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New Clue for Life on Mars?
thhamm writes "Recent analyses of ESA's Mars Express data reveal that concentrations of water vapour and methane in the atmosphere of Mars significantly overlap. This result, from data obtained by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS), gives a boost to understanding of geological and atmospheric processes on Mars, and provides important new hints to evaluate the hypothesis of present life on the Red Planet."
all but the 5th planet are yours, oh, you might want to avoid that nasty 4th planet, too..
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's really awesome, and really amazing, that as we study Mars more, the evidence suggests more and more that life is possible. In other words, the body of evidence isn't ruling life out even as we gather more evidence. It's STILL premature to assume this is life-generated, but its another awesome piece of support for the increased possibility of life.
Moo.
Why the assumption that life can't evolve without water??
They used the phrases "tens of centimeters" and "tens of degrees celsius". I really hate these terms, especially in what should be a scientific article. This could mean anywhere from 20-100 (or more) which is a pretty broad range. Would it be so difficult to say 20-50 (or whatever the measurements are) which would give a much more accurate picture?
Where the hell do the Martians come from?
Put life on mars.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Vampires don't breathe, and they're teeming beneath the dried-blood surface of Mars. Those telltale methane/water signals must be more residue from the victims from which the iron-rich surface powder was derived, shielding the biters from the rays of the Sun.
--
make install -not war
It just seems that there are some spots that might be a little warmer than others, or so goes the hypothesis as I understand it, from geothermal sources. It seems like a little bit of a stretch to link it directly with life on Mars. Perhaps this gives some ideas where to look for life on Mars, but the article itself doesn't seem to make much in the way for claims about Martian life.
Am I reading this wrong?
If I am not, does every discovery about Mars need to really be linked to life for it to be fascinating? Or does the press feel that's the need these days?
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
The martians have your rover in a containment unit that makes you humans think that you're exploring their world!
the Wong's have all those herds. Of course they have methane and ammonia. Duh.
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Found on Uranus. Especially after drinking a few too many Beers and eating some mexican food.
I do wonder if and when it is decided that mars could support life but no life exists, wouldn't it make a damn cool experiment to start planting life there? Could start with some sort of simple plant life (algae?) that would help prime the atmosphere for higher life forms. They may need to be genetically altered to survive in the environment.
;)
And if Mars does turn out to have some sort of life, could we do it on the next candidate that matches the requirements? Europa maybe? That in fact may be an even better candidate because there is less chance of indigenous life making it to earth (by hitching a ride on a rock after a meteor impact). That is, until they develop space flight.
The only bad thing would be that I wouldn't be around to see the end results of the experiment.
I didn't RTFA so please mod me down if this was already addressed.
I thought that the probe was just able to discern hydrogen. Since water and methane are both hydrogen rich, couldn't it be mistaking one for the other?
Blaze a trail to the New World
Little farty green men!
We should capture them as use them as fuel
Noted scientist Marvin, native to Mars, had disclosed his observations concerning the 3rd planet from the Sun. From his latest discourse "... ohhh, you are making me very angry.." Critics agree, he is green with envy and possibly has access to a BFG. One warns "... be on the lookout for a 'flying saucer' type craft in the Earth's moon's orbit..." and suggests getting some local wildlife, perhaps a rabbit, to meet the threat. Stay tuned for details.
If NASA were to say collect some of the water vapor, bottle it, and get it back here, then they would have no need for goverment funding...
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I don't know. I'm stil not sold. I wanna see some physical evidence. Bones, fossils, physical junk that can be hauled back to DC, put on display at the Smithsonian Museum, and drooled on by elementary school students.
Hypothesizing over gases and trace h20 evidence, and similar will not get me interested. Just like I told the church, faith won't get me there alone, I wanna see something.
On the other hand, I think it's more likely that a planet would develop life in close proximity to another planet with life, rather than have them equally distributed through the universe.
I'm assuming that cross-insemination through meteorite impacts, etc... is possible.
water vapour and methane in the atmosphere
Nah, that's just residue from the Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
i mean, think of drakes equation, what are the chances that of the small amount of planets that can sustaine life, the first one happens to be next door....
Well, given that we know Mars is a planet that (a) exists and (b) is approximately suitable for life, we're now looking for the value of f_{l}.
Estimates range from 1e-{very big} (i.e., Earth is the only planet on which life arose, ever) to 1.0 {to a rather large number of significant digits} (i.e., almost all suitable planets have life).
There are good arguments in both directions. Let's just say I would be unsurprised with whichever outcome turns up.
unlikely, since were sitting in the golden spot for life, anywhere farther or closer to the sun wont be very good for life...
I believe that temperatures on Mars would be reasonable if it had a working greenhouse effect. Temperatures on Venus would be reasonable (although a _little_ on the warm side) if it didn't. Also note that there is a very wide degree of temperatures to which life has adapted here on Earth. The habitable zone is probably a lot wider than you think.
The only problem with terraforming mars is the lack of magnetic field and its weak gravity. The weak gravity allows the atmosphere to escape http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Mars/atmosphere.htm l and the lack of magnetic field allows the solar wind to blow the rest of the atmosphere away. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_1 .htm So, we could make it fit for human habitation, but we would have to continually replenish the atmosphere making it uneconomical.
Yeah. If we see the sig of *both* methane and
oxygen then its pretty much a nobrainer there's
life.
Methane on it's own, given mars' current atmosphere
composition is just a teaser. Annnoying, real sexy, but geologic processes could be responsible.
I hope we see lots more surprises. Heck. we are just
starting to play with this place. Its one big planet even though it looks small and I for one pray that no
nasty stupid monkey hobnail boots it before we get
to do serious science...
If there is indeed life on Mars, and a future sample retrieval mission obtains a sample, AND the replicating mechanism of that sample is NOT RNA/DNA (but perhaps, a more primitive form of it), would that be enough to convince significant numbers of creationists of evolution? The body of evidence keeps growing -- there's gotta be a point somewhere when the argument is as straight-forward as round Earth -vs- flat Earth.
(Of course, one might say we're already at that point, but we also don't have Ph.D. scientists from Berkeley and the like advocating a flat earth...)
...and hence we will never be able to do anything useful with the place.
Yey Bro. It sure is an interesting chemical. SO interesting in fact that if you go look in a serious university library you'll find a shelf + of books just called "water".
We don't understand why. Both O and H are pretty common, but H2O is darned weird. So darned weird
I'd guess we'll *still* be writing books about it
1000 years from now.
I like the stuff myself (from a distance). My Cretan
friend here Manolis loves it and insists on risking his life on a yacht. Personally I'm too damn scared. You can never drown on a nice
sandy clay or chalky soil can you..
The debate about life using NH3 or HF is long dead. Hydrogen and Oxygen are about as common as anything you can imagine. So is Carbon . Even the
astrophysicts (who disparingly refer to anything heavier than helium as metals much to this chemists disgust (we love these guys though...))
don't fantasize about worlds where life uses Boron
and Fluorine (excuse me, where would they come from Mr. Sci Fi author?).
H2O is excellent stuff. Sometimes though even careful researchers forget that it can even dissolve glass - Oh yes, the big polywater fiasco.
God. I'm showing my age aren't I...
That's absurd. look at all the unexpected places in the past 10 years where we've found life -- on Earth. and the majority of life doesnt have bones, or saucer wrecks, or is visible to the naked eye.
Moo.
To look at a rock in space and say, " I doubt there is life there" is to ignore the fact that we have yet to find a place where life can't exist (maybe the sun...). In essence, if there is energy, then there exists the potential for something to exploit that energy. And more often the not, something does.
The question should be "What is living on this rock, and why can't I find it?"
"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering." -- Arthur C. Clark
For a good part of the history of life on earth, you wouldn't find any of those things either, because macroscopic organisms had not yet appeared.
Thanks for a great question - allow me to jump into the fray.
<DISCLAIMER>Okay, first of all, let me offer a caveat: I'm a creationist, but I don't believe that evolution is impossible: I just don't believe that God chose to use evolution to create man. More specifically, the Bible says God created Man - it doesn't say HOW, but since it says He created us "in His image", I don't believe that leaves much room for "in the image of a monkey". </DISCLAIMER>
Given that disclaimer, as a Christian, I have no problem believing in life on Mars. Why should I, as an intelligent, thinking, yet finite creature, believe that I can understand how an infinitely powerful God decided to create things? Why should the concept of life on Mars offend my sensibilities? Rather, it would increase my sense of awe at the variety of God's creation and abilities. See, I'm a logical Christian - I believe that the very definition of "god" implies infinite ability - and I don't believe it's my place to artificially limit His ability simply because it's too difficult to comprehend. Instead, I have to continually adjust MY thinking about God to suit the evidence around me.
The church in the years since the Enlightenment has constantly had the same struggle - how to reconcile the Bible with new scientific data. But that didn't end up destroying the Church - instead it gave greater awareness of the awesome, majestic creation around us. The Bible states that the universe itself sings God's praises, and that no man has any excuse for not believing in God, because God has presented Himself to us via everything we see around us.
Now, before the evolutionists and atheists out there jump on me for a perceived inconsistency in my logic, let me go a step further. I do NOT believe, given this framework, that just because God CAN use scientific processes to create, that He always DOES so. The Bible is very clear about the process whereby man was created - and it was very different than the process by which animals and other life were created. It clearly specifies that God "breathed life into Adam". This description makes it clear that there was a separate, unique step of creative endowment with "life" - meaning a spirit, not just "life" as purely reproductive ability. So, no, I don't see man as having evolved. That does NOT, however, discount the possibility that evolution is possible and even responsible for the fossil record.
Let me make one other useful point. I don't believe that evolution is overall God's tool of choice for creation. There are huge gaps in the fossile record between monkey and man, and huge gaps between many other species. From a strict scientific-process viewpoint, evolution is still a hypothesis: it has never been proven as the means by which all the current diversity of life exists. In fact, there are many very convincing reasons to believe that the fossil record and many other observable facts all illustrate that evolution is NOT a possible explanation for what we see around us. If you disagree, just do a Google search for the data. There are plenty of SCIENTISTS that believe in creation.
At this point, most Baptists and other fundamentalists reading this are probably seething with righteous indignation. Still, I'm a fundamentalist in this manner: I believe that the Bible is the complete, wholly accurate, inerrant, and literal word of God, at least in its original form (the original documents in the original languages, not any of our English translations). I've had this discussion with many fundamentalist friends - and they can no more convince me that I'm
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
>Mars would be reasonable if it had a working greenhouse effect. Temperatures on Venus would be reasonable (although a _little_ on the warm side) if it didn't.
OT: actually this is not strictly true; a greenhouse effect is the least of Venus's problems. Venus is an Earth-sized world which never underwent a large collision in it's formation and never aquired a lunar body. Earth, conversely, had a small planetoid smack into it some four billion years ago, blasting away most of the atmosphere and putting enough debris in orbit to form a very large moon. The impact combined with the subesquent lunar gravity skimming away the upper atmosphere ensued that the Earth wound up with a _very_ thin atmosphere for a body it's size.
In the case of Mars, the planet is much smaller (around 40% the size of Earth or Venus IIRC). Furthermore Mars has not one but two samll moons in orbit (unlike ours, they're really just captured asteroids but that's beside the point). And Mars has no protective magnetic field, and is consequently exposed to charged solar radiation, further thinning the atmosphere. Thus the pressure on the surface is way lower than terrestrial norms, whereas on Venus the pressure is obscenely high by our standards. The temerature differences are a matter of insulation largely (and solar proximity) but a greenhouse effect is almost moot. You might as well say that lunar nights would be warmer if the moon had a greenhouse effect; it's true but misleading given that the major issue is the simple presence or absence of a gas envelope. And no, the greenhouse effect does not refer to just insulation; it refers to the presence of gases that are trasparent to visible light but reflective to InfraRed (IIRC).
The theory I've heard is that Mars had a higher pressure and surface water at one point before its magnetic field quit. At this stage it would have still been fairly cold, but otherwise suitable for limited life. Life could have evolved then and subsequently died off; the interesting question is whether any life could have survived in niche environments.
Any astrophysicists or biologists care to elaborate/correct?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Drake's equation gives an estimation of how many intelligent technological civilizations with the capacity to communicate on interstellar level. However, you could change the equation to give an estimation on "life" in general in the universe.