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Ammonia Could Indicate Life On Mars
Young Master writes "Just seen this story on good old Auntie Beeb, apparently traces of ammonia have been found in the Martian atmosphere. Ammonia doesn't last long on Mars, so it must be constantly replenished - it could be active volcanoes (none yet found), or it could indicate life..." Along with the detection of methane, Mars is starting to look a lot less dead than had been supposed.
So far the PFS has observed a depletion of carbon dioxide and an enrichment of water vapour over some of the large extinct volcanoes on Mars.
Ammonia is not a stable molecule in the Martian atmosphere. If it was not replenished in some way, it would only last a few hours before it vanished.
An underground lava theory seems much more plausible than microbes hoarding nitrogen. Underground lava beneath the extinct volcanoes could be releasing the ammonia into the atomosphere and thus explains how it is replenishing so quickly. Without other specific evidence of microbial life I really think we should just not get our hopes up, at least not yet.
Ammonia, eh? Either Mars has life or just really clean windows....
Great! Not only do we know that there are aliens in Mars, but that they pee and fart just like us!
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
How do we know ammonia doesn't last long on mars? Did we take some there and see how long it lasts?
Evolution or ID?
the Wong's have all those herds. Of course they have methane and ammonia. Duh.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Gassy neat freaks.
"folks, we've discovered life on mars, and boy, is it stinky!"
-ninjaneer
It was just the Martians giving Beagle a good clean up before they show it of to the Saturnians (they are really proud of their collection of landers on Mars).
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
It's probably just left over from the filming of Total Recall.
--
Are you a Chipotle Fan?
Does it indicate the insidious presence of Mr. Clean??
Who knows what evil lurks in the shiny surfaces...
has some traces of perfume and lipstick it would settle beyond any doubt that men are indeed from mars and women are from venus.
really the only indicator of life on mars that is going to convince me is....life on mars.
m ar s.gif
i've been disillusioned by all the rumors since the face hasn't lead to any big breakthrough.
http://www.matrixofcreation.co.uk/mars/face-on-
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
I am not at all suprised at this. I always regarded life on Mars as being inevitable for the following reasons:
That the meteorites found in Antarctica contained fossil bacteria only makes the case stronger.
Again and again, life has proven itself to be a real beyutch to kill. Bottom of the sea near lava vents. Antarctic wastelands which are the driest places on earth. I believe I once read about viruses which had survived in space for years as well.
I think the notion of panspermia (if I have the terminology correct) - that life first arrived on Earth after having been blown off the surface of Mars by an impacting meteor - is one of the most interesting theories out there.
From your link:
The magnetic field of Mars is 1/800 as strong as Earth's and was first recorded in 1997 by the Mars Surveyor probe.
That's barely a magnetosphere. It is there, but it's not exactly substantial...
Moo.
I don't intend to go on a flamebait, but this kind of news seem to support Bush's "Go to Mars" space program. Yes, there are some of us who think it's great to explore Mars, but not at the expense of other resources. I keep hearing this comments on how government research funding has been redirected towards Mars... this is the flaw. I believe no resources should have been redirected, but instead, new resources created for a new project. Anyway, something to ponder...
The world might be ready to accept that there is life on Mars (say, bacterial life). After all, we found meteorites from Mars that contained fossilized bacteria. After all we don't even know if life originated on Mars, and then spread to Earth. But the fact that life can spread between planets on ROCKS is going to take some of the shock value out of it and people will realize that instead of saying something like "I don't think God created life on MARS!"
My web domain.
The prospect of active volcanoes is a surefire indicator that there are sources of heat. That means there could well be regions on mars with liquid water. Warmth + Water are definitely a good start when it comes to the possibility of life. Of course if there are no active volcanoes then whatever is creating and sustaining supplies of ammonia and methane is also very interesting. Either way whether ammonia is coming from volcanos or from a possible source of life both scenarios are good in terms of finding it.
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If NASA starts finding life on other planets, many Christian fundamentalists will most likely try to put an end to our space program, just as they have tried and conintue to try to put an end to the teaching of theories of evolution, stem cell research, cloning research, etc.
Remember Galileo Galilei. It can happen again!
A dry sandy place with only ammonia and methane, sounds like a giant cat box, but where are the martian kitties? M
Of the few planet like bodies we've observed we know of two with active volcanoes (Earth and Io) and one with life. However, we haven't really looked hard for life and there are several places where we are planning to look, including Mars and Europa.
While it would be far more exciting to find life then lava, I'm not sure the data backs the assumption that volcanoes are far more common then life.
We know there are only 2 planets/moons with volcanoes, making them a little rare. We know there is 1 planets/moons with life and serveral unknown. Our very palimerary evidence suggests volcanoes are twice as common as life.
We have evidence that life appeared on Earth as soon (by geological time scales) as it was possible to sustain it. There is debate on whether the life experiments on Viking come out positive or negative. Now we have methane and ammonia in the atmosphere.
Perhaps it is our arrogance that insists that we are so special, life of other planets is unlikely.
We know we have already contaminated Mars. This could just be evidence that the clean room environments we built the Mars crasher ^M^M^M^M^M^M^M polar explorers in, were not clean.
For the conspiricist:
Was there a sinister (living) payload in the polar explorers? There is a lot of funding to be gained.
Get a free ipod.
... somebody cleaned the sensor array with "Windex" prior to mission launch.
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When you fork out the cash to send out a definitive human expedition to mars that will comprehensively scour the planet for life, looking for your super-proof, then we'll stop. Otherwise, "arcane clues" are all we have to go on. Science works that way. I mean really, you can't see x-rays, just some arcane clues that they are there...but boy, are they there!
Moo.
The magnetic field of a planet has a direct correlation with the amount of fluid activity (lava) from within. Mars is a small planet, so it cooled off relatively quickly from its accretion period. We can see this similarly with our moon. With little to no convection, the magnetic field will be very low, which is what we observe on Mars. BUT, since we do observe a tiny magnetic field, it suggests that the Martian core might not be completely frozen. Given that Mars has the largest volcano in the solar system, it could indicate a great weakness in the crust where gasses from the core could escape easily. And because they are detecting these chemicals around volcanoes, it doesn't seem likely that life is responsible
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
I have no doubt that you can find some sort of carbon-based cellular life in any environment that has at least some form of water, from the bottom of an ocean trench to the pressurized interior of gysers (sometimes over 300 C), and yes, even in clouds.
What I don't accept is that clouds themselves are a product of bacterial colonies other than as a by-product from releaseing water vapor from inside their cellular structures. Water clouds would form even if the Earth were sterile of life.
You can also find organic shapes from lava flows, like from Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Lava can even form pillowing structures and rounded shapes, and that is just a simple non-organic chemical process, just like you have suggested. Look at some pictures of Io (the moon of Jupiter) to see some other "organic" structures that are clearly from chemical processes. While living things may be on Mars, I seriously doubt any living thing could survive the extreamly hostile conditions on Io, both from extreame heat/cold conditions, the "atmospheric" conditions there, the fact that it sits in the middle of Jupiter's Van Allen Belt (radiation like you wouldn't believe) and other life threating issues. Europa has just enough "heat" getting pumped into it that it can melt water, which is why Europa is considered an even higher candidate right now for Extra-terrestial life in our solar system.
I think some clouds are occasionally found on Mars (getting this back on topic), and that by itself is certainly not proof of life on Mars. Ammonia, methane, and free oxygen are all much larger signs of life because all of these compounds (yes, O2 is a compound) are easily lost to space or consumed very quickly through chemical processes for it to have been sitting there for the past 4 1/2 billion years that is estimated our Solar System has for its age since it left the primordial stellar nursery. All of these compounds are found in abundance in the atmosphere on the Earth, in part because living things are also found in abundance. If you don't think ammonia is that common, you havn't walked past a manure pile lately.
What I've learned from this thread is that to be modded up you need to have extensive credible knoweledge of geology and chemistry, or you need to post any excerpt from South Park's Terrance & Phillip.
> What I don't accept is that clouds themselves are a product of bacterial colonies other than as a by-product from releaseing water vapor from inside their cellular structures. Water clouds would form even if the Earth were sterile of life.
Well, spores and other microbes could act as condensation seeds. Have a hard time getting bacteria in one droplet to produce more droplets though...just about the best you could hope for would be bacteria getting rained down, dried out, and then kicked back up as dust. Cloud-borne life would probably be transferred by air currents and droplet collisions, and would be unlikely to have a strong effect on cloud formation. Well, absorption of light by the bacteria could heat the cloud up, dispersing it or making it less likely to rain out, but they would be quite noticeable then.
Cellular automata often produce cloud-like shapes, which really isn't surprising when you think about it. And some aspects of cloud formation could be simulated with CA...they have some similarities. The cloud is a group of tiny droplets condensed out of the air, the vaprous water is the "food", the droplets are the "cells". However, fluid dynamics makes a better cloud simulation...you get similar effects in many fluid systems, without any chemistry (organic or otherwise) involved. Clouds are simply caused by fluid dynamics and temperature/phase changes.
Clouds are complex systems that show some aspects of life, but none of a living organism. However, they could make a good home for microbial life.
From what I've heard (and obviously nobody else here), Mars doens't have a molten core. How could it have volcanoes?
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Like this.
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"There are no known ways for ammonia to be present in the Martian atmosphere that do not involve life," a US Space Agency (Nasa) scientist told BBC News Online.
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That's just bunk. Ammonia is a very common compound in the outer solar system. Ammonia can get formed like crazy without life being present; it's a very simple chemical to create abiotically.
A decent sized comet impact could deposit enough ammonia in the soil to account for the amounts being detected just from simple outgassing.
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...of my technical advisor's litterbox, that life could consist or stealthy, rust-colorerd felines.
--QTone, not French
I've heard that we no longer have to murder babies to harvest the stem cells...
Oh, please! Nobdy murders babies to harvest stem cells. Harvesting stem cells is an added bonus to murdering babies! It's like, hey, I got that baby murdered (awesome!) and then I get free stem cells to boot (woo-woo!) It's win-win!
-- dR.fuZZo
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
The article also says that they know of no active volcanoes. Therefore, there are no currently "known" ways of producing ammonia. Of course, they haven't discovered Life yet either.
We humans always project our own traits (ie, life) onto the unknown. It's a hell of a hobble on the frontier sciences.
The common phrasing of the razor, "Do not multiply entities needlessly", itself implies this by the word 'needlessly.' You are fully entitled to multiply entities if you need to, as you often will.
If evidence allows you to distinguish between explanations -- as with your suggested examples of where the simpler solution is false -- then Occam's Razor would not require you to keep an explanation that is demonstratably false. After all, if an explanation is wrong, then it is not a valid answer at all.
Occam's Razor only applies where there is no other way of determing which explanation to adopt. Where there are better ways, such as experiments, we use those.