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Water Flowed Recently on Mars
elfguygmail.com writes "According to to Space.com 'Small gullies on Mars were carved by water recently and would be prime locations to look for life, NASA scientists said today.' "
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I don't think you understand.. if we get non-terrestrial life and it's genetic code, the results will be the biggest discovery of the last 100 yrs (leaving out quantum physics and atomic energy).. for instance.. we get to see if it also has a "handedness" in the formation of its molecules. check this:
3 408.html
" The crucial biomolecules of life - such as amino acids, RNA and DNA - are chiral. In order for these polymeric molecules to replicate themselves, their individual components have to be of one kind, either right- or left-handed.
"It is generally agreed that you need homochirality - either all left-handed or all right-handed - for life to get off the ground," Bonner said. "Therefore, a preponderance of one handedness must have evolved in prebiotic times."
The scientists, however, cannot explain how this happened because they have never succeeded in creating chiral molecules of only one kind in laboratory experiments that simulated prebiotic conditions.
Since chiral molecules are necessary to breed new chiral molecules, how did the first ones come about? "
from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/93/930210Arc
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
I was a little disappointed to find no mention in TFA about what they meant by "recently". 1 year? 5? 10? 100? 1000? 10K?
Many will be thinking, water == life!. Let's say this improves the possibility, but if most water on Mars is (and especially, was) mostly locked up as ice and/or only very ephemerally available, then I'd say it's much less likely that the "long shot" of evolution that led to our existence on Earth could have taken place similarly on Mars. Our planet spent millions of years two-thirds covered in water and under a dense methane-ammonia atmosphere. In contrast, it seems Mars had far less soup under far less atmosphere at (average) somewhat lower temperatures. I guess the only thing Mars might have had more of, sans an atmosphere of effective sunscreens, is ionizing (and hence mutagenic) radiation.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
I think it is more likely that life on Earth originated on Mars that the other way around. Mars cooled faster, and it's easier for ejecta to get from Mars to Earth. Either way, life that has evolved separately for such a long time would be very important scientifically.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
There is also the possibility that life on Earth is just life that migrated from Mars.
Perhaps at one time the very beginnings of life were on Mars but due to its conditions the life couldn't sustain itself. However, with all the ejecta shot into space from impacts the life found a very comfy and hospitable home here on this blue planet.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
No, the beliefs would just evolve to accomodate (or deny) the new discoveries like they always do.
You see, once there's a sudden change in the culture and the current belief system becomes unfit to propogate around the population, new amendments are inserted more-or-less randomly into the belief structure and whichever mutations are most fit to attract the greatest number of believers will become the basis for future generations of the religion.
This ability to adapt is really the cornerstone for modern day religion. It also provides us with a wide diversity and complexity of belief systems, yet which all have striking similarities.
If God can create one world, and all life on it, why not others? Just because Scripture is silent about life elsewhere in the universe doesn't mean it doesn't exist, only that it has nothing to do with His plan for Earth.
Blind militant atheism is as bad as blind militant fundamentalism. Open your eyes.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
because Mars has a lower escape velocity than the Earth. So its easier to throw rock from the surface of Mars to Earth than visa versa.
Ian
Now, I'm not the GP, but unfounded aggressive anti-religious statements annoy me as an agnostic: I'd like to perceive atheism as being a rational alternative to religion, and broad, sweeping statements like that aren't helping. Furthermore, seeing as I agree with the GP, you seem to by extension assert that I am under the control of organised religion. Being, as I've mentioned, an agnostic, I find this idea counterintuitive and would like to hear the reasoning behind it.
First of all, you do realise that ad hominem arguments are rather obvious fallacies? The AC hadn't even brought his personal beliefs - which, after all, were irrelevant to the discussion - into the matter. You really shouldn't try to attack people for their beliefs before you even give them a chance to state them.
As for the actual question: The Bible doesn't concern itself with the physical space that lies beyond the Earth, for reasons that should be obvious to both believers and non-believers. The book was written before its intended audience had any idea that such a space existed in as concrete a form as we now know it does.
From a secular viewpoint, this means that the people who wrote it couldn't discuss concepts that were conceived after their deaths.
From a Judeo-Christian viewpoint, it means that the existence of planets beyond our own would be a silly thing for a god to talk about to the human race. While I'm not very well versed in theology, I think it's safe to say that the Judeo-Christian god tends not to concern himself with scientific discoveries past, present or future, but rather with moral codes and prophecies of the future of humanity(in both the physical and the metaphysical spheres).
As far as I know, the idea that Christianity and extraterrestrial life are incompatible is a myth. (Christianity, of course, would hold that God, being all-seeing and all-powerful, is also the god that ultimately was the creator of whatever other planets and creatures that may exist - but this is not logically incompatible with the rest of the set of beliefs.) It may not have been so at one time - I daresay that Christianity at the time of Copernicus was generally hostile to all kinds of astronomy - but I've yet to find a single Christian who thinks that extraterrestrial life would invalidate his or her beliefs, and the Christianity of the present, like it or not, is defined by the beliefs of those who currently consider themselves Christians.
As for your closing paragraph: while a case can be made for the Marxist view of organised religion, you are approaching it far too naïvely. Saying that it was created for one thing only is simplifying the issue. Even from a thoroughly anti-religious point of view, you'll have to agree that religion throughout history has - to take a stunningly arbitrary example - provided comfort to believers who otherwise would have felt trapped in a world they had no chance of understanding, therefore causing them to cling to it. You can't simplify religion - or even superstition, which religion is indistinguishable from from a materialist viewpoint - down to a conspiracy theory.
(You can try, of course, but then you'll be playing "make believe" without even asserting that you have felt a supernatural influence - which is logically provably silly.)