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Martian Sea Discovered
mpesce writes "New Scientist is reporting that a large sea of frozen ice (between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 m deep) has been discovered by the ESA's Mars Express Probe. Here's the kicker: the sea of block ice is only five degrees away from the Martian equator. New Scientist also links to a PDF of a paper to be presented next month about the finding." Update: 02/21 15:30 GMT by T : Note: that's 45 meters deep, not 45 kilometers deep.
If US citizens can't drink the water in Mexico, I seriously doubt we'll be able to drink the water on Mars. Hopefully for the same reasons...
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
But even a minor increase in atmospheric pressure would have a massive impact on the feasability and safety of large domes, for instance, because it would even out the pressure difference between the outside and inside of a habitable dome.
Just getting to a temperature and atmosphere where humans won't die instantly without a suit, or can work/survive outside in warm clothes and an oxygen mask will have a dramatic impact on how easy it will be to have a sustained presence, and the safety of a colony that would otherwise have to have massive safeguards against damages to habitats.
Keep in mind that there are many areas on earth that are extremely inhospitable. While it would be great if Mars could once be as hospitable as the more pleasant areas of the earth, that doesn't mean that less won't still make it possible (or even interesting) to live there.
Humans are quite resilient.
"Imagine living on a planet where you get tax breaks for driving big inefficient vehicles that produce greenhouse gases."
Um, we ALREADY DO.
SUV, truck owners get a big tax break
CONs of the SUV Tax Break
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Isn't the much more important mistake that they don't actually know that it's water?
A new perspective.
I spent several years working in and around the small northern communities in Canada's Arctic.
The Inuit population there refer to water as "molten ice", because ice is the most common state.
Were as we southerners (south of the arctic circle) consider ice as frozen water.
Oh well, I thought it was funny.
Everyone knows that nature is static, and how things were 50, 100, or 1000 years ago are the way that they should be today, tomorrow, and forever!
The reason why large scale or long-term changes to the environment are so risky is not, as you mistakenly state, that nature is static. Rather, it is that nature is highly dynamic on time scales spanning millennia and we don't understand the dynamics yet. A significant change that we think produces benefits may, in the long term, have devastating consequences.
Once we understand natural systems sufficiently well to be able to predict the consequences of our actions in the long term, then we can engage in deliberate planet-wide engineering efforts, here on earth on on Mars. Until then, anything that alters our atmosphere, oceans, or ecology significantly is Russian roulette.