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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.
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".
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.?????
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
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...
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.
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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
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 ----
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?
.. I think this stinks..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
traces of Beano. That would be a sure sign of intelligent, carbon based life. . .
...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.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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...
And here I thought all the methane was around Uranus....
Y'know, maybe the probability of life isn't that low. Sure, it gives us a warm fuzzy feeling that from all those billions and billions of star systems out there, only a handful of them have the perfect conditions to support life. As we look at more planets it may be revealed that life is pretty dogged and determined. Maybe it arises almost anywhere there's water and a bit of sun or lightning.
Personally, I'm hoping that life is found on every hunk of rock we come across. It will destroy those notions that we are alone in the universe, and more importantly, remove the arrogance on humans towards the rest of the planet and maybe we'll treat it better.
On the flip side, if we never find life then maybe it will still shock us enough that we take care of this little niche of ours.
Enough with the fart jokes already :\
Are you lot 9 years old?
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
Actually, IMNSHO it is much more likely that there would be life on Mars than any other planet, especially extra-solar (not in our solar system)
Life tends to cluster, as the program of the same name graphically depicts. Mars is in many ways similar to earth and by virtue of this and it's proximity I would give it a significantly higher likelyhood of hosting life than planet "x"
There is a notion that life on earth was seeded from an extra solar source, like a comet. Material from Mars has been found on earth, the inverse may be true as well as a result of comet and other impacts.
A lot of thought has gone behind the notion of "Terraforming" Mars as well. The probability of success is not impossible.
73
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
Exponential growth is a best-case situation. In a harsh environment, bacteria replicate very slowly.
It isn't the same, but studies of bacteria living far underground offer a good example. They are starved, tiny. Often less than a thousandth the size of a normal bacteria. Their metabolism is so slow that according to Sci Am they may have an average frequency of cell division of once a *century* or even less.
Mars is even less hospitable. Far colder, far less water, and hardly more nutrients.
It seems to me that if you're going to believe we managed that with the probes it also seems just as likely one could argue for earth bacteria having made it there long ago on meteors.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I remember Viking very well, as I worked on analysis of its tracking data. They had 3 biology experiments, plus a mass spectrometer (and various other instruments for other purposes, such as weather monitoring.)
Before the mission, they published the criteria for a postitive result from each biological experiment (along the lines of, add water to Martian soil and CO2 is given off; sterilize another soil sample and add water, and CO2 is not given off). The biology tests passes _every one_ of the pre-published tests, albeit with some variations.
However, the mass spectrometer saw no significant organic molecules (and there were no obvious large critters visible through the camera). This, more than anything, made them discount the biology results. If they had detected large organiic molecules in the soil, they would have claimed life, in my opinion. Instead, they came up with non-biological explanations.
However, this was all before we knew about the ability of life to exist deep underground and buried in rocks, etc., While the Viking results are not generaly regarded as requiring life, they are certainly not against a biological explanation of the Methane findings.
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.
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.
With that said, this certainly is exciting news.
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!"
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.
Stop milking other people's jokes.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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.
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.
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