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Mars Had Surface Water for Eons
LukePieStalker writes "Far from being a one-time event, it now appears that surface water
flowed on Mars for eons. Nasa has announced that, after descending
down further into the Endurance crater, the Opportunity rover has found a 'razorback'. It is believed that this was formed by 'fracture fill' from the minerals in percolating water. Since this feature extends through several geologic layers, it argues for a long period of wetness near the surface. This would seem to substantially increase the chance that life once existed on the red planet."
is slashdot getting slashdotted? it's hard to get here sometimes....
AccountKiller
Is there an official length of time for an eon? I know it just means "An indefinitely long period of time" but when it comes to life developing the amount of time available is quite important.
... Eon is a very long period of time. Geologists refer to a Phanerozoic Eon which is about 550 million years long
The Archaeon Eon lasted over 2.1 billion years.
or is it:
An eon is the period of time it takes for a universe to come into being and then disintegrate again.
Casual Games/Downloads
WE knew that. It was all that standing water that caused the green men to die out. Something about mosquitos and West Nile virus...
So does this mean that we might be able to find traces of water and/or life if we keep digging, or that the water is all gone?
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
on Earth
where Nemo was hiding out.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I knew those Arkansans seemed a little far out.
Now we just need to evidence of other university mascots, and we can build a case for a Mars Bowl.
You are not the customer.
If we can confirm that there is/was water on Mars, what does this say about the rest of the Universe? Is water all that common? If we then associate water with the chance of life, out of the billions of stars, we just ain't alone. Insert Overlord comments below.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
If Mars had water, why would it not have it for a long time?
Shame them didn't actually find water today of all days - 20:17:43 20 July 69
I don't quite see the obession with finding life on Mars.
In terms of science, we know it's possible, it's not an issue of "can" it happen it's an issue of "where" did it happen again. We also know that if there was life it's doubtful it went beyond the microscopic range as not only is there no evidence of that, but life existed on this planet for eons w/o going past the microscopic range. It's arguable that the natural result of life is not always complexity and size.
It seems to me the only reason people are obessed with finding life on Mars, or anywhere else for that matter, is to fill some urge that if they do, to less scientific minded (read: religious) people will be proven wrong.
of course, science fiction never fortells the future now, does it...
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I thought this was pretty much a given. It's very obvious from aerial shots that there was a massive body of water in the northern part of Mars. The lack of craters on the northern end suggests major weathering other than sand storms, because the southern end has more craters yet experiences the same storms.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
And in many future worldlines of the universal wave function, it will have copious surface water once again. Just need to get out to the Oort cloud and start steering some comets...
All Abstract Structures of Objects and their Relationships exist.
This explains the life I keep finding in my percolating coffee pot!
http://www.theonion.com/history/index.php?issue=40 28
Yep, I guess that would be proof of water.
--JLockard - "Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps." - Emo Phillips
IMO the rovers have done well in proving the prior existence of water.
In the now "urgent" perogative of human visitation of Mars, an interim step sending larger rovers capable of sub-surface graphing would aid the future landings in prospective dig sites.
Plus it gives Val Kilmer time to build his robotic dog.
Damned Arkies are everywhere.
and see the same jazz..
"It is believed that..."
"...substantially increase the chance.."
"This would seem..."
Just tell me when those cute space chicks show up...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
To me, that's the only concrete proof of life on Mars. Life is complex--there's more to it than water.
I are winner
Adding the F* word at every place possible does not make for "funny" prose. It simply means that someone has too small of a vocabulary to say anything enlightening or truly amusing.
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Where do you SUGGEST we ask?
I reiterate the parent's question: What the FUCK is going on with Slashdot?
The longest division of geologic time, containing two or more eras. For example, an era where Mars had water and an era afterwards, where there was no water.
-Valiss
A previous article stated that solar winds may have carried at least some of the water away from mars, makes me wonder if those solar winds passed by earth and deposited some water, carrying life!
simply because there are giant chunks of ice that have been visible on its surface for as long as I have been alive. Where there's smoke...
After billions spend, what does this really teaches us?
If you're going to talk like Yoda, do it right: "After billions spend, teach us what does this?"
one day it will become common knowledge that the people who control most of this planet are really planet-killing aliens who also killed mars and venus.
earth is almost gone. but before it goes, the evil ones are sending probes to saturn/titan to see if they need to send an armada of fusion bombs to kill off any life that may exist there.
Remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc where it get's crated up and put in Top Secret storage? Same thing with life on Mars. Do you really think that George Bush (Mr. Fundy Christian) would allow this cat out of the bag? Stop pointing at my tinfoil hat.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I scan the raw feeds from Mars regulary. I ran across the following image: Mars Photo. Now if that doesn't significantly improve the odds of life on Mars I don't know what does.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
I agree completely. When you use the word "F*" it doesn't do anything for humor. I much prefer to use the word "FUCK" instead of "F*". Much funnier!
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Adding the F* word at every place possible does not make for "funny" prose.
You must be fucking new here.
If water is dripping into a gap caused by a fault, it might not take that long for dissolved minerals to fill the hole. Considering how big stalactites and stalagmites can get in a few thousand years with just a slow drip, how long would this take with periodic flooding followed by a long dry spell?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
This would seem to substantially increase the chance that life once existed on the red planet.
No. Life did or did not exist on Mars, but either way, its chances are over.
What these results might increase, if true, is the chance of our discovering evidence that life has existed on Mars.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Of course, if it were, either we would have gone there and slaughtered the natives already, or vice versa.
Instead, Mars and Venus serve as object lessons on the narrow window of planetary viability.Now, we can have a new highlander series set in the distant past on Mars. The prize being completely plantery destruction. Yeah! Water was the last ingredient to my new "historical fiction." You can't prove me wrong.
"There can be only one on Mars."
Oh ho, bring on all the 'everyone who r believe life on Mars have tinfoil hats' stuff, soon to be debunked in a year or so. Just throw them in with 'people who believed Mars had water have tinfoil hats' and so forth. Always a a great bunch, they are.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
I agree that excessive swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary, but to be honest, I don't think we do have the words to describe how big of a deal walking on the moon was. For once, nobody had a vocabulary descriptive enough, so I think it's oddly appropriate.
.. *has* been found.
Turns out they were Golgafrinchian telephone sanitizers and marketing executives. Bunch of asshats, really. Hardly worth noting in the history books.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It was certainly funnier than your post, vocabulary or not.
Heck, there was even a link to the Onion article he was quoting. Where is your enlightening link or amusing comment?
Just because your definition of humor is different doesn't mean you get to dictate what other people say, or choose what they find humorous.
you do realise that's a fake article right, Mr. Christmas?
Not only is water uncommon, the liquid phase is uncommon.
Water is likely very common. Hydrogen in the most common element in the universe, and Oxygen is a pretty common element as well.
The liquid phase of water appears to be fairly uncommon, in our solar system and likely everywhere.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I've found it quite interesting that the fundies (of all persuasions) have been very quiet about this issue. Well, except for Hoagland and the "tin foil hat" brigade from "Coast to Coast". Even my fundie christian acquaintances haven't said much.
Time to revise the docs, I guess.
And no, just because I don't believe what you believe does not make this a troll.
Being Modd'ed (Score:0, Troll) for telling an idiot to RTFM before modding? - Priceless!
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
Nah, Armstrong's first words actually on the surface were "It's soft and powdery and I can kick it around with my foot" then he said that other bit where he left out the a part of "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind".
Who is John Cabal?
Searching for life on the Martian surface is asking two wrong questions. Because below the surface, Mars is teeming with UNDEAD vampires!
--
make install -not war
Surface water on Mars existed across a significant span of time, not just for years but eons, suggest new findings made by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity.
Within a few weeks of its landing on Mars in January 2004, Opportunity revealed what was uppermost on the twin rovers' agenda: that bodies of liquid water once existed on the surface of Mars. But the evidence proved what could have been only a solitary event - a single wet episode.
The new discovery, reported by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Friday, pushes the boundaries significantly further back, into geological timescales.
After motoring down several metres into a the large Endurance crater, Opportunity has found what science team member Jack Farmer of Arizona State University calls "razorback," a ridge of thin, jagged vertical plates sticking up at the edge of a flat expanse of bedrock.
The team suspects that the ridge is a layer of rock that formed when earlier layers of rock cracked, and mineral-laden water percolated through the cracks leaving deposits behind, forming veins, or "fracture fill". Those deposits formed rock harder than the surrounding material, so as the rock eroded away it left this harder ridge behind. The fractures, Farmer says, may have been caused by the impact that produced the crater.
Salt crystals
The surrounding rock is the very bedrock that Opportunity has been studying ever since its arrival on Mars, first in a tiny crater called Eagle, and for the last month in the much larger Endurance crater.
In both places, the layered bedrock has provided multiple lines of evidence - unusual minerals, voids left by dissolved salt crystals, and hematite spheres - showing that liquid water once flowed there. And at the Endurance site, this evidence for water extends through five successive geological layers, or units, extending back in time from the original layer.
But the new "razorback" find dramatically extends this record. Formation of such crack filling material requires liquid water, but at a time so much later that these different layers of marine sediment had time to be compacted into stone, hard enough to form sharp cracks rather than crumbling.
The actual time span has not been estimated, but it reveals enough time to strengthen the possibilities that life could have evolved on Mars. The team is expects to spend most of this week analysing the razorback with the rover's various spectrographs.
Dwindling sunlightMeanwhile, there was great excitement on the other side of Mars. The rover Spirit, skirting the edge of a hill called West Spur on the edge of Columbia Hills and preparing to drive up it, has now driven over an outcrop of bedrock - something that had never been seen before at Spirit's site in Gusev crater.
"Eureka! We have found it!" exclaimed Matt Golombek of NASA-JPL, a science team member. "Spirit has an outcrop under the rover wheels. And an outcrop is the currency for geologists." Studying it should help reveal the geological history of the Gusev site.
Both rovers are in the most scientifically interesting and technically challenging terrain yet, though both are also somewhat limited by the dwindling sunlight and plummeting temperatures as midwinter approaches in September. And both remain healthy, despite one balky wheel on Spirit, having more than doubled their 90-day design lifetimes.
Both Mars and Venus are bone dry because they have little to no magnetosphere. This allows water vapor to be broken into H and O by UV radiation and since the H is light, it can acheive escape velocity much faster when hit by unhindered solar wind.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Personally, I think that once Mariner 9 showed what is very likely former riverbeds on Mars, it's obvious that in the distant past, Mars had water and very likely some form of lower-level lifeforms.
In my opinion, here's what happened on Mars:
1. In the distant past when there was flowing water on the plant, life did evolve, with the likely chance that we had fairly advanced plants lifeforms and lower level animal lifeforms.
2. Alas, when the atmosphere thinned, the surface water evaporated, essentially killing all lifeforms except for (at best) forms of bacteria and possibly algae that could survive in today's extremely severe Mars climate, living off the water trapped under the surface of the planet.
3. I think when the Mars Science Laboratory lander/rover reachers Mars in 2009, it will find that life does exist on the planet today in the form of bacteria or something related to it.
If it turns out that it had water for billions of years I would call that a long time.
Just because we don't see it now doesn't mean it was short lived. Remember that dinosaurs lasted much much longer than humans have so far.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Didn't we have one of those darn Razorbacks in da Whitehouse[.com] a few years ago?
It must have been java-powered water. It ran too slow to actually function as advertised, and didn't actually combine with anything like it was supposed to, so it had no solvent properties.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Earth has a large moon which stabilizes the tilt angle of its rotation axis. The Earth bulges at at equator from its rotation and the pull of the moon. The moon pulling on this bulge keeps the earth's axis steepening much more than it is now- a 23-degree tilt. The tilt angle creates the seasons. If it tilted more, there'd be warmer summers and colder winters.
Mars lacks a significant moon. Therefore people speculate that it could tilt all the way over on its side sometimes and have extreme seasons. Maybe even extreme enough to melt the carbon and water ices at the poles and permafrost.
The longest division of geologic time, containing two or more eras. For example, an era where Mars had water and an era afterwards, where there was no water.
Well what constitutes an era? Who's to say that there were not subdevided eras when Mars had water? From what I see, your example is akin to saying that there has only been one eon on Earth: an era without life and an era with life.
Besides, I tend to give a little more credence to the dictionary definition posted above.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
It was certainly funnier than your post, vocabulary or not.
Obviously I was not trying to be funny. Guess what, your post wasn't funny either. Does that mean that you also Fail It(TM)?
That's not to say that I haven't been known to be funny from time to time.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Is it all forms of H2O, or only the liquid phase? The dictionary defines water as a liquid. You don't say "put some water cubes in my drink." It's not gaseous water, it's steam. It's not solid water, it's ice. Also, is it as dangerous as this Dihydrogen Monoxide I've been hearing about?
that there may very well be water under the surface of Mars that we can't see or get at. While there is no evidence to say that there is still some liquid or semi-frozen water under the surface, there is no evidence that says there isn't any. Until we can fly people there and drill several meters into the ground, there is no way to know for sure.
There are other elements/factors which are vital as well.
P otassium
Nitrogen
Carbon
Phosphorus
Sulfur
Calcium
Mars is lacking in Nitrogen, which is a major component.
In addition, we don't know how important a large moon is for getting the process started. That the early tide created by the moon was a good lab for mixing the above elements to create life.
The evidence presented here (w/pictures) is pretty compelling too. I mean, if that doesn't look like a crater lake resort, then nothing will.
That is all they need to find, to cause a new space race.
That's exactly why the Onion article is so funny. They present the astronauts and ground controllers as that type of person. The humor results from the jarring contrast between The Onion's version and the actual cool-headed transcripts that we've heard replayed hundreds of times.
Well, that's it, then. If these features "could have formed when fluids filtered through it" (according to the article), it's time to update the science textbooks. This is all the proof I need to know that a wide variety of (and probably intelligent) lifeforms roamed the Martian surface eons ago. You know, a long, long time ago in a place far, far away.
Sorry, I couldn't resist =)
"This would seem to substantially increase the chance that life once existed on the red planet" I think a more accurate statement would be that this increases the chances that we might find evidence of carbon based life forms having existed at some point on mars. It is theoretically possible for life to exist without water by using another liquid solvent as a substitute. One often proposed substitute is ammonia (see article http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/ammoni alife.html/ ). People seem to think narrowly about the possibilities of life, and often constrain their thought process to life that is, at a very basic level, similar to life on earth. Granted, since carbon is fairly prevalent throughout the universe there is certainly a good chance of it forming life in areas other than earth, but we should keep in mind that it is not (at least theoretically) the only option.
>>This would seem to substantially increase the chance that life once existed on the red planet.
It does if you believe the currently popular spontaneous generation theories.
You are reading too much into the statement. They said it increases the chance of life. The absence of ANY water would substantially decrease the chance of life.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Maybe you didn't notice my post referred to an article on The Onion. Are you saying that the writers of The Onion's articles have small vocabularies?
Having lived in Wisconsin for a good portion of my life, I am well aware of the Onion and its shenanigans. Yes, they make use of a very poor vocabulary. Yes, the jokes are forced. In all practicality, most Onion articles are more amusing as jokes to play on friends.
"Did you see the paper!? Boris Yeltsin has gone off his rocker and turned over control of Russia to a flock of wild geese!"
Yep, it's lots of fun when you're about 16. It gets less and less funny as time goes on.
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As opposed to... "intelligent design" stories?
...except they were in Antarctica.
But it can't be funny 'cause you said sh*t.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
That's exactly why the Onion article is so funny.
It *would* have been funny if it was a good contrast. But the Onion couldn't leave it alone. They decided that they had to swear so much it would make a Gangsta Rapper blush. That's when it stops being funny and begins to grate on your nerves. It's nothing more than a forced joke by someone who can't write.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
And had your reading comprehension been higher, you might have noticed that I said "using the F* word in every place possible" was what failed to make it funny. I expand on this point more in this post.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Aren't there enough articles about Mars to warrant its own category within Slashdot?
Well, this article is pretty fascinating, and not only for its content - None of the other space exploration sites I visit regularly seem to have this information - At most, they talk about Opportunity's discovery of the Razorback feature, but no discussion of analysis. Has NewScientist scooped everyone on this discovery, or was this publicized prematurely?
No tinfoil required, really, just an observation.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
And had your reading comprehension been higher...
And had your sensitivity level been lower, you would have taken my comment as a well-intended joke.
You have just proven to everyone on this thread that you are indeed humorless and thin skinned.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
My apologies. I'm just annoyed because that joke has been appearing on every space related article posted over the past few days. It's beginning to grate on my nerves (which are already raw for other reasons) and you happened to reply the standard troll text I was expecting. You just kind of ended up in the line of fire. It was nothing personal against you.
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..or Butthead??
Is it just me or does this look like a profile of one of them??
figures they would show up on Mars!!
They'll start trying to sell us bottled martian water! Eons more pure than that razorback sludge they're selling us now.
Yes, that's what made it so damned funny.
And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurable superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely,
they drew their plans against us.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
The correct spelling of the word is "aeon", not "eon". http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=aeon
... the remains of the big pipe Los Angeles used to suck it dry?
No, science has so far been unable to answer certain questions about our existence. You can't say that it won't. Unless of course, you don't believe that it will be able to. At least science progresses...
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Baht Sair, ye've beamed down to planet SlashDot, world of geeks and nerds! There's got 'ta be *some* intelligent life down there?!
Scotty, now would be a good time... there's a flameware down here.. it's not pretty... AAAAH!! Oh, the pain! Oh the humanity! Oh, the pedantic trolling! They're all technically correct, yet they disagree! My brain is melting! AAAYYIIEEEEEE!!!!
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Hmmm, interesting question... (googling) OK oxygen is ~.1% of the sun, and the solar wind is 1-10 particles per cm^3 at the surface, and they travel at ~ 500km/sec. This gives about a 10^6 kilograms of oxygen streaming off per second, or say 10^13 kilograms per year. The earth's oceans mass about 4*pi*6,000km^2*1km*10^12kg/km^3 or 10^21 kilograms of water. So it would take 100 millions years for the sun to fill the earth's oceans via its cooled plasma, if the earth collected all the plasma and it had cooled of enough by then, neither of course would be even close to forfilled... But the Sun does radiate a healthy percentage of the oxygen in the solar system over the course of billions of years - although I'm almost certain that the sun did not create an appreciable amount of that oxygen - rather just remenants of some supernova in this arm of the galaxy some 5 billion years ago or so. I wonder if the plasma cools off enough to start forming water at the edge of the solar wind, 75 times further out than Pluto...
All Abstract Structures of Objects and their Relationships exist.
1. Eon - noun, the amount of time that passes between releases of Duke Nukem.
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
No. Life did or did not exist on Mars, but either way, its chances are over.
Well, statistics is all about reasoning with insufficient data. Given that we don't know whether life existed on Mars or not, I think we definitely can try and figure out the odds for and against.
There's no reason why you can't calculate the odds that you could have picked last year's winning lottery numbers. It really doesn't matter that it all happened in the past. You just calculate the odds based on what knowledge you had at the time. In the case of lottery numbers, this is, presumably, no prior knowledge at all.
In the case of life on Mars, the difficulty, of course, is establishing what conditions would necessary for life to have existed, and how likely it is that those conditions existed on Mars.
But given what we know about life, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the likely existence of liquid water increases the likelihood that life once existed there.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
In other news, it has been found that previous Mars rovers that have dissappeared onto the martian atmosphere have been sent back eons in time due to a glitch in calculations of relativity. The failed rover landed in a creater and had a fuel leak, with the spilliage causing creavases in the land called 'razorbacks'.
no it doesn't.
I thank you for your apology.
One piece of friendly advice: You shouldn't let anything on this site bother you that much.
Of course the humor on Slashdot is sophomoric. It is frequented by people whose average age is bracketed by sophomores (high school to college).
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
The ice caps have been visible for four hundred years.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
...i thought venus was bone dry because its surface was 900F...
Thanks. I don't know how I missed that story but it explains the problems. But that brings up a new question; Can we have an up date on this at some point? My workday is based totally on reading /.
Every planet probably has microscopic, non-oxygen-using life INSIDE it. (In fact, it may even be NON-microscopic.) Just because we don't find it lying about the surface does not mean that it did not exist.
When we talk about 'life on earth' it's assumed that we are talking about life on the *surface* of Earth. But that surface is *7 miles thick* [depth of ocean] and the radius of Earth is *4000* miles. And we know non-oxygen-using extremophiles and Archaea exist *here*. Why not there?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Water on mars, what a surprise!.. And for ages!... Oh!....
Summerians already called Mars the 'watery station', they even said that Mars was destroyed on a violent episode.. Maybe some years from now we will find evidence of a massive impact..
Hey that's 5.5k years old news!
What's in a sig?
Even if a final picture were not a closeup of teeth, of course.
And it's the first time I saw the thing. I thought it was funny-- sorry you're burned out on it. The important lesson here, kids, is not to post when your nerves are so raw that a joke with the word "fuck" in it will piss you off.
If your idea of humor requires it to have a more polite and eloquent vocabulary, you may want to consider reading a site besides slashdot. There is no excess of well-spoken intellectual wit here, but there ARE plenty of crass, repetitive, juvenile jokes in between the occasional science or computer topic.
I do Fail It, apparently.
Does that mean you made a repetitive slashdot joke, like the one you were complaining about here?
And before you get all jumpy, this is a joke, too. We are all being very inconsistent. We're posting on slashdot, and one of us is complaining about profanity, and the other is complaining about intolerance of differing opinions.
Something tells me we're both in the wrong place, but god knows why we just... can't.... quit....
It seems to me that just about everything Nasa has released so far has been through JPL press conferences (as opposed to writeups in academic journals). None of this information has been through any sort of peer review process yet -- isn't this the cornerstone of good science? I'm sure the raw data isn't yet available to folks outside of Nasa so it's impossible to even get an independent evaluation. I know they need to keep the public excited to justify the overall expenditure, but I'm very suspicious of broad generalizations like this made in days (as opposed to years) time after data collection...
With this, the detection of methan and amonia, I think ikts time we stop asking if Mars had life and start asking where did mars' life go?
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Use this handy conversion chart.
1 eternity = 10 eons
1 eon = 2 eras
1 era = 4 ages
1 age = forever + 1 day
forever = 1 / blue moon
The largest unit of geological time is actually a "DNFDC" (Duke Nukem Forever Development Cycle).
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Dear AKAImBatman -
So sorry to hear about your recent demise. Condolences to the wife and kids.
Oh, yeah, and FUCK, FUCK FUCK!
Since the universe is expanding, perhaps Mars was once an Earth?
Oh thank you! I didn't know you cared!
Wait a minute...
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If or when the same conditions happened on our Earth, what lifeforms would survive in the sub-surface? Chances are there are underground caves on Mars with liquid water and some kind of air. When will they split open some Mars rocks, looking for fossils?
It is perhaps useful as a study of the way we communicate. Applications would include language reform and movement to and perfection of a more effective language such as esperanto.
:)
The criticism was also good for me as a quick mental backflip and consequent giggle. Hey we're geeks right? Or actually we're all unique individuals so I won't hold you to conform to the convenionality of the group's unconvention.
I don't see why everyone is so certain that water based life is the only kind there is. About the only universal principle that any kind of life must obey is entropy - there must be an energy source and an energy sink.
I have always been of the opinion that single celled life is common in the universe. If we find bacteria (live or dead) on Mars I'll say "Yup, I thought so." We know that single celled life on Earth came about fairly soon after things calmed a bit, but it it took billions of years for those single celled organisms to join forces Voltron style and start the inevitable progression towards a sentient species.
I'm also of the opinion that this planet is the only one in the galaxy that has interesting life on it, as in more than a single cell. I know that many of you will think a single cell can be interesting, and I agree it can be. But when compared to a multicelled beast, I say one is interesting and the other isn't, by comparison. My reasoning here is the classic "If they were out there, we would know it." If they were out there, in a few thousand years the galaxy would be filled with colonies.
If we find anything bigger than a cell I'll call it fake.
Actually, they were pretty impressive, and the work they did to predict the motion of heavenly bodies using the geocentric theory is what lent credence to it during the early middle ages even among relatively educated people.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
- The calculation of odds assumes that the protein molecule formed by chance. However, biochemistry is not chance, making the calculated odds meaningless. Biochemistry produces complex products, and the products themselves interact in complex ways.
- The calculation of odds assumes that the protein molecule must take one certain form. However, there are innumerable possible proteins which give biological activity. Any calculation of odds must take into account all possible molecules (not just proteins) which might function to promote life.
- The calculation of odds assumes the creation of life in its present form. The first life would have been very much simpler.
- The calculation of odds ignores the fact that innumerable trials would have been occurring simultaneously.
CB000 through CB090 might also be of interest.For example, complex organic molecules are observed to form in the conditions that exist in space, and it is possible that they played a role in the formation of the first life [Spotts 2001].
It's Ammoniaco NH3!!!
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It's Ammoniaco NH3!!!
open4free ©
Wrong... actually Armstrong's first words were "Contact light". He was looking at a blue light that came on on the instrument panel when one of the three probe legs scraped the surface, which indicated to him to cut the motor.
It's Ammoniaco NH3 stupids!!!
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It is believed
it now appears
it argues for
This would seem to
Deja Vue. Do us all a favor and break the news when water is actually found. I mean, one speculative story is interesting about a subject, but speculative story after speculative story after ... gets real boring when nothing actually changes. So help us, if they actually find a drop of water.
what does it actually mean?
can we then take it that we have found life developing of it's own accord?
or does it just prove that life can _survive_ on a different planet..
how possible, and how likely is it that the same source could populate both the earth and mars? i.e. still the same very unlikely fluke.
Would there be any way to distinguish between very primitive alien lifeforms and earth ones?
Oxygen O2 is *really* very uncommon in Mars!!!
Can you carry tons of stolen Oxygen from Earth to Mars? :P
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He did put his hand to make a big explosion of Oxygen O2 from the nuclear reactors!!! XDDDDD.
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The Martian wrecked the ecology of their planet just like we're wrecking the ecology of ours !
Don't you see. Mars once had water, life, and a more protective atmosphere. Then over time the beings that lived there released gasses into the air that reduced the protective layer around the planet. During this time they were exploring nearby planets to go to in order to save the species. Then when they found one that was habitable, they sent as many of their species as they could to this new planet to start all over again.....
And now we're doing it all over again.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
The weirdest thing is that these lifeforms evolved from "normal" terestrial life, and aparently within a couple thousand years. The majority of the species found there lost vision and skin pigments.
So why not something similar on Mars ? If water was flowing on Mars (and that implies some temperature ranges), there's a good posibility for life. At some point a planet-wide cataclism changes everything - surface water is completely lost - but in some places water, along with its inhabitans, is trapped underground. Evolution takes care of the details.
A long stretch, of course, but not unlikely.
The Raven
Yes, there is a way - it's called DNA.
The very first question a biologist will ask, if we actually find life on mars, will be whether it's genetic structure is similar to anything found on earth. If the genetic structure is similar to things found on earth, then most likely, the material is not native to the planet. (Carried there by a comet...etc).
-ted
What, from nil to nearly nil?
It took a lot more than just water to cause create reproducing life. Most of our modern theories concerning evolution and the origin of life on Earth point to life being very rare in the universe. Of course those theories could be wrong, but barring evidence to the contrary, I find that it is more likely than not that life is rare and thus the chances that Mars once had life on it are astronomically small. But clearly NASA feels differently or they wouldn't be so eager to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to disprove commonly accepted theories on the origin of life.
$5 says that if life did ever exist on Mars, it came over on a poorly sterilized spaceship.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
NASA has too big of a budget?
I am not an organic chemist, and to my knowledge neither is Carl Sagan.
I however mentioned this to a an organic chemist freind of mine and he laughed at the idea. It is true that carbon and silicon have 4 valence electrons and in theory could form long chain molicules with great complexity, but Si forms somewhat weaker single bonds than carbon. This causes long chain hydrosilicates to be both unstable and shockingly flamible. In short he told me that for life to be silicon based it would either have to be very cold, or have an absurdly fast growth/reproduction cycle.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
I heard somewhere that if all of human knowledge were put into a balloon the questions we need to answer are on the surface and what we don't know would be all that is outside the balloon. As we continue to fill the balloon the surface becomes larger thus we have even more questions.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
This is where we're heading folks, the way they make us migrate en masse to and from work seems harmless enough ... but what if there was only 1 big company and everybody collectively drove the same direction .... against the planets rotation maybe...
Exactly. They all tried to drive the same direction one day and countered the planets rotation, causing it to cool, stripping away it's magnetic shield and leaving Mars at the mercy of the solar wind - which blew everything off the planet. Cars and all.
....with a baseball glove in his hand and his dick hanging out.
Signs of water upteen gazillion years ago are only useful in providing hope that fossil fuels exists. Why else would Bush want to go to Mars, other than to find oil, that and maybe to exact a preemptive strike to prevent the war of the worlds. I saw that movie, and those martians certainly had weapons of mass destruction.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
radiocarbon dating is reliable out to about 60,000 years - http://science.howstuffworks.com/carbon-142.htm. The error increases, the older the samples are. I think radiocarbon dating can do + or - one year for up to several thousand years ago.
What I've always found weird is that, based on the assumption that the planets were formed from the same 'cloud' of interstellar particles, how they've evolved with such different compositions. There's clearly activity that we don't know about going on.
Suppose during the birth of the sun, it was immensely hot, and began cooling as the fuel for fusion burned off. Initially, life formed on one of the outer planets, as temperature and perhaps a few said unexplained phenomena created the so-called 'life conditions', and that this gradually moves inward as the planets cool.
We don't really have a timeline on when this happened, but I'd expect it to be longer than you or I have ever lived. Maybe it's actually been long enough that all traces of civilization have been eradicated by natural forces (such as a meteor impact). We've only been fiddling with rocks on the surface on Mars, but closer to home, we only find traces of older civilizations when we unearth then from several meters below the surface.
Um.. no, I will have to say there's no supporting evidence.
But the article says "water for eons"... Does that mean it flowed bee.. er.. Pepsi in between the two eons? /ducks
Whens the next flight there?
Way too many people dissmiss the certainty of evolution because "theory" is in the name. Ronald Reagan was perhaps the most famous person to make this mistake, using the american vernacular refering to "theory" as somthing which is at a lower degree of confidence than a "fact". However within the scientific meaning of "theory of evolution", theory merely means the ideas which explain the facts. "Facts" can be considered to be the raw data which theories are built around.
Example: You walk into a dark room. It is your "theory" that someone has turned the lights out. It is a "fact" that is it dark. It is not a fact that someone has turned the lights out, even if your brother comes into the rooms and confessess to having done so. Facts are data, theories are explainations. A theory is NOT meant to mean "less than confident" fact.
So anyone who argues against evolution because it is "just a theory" is actually arguing semantics, and is making a fundemental gramtical error. There is no such thing as "just" a theory.
more information here
The Bible says nothing about life elsewhere, either for or against.
It is a book written (yes I know, many books over a long period of time, yada yada) for humans, i.e. mankind. That's what it addresses, life on this planet.
Finding sentient life elsewhere would indeed be pretty astounding but basically irrelevent to the message contained in the Bible which is addressed to mankind. It's about man's relationship to God not man's relationship to the inhabitants of Zebulon 5.
Finding bacteria on a rock orbiting around the sun relatively close to our own rock wouldn't mean anything in particular in terms of religion. So what.
No implosion, why. It is completely unecessary for the earth to be unique. Religions address mankind and life on earth. I'll speak for Christianity because that what I know most about: the Bible claims to explain life on earth for humans, not life on Vulcan.
Think about it, we're talking about God here, why couldn't God have billions of planets and lifeforms. I'd say that's up to him wouldn't you?
1. All molecules are formed by chance. The respective building blocks (elements or other molecules) must meet with the proper energy and orientation in order to combine. All the talk of activation energies, intermediary stability, etc. are just ways to quantize and categorize the probability of formation.
2. No. The calculation is based on the chemicals required to create RNA strands, which is the only currently known way for biological replication to occur (replication is required for evolution) and for biological information to be stored. Thinking up "just so" scenarios for molecules based on what they might do is bad science.
3. No. The calculation of odds is for RNA, which is the simplest molecule we know of that can replicate and pass on information.
4. No. Innumerable trials would NOT be occurring simultaneously. A finite number of trials would be occurring simultaneously.
The chemistry here is pretty straightforward. When you start looking at the actual chemicals required and not just some hypothetical substance A, compound B, etc. the probabilities of these chemicals, according to the laws of chemistry, forming RNA is vanishingly small.
I don't care if you have 10^30 simultaneous trials going on. If the odds against it happening once are 10^80, you still have a statistically insignificant chance of abiogenesis occurring once, let alone twice within the same universe.
You might as well start talking with a straight face about the real possibility of 747s full of encyclopedia salesmen named Bob flying out of black holes. (It is statistically possible, you know.)
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Religion has nothing positive to do with science. When creationists attempt to twist science to match the the stories in the bible, they've stepped way over the line. I have nothing but the most profound disrespect for creationist opinions. I have absolutely no concern for why a creationist would not share my views. Zero.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't see why everyone is so certain that water based life is the only kind there is.
I never said that it was impossible to form life without life. I said:
"The absence of ANY water would substantially decrease the chance of life."
That statement does not preclued the possibility of other environments. It just reflects our current undertanding of what factors contribute to the formation of life.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"