be only populated by minuscle bacteria, that would not forbid them of creating colonies or produce large-scale deformations on rocks.
However to have a clue, no one can be sure of it even if it gets right in his face a something following Knoll's criterium the harshest criteria to find fossils that NASA stands for (and maybe correctly). For example I saw something that nears that criterium:
http://cydonia.ksu.ru/parafossil/parafossilA.pn
Is that a fossil? Well that thing has many things that point to organics. It has a interachange of structures looking like sections or segments of our animals. The bent structure in the middle of the rock suggests some kind of elasticity of the strcture. those holes are cavities and suggest very thiny walls, what excludes a mineral origin, through crystallization. The structure seems to have a bifurcation. If you see well then that zone has something looking much like the structure of the muscles in animals venous systems...
Is that a fossil? Well maybe, so I call it a pseudo/para fossil or, as some name it fossiloid. But this could be a trick of nature. No it is not a trick of JPEG as that picture is a composite with perliminar blur, besides two originals already show those lines without enhancement. So it is SOMETHING (no it is not a stupid bunny or a Message of Mars to Earth in Maori). But the worst this something has is the fact that is laying there lonely and unique. It could be a vent of hot mineral waters. It could be a sequence of events that lead to such a unique structure. We had once Faces there, remember? Truly quite fussy. So until someone gets a better enhancement of that (there are six frames of that rock) or we find something similar, it will remain something.
In fact the only way to find life there is to accumulate evidence. Even if it is only with the help of a microscope. But using ONLY a microscope, that will be like finding a needle in the haystack. The planet is quite dead and you don't need microscopes to be sure of that. So where they were/are is also a pretty serious question