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Methane on Mars?
mbone writes "Two independent groups are claiming the detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere, one using the
Mars Express orbiter,
and the other using ground based telescopes. This detection, if confirmed, would be of great significance for the search of life on Mars, as Methane will not last long in the Martian atmosphere and thus must be renewed, presumably either by biological processes or by volcanic vents, which would be a good place for life to develop. The leader of the ground based astronomy team, Michael Mumma of the Goddard Space Flight Center, when asked if the methane was biological in origin, said 'I think it is, myself personally.'"
...it will be indisputable evidence of living, farting Martian beings!
Actually, a couple of sources indicate that humans emit little or no methane when they pass gas.
"I think it is, myself personally"
It's GOLD Jerry, GOLD!
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
forst replizzle!
props to:
I think think that Val Kilmer's disobedient robot dog has something to do with it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This Crazy Wacko, Hoagland, is going to have a field day on this. He believes in all sorts of NASA coverups and apparently has a small following. He was mentioned recently on slashdot, as well, as the famous "Bad Astronomer" debunked some of his BS...
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Is it possible that this is a contamination issue from the original setup on earth? Could this have travelled with the spaceship to mars? I have heard rumours of NASA employees that have resorted to eating only brown beans due to budget restrictions. Is this a science issue or a budgetary issue?
Stay tuned for new sig...
Well, atleast he's not denying it. How did Michael get to Mars? Gee, he must have a heck of an intestinal disorder for it to be detectable with a telescope!
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"My theory of Martian Cows works!!!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
"Bad Astronomer"
Is this another future Mac OS project, much like their famous Butt-Head Astronomer project.
Come to think of it, Bevis is a constellation.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I think it is myself, personally
...with an Earth-shattering Ka-boom!
He who smelt it, dealt it.
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such Martian flatulence films as "The Baked Bean Crater" and "Angry Red Anus".
I think it's more like hogs - those things smell a lot worse and I think produce more methane than cows.
Just drive through UP-North Wisconsin in the Summer. And good luck to you if the wind is blowing the wrong way... Muhahahahahaha...
Any one got a light... ?
Ahhh, methane. Proof of the existence of chili and beer on Mars. I'm on my way...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Who's to say we haven't taken any bacteria to mars the past few Yrs.?????
Wooooooooo
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
It is slowly coming closer. The day we actually find that source of life on another planet. It is beautiful and logical and perfectlly of sense to understand and grasp that we will some day find life, but the day we actually do discover it. That will be an amazing day simply for the achievement. Though anything we find on mars will be very simple (single celled things? bactiera? virii?) it will nonetheless be something.
It is life.
Mad, adj : Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. Ambrose Bierce - The Deveil's Dictionsary
Methane on Mars? Must be Uranus.
http://www.mrmethane.com/frameset.html
Yes, they even made that into a song, "Cows with Guns."
Yes, let it forevermore be known as the "Red Meat Planet"!
(Atkins Diet Approved!)
If this turns out to be what it seems to be it is a dream come true. I wonder how this might affect future missions. Hopefully they will start digging at last and not only look for indirect signs of life such as water.
There were some experiments onboard the Viking landers that showed some odd results but weren't invested any further.
The fact that the fine rovers are unable to detect life is a shame I think. They were designed to search for water only, I know. But they should at least have been equipped with minimal biological experiments too, just in case. I can't wait for a samplereturn mission...
Who farted? Probably the Mars-osaur!
looks like someone beat me to the punch....about the fart joke.
o well, the good thing about passing gas on Mars, no one there to smell and complain about it.... (the ol' "If you pass gas and no one is around to smell it, does it smell?")
but this is good news. Now they don't have to rely on just solar power when they eventually make an outpost on Mars; they can collect the methane and use fuel cells to power the station (especially at night)
Methane is already pretty common in the universe. Given the amount of craters on Mars, the simplest explanation is probably that a methane-laden asteroid or comet hit Mars at some point.
...
From Research Nebraska
Methane is the second-most abundant greenhouse gas. The world's agricultural livestock produce about 17 percent of the methane in the atmosphere. A byproduct of digestion, cattle and other ruminant animals produce methane when organisms in their stomachs called methanogens break down fiber in grasses and grains they eat.
Here are some pictures of the little critters, and here
Does anybody remember the earlier attempt at proving life? At that time, results showed that something happened, but NASA came back and stated that it was almost certainly not life. The original designer of the project and a number of others have come forth and said that they think the test was valid. It will be interesting to see what the future holds.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Since we now know that once Mars had liquid water in significant amounts, and now we've found evidence of methane gas, there can only be one conclusion:
There were cows on Mars.
But what happened to the cows on Mars, you say?
Well, that's simple. As any reputably zoology dragon will tell you cows have infinite density. As Dr. Joel and Alex Veitch discovered in the Jaunuary 2004 issue of The Annals of Completely Fraudulent Research:
Obviously this means that all of Mars' water was not evaporated by a thinning atmosphere, but carried off by a massive cow-based singularity.
In order to prevent such a catastrophe from occuring on this planet it is clear that we must begin a systematic effort to minimize the cow population. Preferably using barbeque sauce...
I will love to see the ramifications to the worlds religions when life is actually found. The fall-out will be grand. With some luck it will put into proper perspective all the in-fighting that has been caused by 'holy wars' over the centuries.
Or they may just dismiss it as ' well, we don't consider that blob of bacteria life ' and move on believing man is the center of the universe, and continue to pummel their un-believing neighbors in a neighboring state.
Of course, depending on which book you use at the time...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now NASA will spend a quarter of a billion dollars to send a lit match to Mars
i always appreciate the props
ON TEH SPOKE.
And I'm sure they'll also find Saddam's weapons of ass destruction there too...
According to this article at The Guardian, NASA is actually thinking of creating earth-like conditions on Mars. Will I get to visit Mars in my lifetime? My expiration date is sometime in the years around 2070.
BTW, has anyone seen Red Planet?
So you have a triple appointment at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Sidwell Friends School, and Michigan State University ...or you just did a Google search?
.. I think this stinks..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
but wonder if this guy has anything to do with it.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
--------
Create a WAP server
traces of Beano. That would be a sure sign of intelligent, carbon based life. . .
me thane? you thane? we all thane?
WhatMeWorry!
Shut the hell up, whith you redundant crap. I just meant to be funny. I wonder if the European rover died of a one fart too much:-)
...so little actual exploration happening now.
Seriously, I applaud the efforts of the rovers and the orbiters. They're doing a lot of good science, and we should be proud of what they've shown us. But at the same time, human explorers could do so much more, for not a heck of a lot more money (this $1 Trillion price tag that's been floating around is bad journalism at its finest). I say that all of this good news should serve as impetuous to get people on the surface of the Red Planet as soon as possible!
To all those people who worry about cross-contamination, come on...the two environments are so different, the chances that a microbe from one could survive in the other are basically nonexistent. Besides, it's been proven that unsterilized meteorites have been moving from one planet to another for several billion years now, so if cross-contamination was ever going to happen, it already would have.
How To Get Humans To Mars
Someone's gotta tell these aliens that if they wanna stay hidden they better stop farting.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
In thane!
The lack of obvious artifacts on Mars makes me doubt that there is or probably has been any kind of sophisticated life, but there's still the chance that their microbes could kick our microbes' collective asses...
I'd feel a little better if the first experiments were done remotely...
How reliable is that source? It seems like a very reckless thing to say at this stage, which makes me doubt he said it.
Whether the origin of martian methane is biological, or due to some unknown chemical process, or whatever, I think that one thing is becoming clear: we must visit Mars, as soon as possible. If you detect water and methane on planet, it's time to go there and make sure. A rover/probe is all well and good, but sending scientists and a lab is well worth the exta expenditure (and risk). This should become a new priority.
And here I thought all the methane was around Uranus....
"I know that even among Young-Earth Creationists there is a portion of good Scientists that have serious doubts about Biological Evolution as a sufficient explanation for the Origin of Man."
Oh yeah? Name them.
Outside of a few obvious crackpots, these Evolution doubters seems to exist only in anonymous references like this one. If you can name someone I actually care about, e.g., of Dick Feynman's stature, then you'll have my attention.
I'm sure the environmentalist groups will be up in arms over this, dedicating a new effort against whatever life may be on Mars for unwittingly adding more greenhouse gases to their atmosphere. "Save the Martian Ozone!!" they'll be chanting.
Is it just me, or are these guys using obscene amounts of public money to try to quelch public's doubts about the Biological Evolution Theory?
Uh, yeah, pretty much. Thing is, if they wanted to lie, they could do it a lot more cheaply. The great thing about fake evidence is that you don't actually have to go all the way to Mars to get it.
They have a lot of other motives, actually. They learn a lot about how things might work on Earth, from geology to biology to meteorology, for which we have few controls on earth. I can't say how many of them have explicitly in mind the disproof of creation theory, but the way science works is that if they uncover new evidence for evolution, it bolsters their theory. And if they uncover evidence against it, it puts the theory in serious jeopardy.
Every scientific theory is provisional: if evidence comes up against it, then the theory must be amended or discarded. If the theory couldn't be disproved by evidence, it's not a very useful theory. A theory is useful only because it makes predictions. When the predictions come up against reality, the theory loses. If there isn't any way to disprove the theory, that means that there are no predictions being made, so the theory is pointless.
The theory of evolution is a difficult one to test, because it's difficult to establish controls. There isn't any alternate-earth to poke at. About the best you can do is to say, "The theory predicts that life could evolve elsewhere", and hope you find it relatively quickly.
(There are many other tests that can be done. The theory of evolution gots another nice boost from DNA, in that evolution claims you can trace ancestry through genetic similirities. But I digress.)
What the trip to Mars might do is to help disprove a competing theory, the creation theory, at least those variants which claim that only Earth could ever have life. (Other versions don't rely on that assumption.) As long as the evolution theory holds, and other theories fail, we maintain it as provisionally true. Theories for which we see much evidence, such as the theory of gravity, we tend to speak of as simply "true" rather than "provisionally true", but the fact is that if an apple ever falls up we could chuck the theory of gravity, too.
There's a methane to this madness!
Since when has methane on mars had anything to do with evolution? If like could have come into being on Earth by other means, it could have come into being on Mars by the same means.
The cynic in me thinks that the folks at NASA are just raising the hopes of all those gullible people out there, to get more funding. Doing science that you know has a popular hook is one thing, but doing non-science as an excuse for cool engineering is inexcusable.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Enough with the fart jokes already :\
Are you lot 9 years old?
...I promise
RegardselFarto
Fair enough. What does irk me is that all this hype on life on Mars sounds too partisan to me, like trying to quelch doubts about received wisdom. Since I feel we're heading towards a new Dark Age, it does unsettle me.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
The article says that methane in the atmosphere would decay over a few hundred years - so something is continuously renewing it...and that something is very likely to be life. Furthermore, we know (I think) that these hypothetical Martian beasts would have to be living underground in some very salty water.
o nd ay_040308.html ...which is talking about weird bacteria on Earth and how they manage to survive deep underground in salty water:
... produced in chemical interactions between water and rock" ???
OK - I can buy that - but I've been reading a bit about this subject - and I happened on this article:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_m
"On Earth, organisms do thrive deep underground -- hundreds of feet below -- without a single ray of sunshine. They live off chemical energy instead, like methane or hydrogen produced in chemical interactions between water and rock."
Wooaaahhh. Hold ON a minute. "methane
If methane can be produced between rock and water (eg: of the salty kind presumed to be found underground on Mars) then isn't the signature of 10 parts per billion of Methane in the atmosphere of Mars merely a further indication of underground water?
That's not what the 'experts' are saying though. Clearly I'm missing something - but I don't understand what.
Help?
www.sjbaker.org
We already know about the existance of buggalo on mars...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Looks like we can safely send some humans that way. I mean.. they do have fuel to get home now, don't they? ;)
That's the connection I found not wise, and sound like proposed by the the poster's quotes on Wise People...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Personally, I think is shows that the thinking of such people is mired in early-Victorian (yes - that should be capitalised, as it refers to a person's name) anti-scientific religiosity, and that is why I ignore their outdated and almost universally derided opinions on the origins of life.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Exponential growth.
-Colin
But what's the big deal with finding single-celled organisms on other planets? Are we in that dire a need of validation of theories about the origin of life on this planet that we're grasping blindly at the hope of "Is it here?" ... "What about here?"... "Let's try over here!"?
Quite frankly, what difference does it really make how we got here? The important thing is that we *ARE* here... and while I won't deny the scientific importance of actually knowing our own history, I am completely at a loss as to how validation of certain theories regarding it would classify as anything even close to the "most significant discovery in the history of humanity".
Personally, I'd think that label would really only deserve to go to the discovery of how to bring dead people back to life in a replicable manner (and I don't mean people whose hearts have merely stopped for a few minutes, I mean _really_ dead).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...that even martians farts sometimes
I never said that. Only that i know several religions around the world will be impacted by the discovery. ( as well as the general population when they learn we really aren't that unique in the grand scheme of things ).
However, as many point out, they will just 'adapt' their view of the universe so that their 'faith' isn't effected.
Sad really, if you have to adapt to keep things in check...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is not a troll, you idiot. Maybe you don't like the content, but it is a valid comment. Read the Mod Guidelines before moderating and keep your own fucking superstitions/bias out of it. If you can't do that, don't moderate.
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
Er no there spending public money to analyse the composition of the Martian atmosphere with particular reference (in this article) to methane detection. How does this go any way to quelching any doubts other than the eternal 'are we alone' question. And 'scientist' is an unusual spelling of priest wrt "Young-Earth creationist" (ignoring the 'scientists' with those $60 degree diplomas who always seem to pop up on religious TV)
fart.
We all know there is no Martian atmosphere, or they wouldn't have built that nuclear atmosphere machine underground.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
It's just a whole load of hot air...
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Marthane :-)
Table-ized A.I.
How many robotic missions can we send, for the cost of a manned mission, there and BACK?
RTF whole quote:
Asked whether the continual production of methane is strong evidence of a biological origin of the gas, Dr Mumma said: "I think it is, myself personally."
He added: "It's difficult to imagine that primordial methane [from geological activity] would continue outgassing for four billion years [the age of Mars]. This looks very intriguing."
Doesn't sound reckless to me. Sounds more like informed speculation.
FreeSpeech.org
Perhaps it just betrays a whim or some German influence... whatever, it is an ad hominem attack.
(Lack of) Age and (lotsa) popularity are no indications of sanity of anything, much less scientific theories.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I haven't RTFineA. So I blame it on the poster.
My question precisely.
Your prejudice. One do can be a scientist and yet doubt Biological Evolution as a sufficient theory of the origin of Man.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Dr Carol Rosin was the first woman corporate manager of Fairchild Industries and was spokesperson for Wernher Von Braun in the last years of his life. She founded the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space in Washington DC and has testified before Congress on many occasions about space based weapons. Von Braun revealed to Dr Rosin a plan to justify weapons in spaced based on hoaxing an extraterrestrial threat. She was also present at meetings in the '70s when the scenario for the Gulf War of the '90s was planned.
As practically a deathbed speech, he educated me about those concepts and who the players were in this game. He gave me the responsibility, since he was dying, of continuing this effort to prevent the weaponization of outer space...
When Wernher Von Braun was dying of cancer, he asked me to be his spokesperson, to appear on occasions when he was too ill to speak. I did this. What was most interesting to me was a repetitive sentence that he said to me over and over again during the approximately four years that I had the opportunity to work with him.
He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had "killer satellites". We were told that they were coming to get us and control us-that they were "Commies."
Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify third-world country "crazies." We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.
The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.
Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.
And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card.
"And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie."
I think I was too naive at that time to know the seriousness of the nature of the spin that was being put on the system. And now, the pieces are starting to fall into place. We are building a space-based weapons system on a premise that is a lie, a spin. Wernher Von Braun was trying to hint that to me back in the early 70's and right up until the moment when he died in 1977.
ends up in hundreds of millions of little creatures letting rip!! Oh the horror!!
Sure, there have been allegations of UFOs on Mars. But multiple news sources have carried that Martian Air Force Denials that they're real - just harmless weather balloons. These reports suggest that the real explanation may in fact be swamp gas. Either way, there's no evidence of intelligent life on nearby planets.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They sneaked a tank of methane onto the lander and released its contents upon landing, just to make sure there continues to be a budget for future Mars exploration.
(ducks)
If the messenger is bearing a mistaken message, in a manner that invites ridicule, then what, precisely, is wrong with taking the piss (that's modern English for ad-hominem, and much closer to the truth than trying to use Latin phrases without a sense of what is really meant)?
If it was German influence, then the proper course (which I understand is less popular these days than when I learnt German 20-odd years ago) is to capitalise each noun, not just some.
If it's a whim, then by all means indulge yourself, but don't expect to be taken seriously.
And as for age and popularity, 150 years without any evidence to the contrary tends to lead to popularity, while a couple of thousand years of theological squirming and avoidance of evidence leads to the rejection of some silly beliefs by the majority of thinking people.
Help me to understand - if you have the necessary brainpower to be a DBA, sysadmin, etc., then why do you feel the need to hold to a belief system that is palpably inane? Why not concentrate on the facets of that system that remain applicable to the modern world, and will remain so for as long as people are people?
Love, hope and charity - forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those..., blessed are the meek, etc. etc. are all universally applicable, and will ever be so.
Holding to a creation myth that was only finally invented itself during the exile of the priests in Babylon will only serve to dilute the good and moral message that was brought by a good and moral man and his followers.
Believe in a single god if you will, but do not mistake the rantings of priests for a universal truth, for that way leads only to intellectual stagnation.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
maybe it just smells that way here for some of US?
lookout bullow. don't count on the life0cidal corepirate nazi felon execrable moon/mars/bars shot, or even the fraudulent fairytail payper liesense stock makup 'economIE' (poorest over use/abuse of that word ever imagined), to pool us out of this won?
all is not lost.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... unlimited fuel for the mind/body/spirit. see you there?
If these new findings weren't found by the rovers, why has this just now been discovered? One of the sources of the discovery was from earth. Is it because mars has been so close to earth recently? No mention of this in the story.
My wife has PLENTY of gas (she farts more than I do). Let's send her there and she can add to it.
It proves nothing.
Simply not true. You seem not to have read anything by reasonable Evolution doubters lately, which is to be expected given current obscurantism.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
makes it silly, IMO, to rush right oa manned mission. Manned mimssins require that extra 10% of reliabilty that adds an order of magnitude or more to the cost. A 150 pound person, with life suport for a coupe years, and mehcanisms for return, adds exonenetialy to teh weight of the missin, and therefoe the amount of stuff we can send, or the cost of assembbling this to send it. If we can send 100 90%-reliable missions for the cost of one 95%-reliable manned mission (and ai'm basically dreaming at these numbers; reality is much lower than that), we can learn a shitload more before committing ourselves to what is likely to be a one-off (for a good long time anyway) missin that may or may not have the materials necessary to modify the mission on teh ground if we see somethig interesting,and that basically kills the budget and missins if it fails. One majpor advantage of robotic missions is that redundancy is relatively cheap. That alone is sufficient argument to do the early sets of missions via robotics. We arent to teh pitn yet of justifying a manned mission, with its inherent limitatins.
next time, I preview first.
...pull my finger, and I'll tell ya. =)
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Public interest in Mars == greater support for NASA funding. The public doesn't care about rocks, they want to hear about life. So, to keep the public interested, NASA is now couching everything in terms of discovering life. You're not being 'eased into acceptance' of the idea of life there due to some slowly uncovering conspiracy, but rather because it's in their best interest for you to be excited about the idea of life there. It's PR spin, pure and simple.
and back. Along with the weight, cost and complexity of life support there, during, and back. Along with the orders of magnitude higher cost imposed by the reliability required to send a human, as opposed to a machine: A 95% reliable mission is much, much, much more expensive than an 80% reliable mission, and we aren't even running that high with our mars unmanned missions. Why jump right to a high-cost, high-risk, lots of eggs in one basket manned mission when we can continue to learn so much with multiple unmanned missions, many of them, for a lot less cost, and apply the accrued knowledge to an eventual manned mission. IMO, it isnt time yet.
With that said, this certainly is exciting news.
With all of the initial excitement surrounding possible discoveries of life on other planets, I wonder if the dangers in having this knowledge will be thought out by our space invaders. Look around at our world and what we as a species have done to this planet in a mere 8000 or so years, can we be so sure that our touch will not have the same result on another planet? Perhaps these initial signs of life, and what may be beginning steps of an evolutionary proccess (or the middle, or the end(if you think of it as linear)) will some how be fouled, or even stifled by our intrusion upon it-I mean I can't see our world's governments sitting on their haunchs and not attempting some kind of observation or capitalization which has the extreme possibility of upsetting a balanced and private ecosystem. Looking at it from a Douglas Adam's perspective: already the treads of our landers could have ran their wheels over the heads of the Adam and Eve of a primordial garden of Eden (however that would be a great preemptive strike against martian invaders).
While we certainly will send humans to Mars at some point, now is not the time. The cost of human spaceflight is not a small increment over the cost of a robotic mission, but a massive multiple of cost. Given this, it makes sense to have several more robotic missions to learn as much as we can before sending people.
Besides, in less than 15 years we might have a functioning Space Elevator that would make our current method of getting to space (strapping people onto a glorified Roman Candle) seem barbaric as well as wasteful. Rather than rush into spending vast sums for a follow-on Shuttle as a component of a Mars mission, it would make more sense to step back and consider what the optimal technology for space travel will be in the next 30 years, rather than just assuming that the only thing we can do is continue tweaking the same technology Robert Goddard was using in the 1930's.
I believe the human exploration of Mars will come, but it will come after improvements in space transport technology have vastly reduced both the expense and risk involved in space travel.
If there turns out to be life on Mars, the best way to go about proving that this life was not carried from Earth by space probes would be very easy.
All one would have to do is study the DNA structure of the Martian life. There would be stark differences between Martian life DNA and Earth life DNA. The best analogy of this I can put forward would be one dealing with snowflakes. On the base level snowflakes are exactly the same thing. They form the same way, and are made of the exact same stuff (ice), but the key difference here is that while there are many similarities, no two snowflakes are exactly the same.
While the base similarities would be the same, there would be sufficient differences in Martian microbe DNA to say with absolute resolve that "These are not Earth bacteria!"
I haven't lately read anything by any 'reasonable' holocaust doubters or moon-landing doubters either, and for the same reason. There aren't any.
Doesn't NASA have a plan for about any contigency? Anyone know what there plan is if they DO find life on Mars? Do they go public? Do they only tell the president? Going to the far fetched. What are the odds that NASA had some time of plan (at least on paper) on how to handle seeing an ET with the rovers?
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Exponential growth is a best-case situation. In a harsh environment, bacteria replicate very slowly.
Whether they divide once every century or once ever 20 minutes, their growth is still exponential. Biological systems only stop growing exponentially once there is serious competition for resources or space.
I promise to read them faithfully, critically, and honestly.
If they are truly reasonable, that should be enough to convince me.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
There are, in fact, reasonable doubts about the intent and the extent of what is now called the holocaust, and it is only the current orthodoxy that rails against such doubters, as though holocaust-affirmation is a necessary act of faith in todays world.
Your orthodoxy is as offensive to me as the orthodoxy that denies evolution against all the evidence.
Moon landing doubters, now - there's a different class of lunatics.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
but sending scientists and a lab is well worth the exta expenditure (and risk)
Sending a single manned mission would easily cost between 100 and 1000 times of what an unmanned mission costs. I venture to say that we get a lot more data out of 100+ robotic probes than out of a single manned mission.
Furthermore, if we wanted to send a general-purpose chemical lab, we could do so on a robotic mission. That is something to be considered. But there is no need to send people: they are useless and expensive.
It wasn't funny though, it was redundant as my fellow AC wrote. What's the problem here?
I was refering to the 'nope-never-hapened', Turner Diary reading crowd. I don't suppose you are aligning yourself with them, are you?
Stop milking other people's jokes.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Because my mod points mysteriously disappeared.
We have found a number of meteorites that are of martian origin. There should be a similar number of Earth origin meteorites on Mars. Mars had surface water at various times. Earth life has most likely already been planted. I would not be suprised if any place in the solar system that has liquid water already has forms of life derived from Earth. Show me life on another star system.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
I farted.
I don't know if anyone remembers, but a fellow named Tom Gold -- part respected physicist, part alleged nutcase -- wrote a book a while back (can't find it on Google) about the Earth's core being made in part of non-biologically-originated hydrocarbons. His most recent one postulates that there is a fair amount of bacterial life down in the nether regions of the earth's crust.
/DISCLAIMER
DISCLAIMER: I do not personally have an opinion of his view, being ignorant of geology.
I wonder what he would make of a methane discovery on Mars?
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
James Lovelock was the guy who invented the current notion of 'Gaia'. Whether you agree or disagree with that idea I think you'll find the origin of it interesting. He was hired by JPL to devise ways of finding life on Mars. So he asked the question: How could we tell there is life on Earth ? And being a chemist he concluded the atmosphere is a dead giveaway. The oxygen in the air indicates life, so with a powerful telescope (he actually wanted to build a 1,000 inch scope to find life on the planets via atmosphere chemistry) you could find if life existed. His argument was not to look just for oxygen but to find if the atmosphere was far from chemical equilibrium ... that would be the telltale sign. Needless to say NASA was not impressed with the idea that they didn't really need to go to Mars to tell if life was there.
Here is one link. Doubtless there are others.
Bitter and proud of it.
There will be not much significance if we prove that life once existed on Mars or is existing there now.
Most serious scientist have predicted such a discovery and leaders of the major religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and a few others) will probably say that this is proof of a great design by a higher Supreme Being. It's some of the small xenophobic religious sects that I DO worry about, though.
I think if you've read Carl Sagan's novel Contact you can get some idea of what the ramifications of such a discovery does to the human race.
Ive always wanted to live in an active volcano, send me and all the sports illustrated swim suit models right now and we will start the project.
Methane, eh?
They can probably get away with that for now.
But if someone discovers oil under the surface, well, they'd better get ready for regime change!
A lot of people seem to be forgetting that as of the mid-1970s we knew there was once liquid water on Mars thanks to pictures beamed back by the Viking probes. These images very clearly show channels and streamlined features that would have only been created by liquid water moving on the surface of Mars. (There was also more ambiguous evidence of flowing groundwater, but that doesn't detract from the strength of evidence for other observed features being created by moving surface water.)
The interesting questions were how long the water had water existed on the surface (was the flooding episodic, or was mars generally damp for a long time), when did the climate cease to be able to support widespread liquid water, where did the water go, and was there ever life?
The current probes confirm our earlier analysis: there was once liquid water on the surface of Mars, but this is scarcely news. (It would have been much more surprising if they showed water didn't once exist on Mars.) The probes presently exploring Mars have, however, gone much further than simply confirming the presence of liquid water in the Martian past; they have shown that the water that once flowed there wasn't just temporarily liberated by catastrophic events like meteorite impacts, but had to have remained liquid on the surface for quite some time. Standing bodies of water formed the intruiging geologic formations observed by the Opportunity rover, and have important implications for understanding the ancient Martian climate...in addition to increasing the likelihood that life could have once thrived there.
So if scientists are speaking up more about the possibility that Mars might have harbored, or might still harbor, life, it's probably because we're slowly accumulating a more interesting body of evidence. I don't perceive any big coverup, just many new discoveries.
As for detecting methane in the atmosphere, we've probably never previously detected it because the instrumentation with the resolution needed to detect it hasn't previously been flown to Mars, and it's difficult (but clearly not impossible) to make similar measurements from Earth. The tone of the article suggests that people have been trying to detect methane before this, but have only recently succeeded, which isn't too surprising given the thing that we were trying to detect exists at only about 10.5 parts per billion.
There are, in fact, reasonable doubts about the intent and the extent of what is now called the holocaust...
Yeah, like did the Nazis intend to kill 6 million people or did they mean to stop at 4 million and just miscounted? There may be historical questions about the minute details, but the broad outlines of the Holocaust are pretty clear.
You meant their data seem to be noisy.
department of redundancy department, pleace wait and hold. sorry, please dont troll me :)
"I think it is, myself personally"
What did he use, the Professors smelloscope?
Well then, I guess that weird powdery substance we landed on is a bed of fresh Earth microbes covering the plant from Viking!!
If some earth carried bacteria were to survive, where would it survive? Possibly in some sheltered nook, or tucked under a rock when we went to scoop something. In that case the resources and/or space for the organism to work with is so small that I would say calling it exponential might be a mistake, can you really call two generations before maxing out resources "exponential" growth?
Plus of course the organisms are competing for each others space, so some are bound to loose out - just like Conway's life. You don't get cells spilling out of the monitor, you get bursts and die-off. Such is the way of life in a very inhospitable constrained space.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, that means anti-evolutionints failed to evolve...
He was telling us to pull his finger.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
So now we know that Pigs came from Mars. And it was the fart that killed the dinosaurs.
After Superman, Mars might be the home of our next galactic superhero:
Mr Methane
There I was, trying to rescue the world, but did it show any gratitude?
The question should *ALWAYS* be has anyone READ Red Mars. I'm absolutely shocked that on a /. discussion about mars terraforming there still isn't a single link to Kim Stanley Robinson's (Red/Blue/Green)Mars series. Not the worse read around for sure.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Actually, the methane is almost certainly primordial and has nothing at all to do with life, not even life as we don't know it! If not, then Jupiter, Saturn etc. must be awash with microorganisms. Methanogenic bacteria down here on planet Earth work by converting organic matter to CO2 in the absence of oxygen and are as such advanced organisms. So no methanogenic bacteria could evolve until life had already provided them with something to eat. Their predecessors, still to be found around deep ocean vents etc., convert primordial methane to water and CO2 by reducing e.g. iron oxide. The fact that the red planet is RED (oxidised iron), suggests that these bacteria just aren't there, otherwise it would be the BLACK planet. So people, the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere just means that Mars is a chilly oxygen-free planet. Of course the NASA folks know this, but they need to make sure their budgets are approved and since the SETI programme hasn't brought any solace to members of the "we-are-not-alone" club and rockets cost money, a politically viable campaign had to be launched. Therefore a warm welcome to the Search for Extraterrestrial Life endeavour.
A very fashionable and socially safe prejudice. Comfortable and cozy in fact.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Long time no read, will look for and post later, hope soon.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
So what's changed? Is the methane a trace that Lovelock's instruments couldn't pick up? Did he discount it as too small to be significant? Or did he discount it because there was no free oxygen?
Or did the bacteria arrive since then on one of our probes?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
If he were talking to scientists, then yes, informed speculation is a good description, but saying something like that to the media is just going to create a frenzy.
Well, this is what happened.
1. Martians had a thriving civilisation
2. Martians ate alot of junk food.
3. Martians farted alot.
4. Martians decreased in population due to heart disease and lack of air.
5. Martians went extinct - no oxygene left, only methane.
6. Martian electronics short circuited and set of a planetary methane explotion, delivering rubble all over the planet.
I have PROOF for this; there is rubble all over the planet!!!
Does it have to be a Zippo brand lighter or would a non-trendy, non-overpriced, non-wind-proof... oh... nevermind.
Respect my authority! Methane gas, though a frequent ingredient of gaseous matter - is by no means a significant contributor to the octane of flatulent fuel. Its measures in human farts is residual (despite its ability to pyrotechnically impress us)
I mean, how big can the difference between methane and meth be? Three characters at most. And considering there are as of yet no drug laws on Mars, I predict a huge exodus of twitching people to Mars any time now. And everyone will be happy, including the tweakers on Mars going "whoa man, this shit is lethal!" "Yeah I know, and it's all over the planet!"
*twitch*
Anyone have any suggestions for the new name?
Exactly what happened to cause Alaska's placer-building bugs to build up a gold molecule at a time isn't certain. Grossly oversimplified---and I certainly hope no chemist reads this---the metabolic products exuded by the bacteria interact with compounds in the environment virtually an electron at a time. So to speak, the bugs sweat solid gold. Others think the process may have had another purpose. British chemist Steven Mann speculates that the bacteria could be using "gold complexes...as terminal electron acceptors. If so, then this would be a novel form of energy transduction in anaerobic respiration"---that is, the gold buildup was an important part of the bacteria's life processes, not just a waste product like the crust of salt on an athlete's drying skin. And, here is more on the subject.
-cp-