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Test Equipment Finds Life In Mars-like Conditions
DIY News writes "In a test of equipment that might one day be used to search for biological activity on Mars, researchers discovered life tucked deep inside a frozen Norwegian volcano, a test region said to have geology similar to that of Mars. The test instruments discovered a rare and complex microbial community living in blue ice vents inside a frozen volcano, which is the kind of evidence scientists have been searching for on the Red Planet."
But why don't we go ahead and spend the money to see if life can exist on mars...on mars? I'd rather my tax dollars going into science more than most things. What say you?
Now the question is not whether Mars can support life, it is whether or not Mars could have supported its abiogenesis and subsequent evolution.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Went to the website and it froze up...slashdotted already?
This ad space for rent.
I'm waiting until they find life in Uranus!!
It really astounds me how life 'finds' a way to every possible surface/hole/place in this planet. As for Mars or any other planet, it's great if they find life... but I'm really only interested in 'big' animals, plants or 'sentient' beings. Bacteria/whatever is interesting, but I'm not of the camp of "life is exclusive to Earth", so I take life on other planets of the Universe "for granted".
Disclosure: I'm stupid
Here.
Do these lifeforms work with oxygen and/or carbohydrates and/or water? Whenever a discussion about possible extraterrestial life pops up, I always have to ask if the researchers have considered lifeforms that don't work like the ones we're used to.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So we can send our microbes there and just have to wait for like a few hundred billion years till humans's can survive there. I can't wait!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
The photo shows one of these Martian-like creatures at work in their natural habitat. Apparently they look just like coke dealers here on earth filling up baggies for distribution. Except they are all red with purple hands.
Went to the website and it froze up...slashdotted already?
Note what TFA says: living in blue ice vents inside a frozen volcano. They're trying to reproduce the environment and temperatures from Mars, so freezing up makes sense.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I wonder, is there a possibility of not identifying Mars' living things as form of life, just because it is very different from ours? How do one check, whether the thing is alive or not?
May Peace Prevail On Earth
There is life. Anywhere there is no water (Atacama Desert, Chile - no measurable rain in 100 years) there is no life. That's been borne out by every observation of Earth. Although increasingly hostile conditions make for less and simplier life (ie extremophiles), there is still life. Now the question is, 'Does that apply to other planets too?' I imagine that at some point, a planet or moon would need to have a large body of liquid water to facilitate the initial creation of life.
While this is amazing proof of life on Earth, unfortunately it is not proof of life on Mars.
These Earth-borne creatures are red because of the propensity of life on Earth to use iron as a key component in blood. I would expect that Martian creatures would have copper coursing through their veins.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
At least some aspect of the human race is earnestly exploring the possibility of living in other planets/moons/galaxies in whatever timeframe. If such an endeavour is taken up, almost certainly, we are going to build a habitat thats suitable for us...warm, abundance of water, sunlight, etc.
Search for/Finding out that indigenous life exists is merely a psychological boost to set that up than to find little green (wo)men.
A.
It'll be a cold day in a volcano when they find life on Mars!
Wait a minute...
We are looking for a precise thing we call life. This quest is very specific and could lead to wrong considerations.
The point is that we know too little about life, Universe and everything to do something resembling a real search for life.
I recall Cristoforo Colombo that knew too little about India to understand that it was not India at all!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
"The organisms found in ice are survivors" . Oh No, not another Reality Show
What would it mean if we discovered microbial life on another planet? Honestly. What would it mean. One, it would mean that the posibilty of life is not that uncommon. Life prevails under the harshest of circumstances here on Earth. Why not elsewhere?
Two, if it does exist elsewhere, then what's so special about our planet?
Three, what's stopping it from evolving beyond the microbial stage? It opens the floodgates on "what is possible" in this universe.
I for one, welcome.... nm. I'm interested to know if mankind as a whole is ready to comprehend the fact that life is not indigenous to Earth...
There is simply too much glass..
I'm honestly not surprised; life is the most adaptable thing in the entire universe.
In New Zealand, the Maori traditionally attributed life to fire. I'm sure they were not the only ones. It consumes, reproduces, moves and behaves chaotically.
You know, although I do think it's really important to discover if there's *any* life on Mars, I think ultimately humanity is being foolish by not focusing in other, more fruitful directions.
It would be an interesting discovery if we found life on Mars, because it would be our first opportunity to examine a lifeform (however simple) that is not of Earthly origin.
But, I can't help but feel like a lot of the focus on finding life on Mars is for a more basic reason: we're eager to find ANY life on ANY other planet, just so we can finally put to bed the question of whether there's life elsewhere in the universe. Mars may represent the easiest way to meet that goal, since it's the most promising planet that we can actually land a ship on in a timely fashion.
And although I'd love to see it happen, it's sort of a stupid reason to focus on Mars. Why? Because this question of "is there life out there" is all but a foregone conclusion. Honestly, what scientist, from a scientific perspective, thinks we are the only planet with biological life on it? The scenario in which we really are alone in the universe is the statistically improbable one. It's only our emotional sense of galactic loneliness and our overblown sense of how special and unique we are that makes us think it's a significant possibility.
Why is it the majority of the population believes in the existance of God, a being with no scientific basis, but yet we can't just accept that it would be one of the biggest surprises in the history of humanity if we one day discover that we ARE, in fact, alone in the universe.
So I'm just asking whether there's more to be learned from the intense studies being done on Mars, than if that effort were spent focusing on other NASA-like things, such as figuring out how to build better and faster spaceships to take us further from Earth so that we might discover more INTERESTING lifeforms than microscopic bacteria.
Is what we're finding on Mars really more important than expanding our overall space explorations, or are we simply allowing ourselves to be biased from this foolish desire to prove to ourselves that we're not alone in the universe?
Besides, don't you think it would be a lot more efficient to travel through space looking for giant giveaways of intelligient life, like, say, planets that look like ours, satellites and space stations orbiting planets, or OTHER spaceships flying around? Wouldn't we be making much faster progress if we just ASSUMED there is life in the rest of the universe and GET OVER our need to examine every last speck of Mars?
high school buiology is oversimplified and to large extent obsolete. imagine a simple electronic thingie which can respond to stimuli (my computer can do that), but is it alive? imagine a robotic factory programmed to replicate itself - is it alive just because it replicates itself and not cars or whatever? i think not. defining life is not that easy consciousness may be? but i am one of those that are sure that animals have "souls" and are consciouss as well as plants and may be even bacteria... but... we cannot mesure level of consciousness
Deliriant isti Americani.
Cellular life we know of on Earth is based on complex molecules. Basically carbon is the only atom that can form these complex molecules (with an outside chance that silicon could do similar).
Studying the radiation from other parts of the universe, it seems that stars out there are made of the same basic elements as the ones we are familiar with here. So it follows that if there is complex life out there, it is probably carbon based. So we have a fairly clear idea of what carbon-based cellular living organism looks like.
Once you get a chunk of some substance under the microscope, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a determination about whether it was or is living.
Isn't that an oxymoron, like 'jumbo shrimp' or 'Microsoft innovation'?
Researchers are now investigating wether there is intelligent life in Norway. "The odds are against it," says a swedish scientist.
'Test Equipment Finds Life in Mars-like Conditions '
Yes, but its life that has evolved over millions of years on the Earth. Living creatures are extremely adaptable. Given time, you could expect some life form or the other to make it thru' in the worst of climates.
So it does not follow that you can extrapolate this to a conclusion that life of a similar sort could have existed in Mars. The toughie is finding out if life can start anywhere, and in what initial conditions. Natural selection will take care of the surviving.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Test Equipment Finds Life In Mars-like Conditions
..till they find life in Snickers-like conditions
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Long term colonisation of Mars would require locally grown food, and preferably not at the expense of shipping in from Earth all the resources they need to grow. Is this a step towards finding hardy life forms that can be mutated to grow in Mars, or in a hybrid Mars-Earth condition? (ie. giving plants some support but not having to create Earth conditions). Hence making the possibility of long term missions to Mars more achievable...
Yup, I don't see why people bother with testing and training, whether it's for space missions or going to war.
I, for one, welcome our new microbial-community-living-in-blue-ice-vents-insid e-a-frozen-volcano overlords.
In soviet russia, life discovers you.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of researchers on mars.
And who discovers me in my volcano, you insensitive clod!??
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
It came back positive, so NASA declared the test invalid. Now the developer of it (and others) have declared that the test was valid. All things considered, the test probably was valid.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
that is what Earth is.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Even worse, what happens when your fancy machine gets taken over by rare and complex microbial monsters?!
There is a high probablility that Mars has blowback from meteorites from Earth. So life on Mars may have very well been there, but from Earth.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
There is a river in Spain (Tinto River) in which life is supposed to be impossible and still, some kind of bacteria has been found in it.
Now, we know life rises in unthinkable places, but it is the final time now to go to Mars and stop doing experiments about where life would grow in Earth even if we think it is not possible.
We could be wondering and experimenting thounsands or maybe millions of possibilities, that wont bring the fact that there is life in Mars. Going there and check, that will.
So why exactly do you need air? Remember that this is deep underground, in tunnels of water within ice, near volcanoes who can give heat. Also, for other posters who complain about no pressure, I imagine there is plenty of pressure once you go deep enough into the ice (3-5km). I don't think there was alot of air where they drilled in Svalbard (Norway)... Water on Mars has been proven, and you don't need alot of water for this scenario. -Filik
"If the whole earth had been dry volcanic craters with little or no
."?
water what do you reckon the odds on lfe ever evolving would be?"
How about "If the whole of MARS had been dry volcanic craters. .
You're forgetting there is a plethora of evidence to suggest it was much wetter in the past. A frozen volcano on Earth and a Martian lake/sea are not similar conditions.
Hmmm
As others have noted, perhaps expecting life on Mars or any other heavenly body to be even recognizable is foolish. What if other forms of life move slowly through time? Imagine a human-like being who lives for a billion years, but moves so slowly that they only manage to get done what one normal human gets done in their 75 years. Or visual a rock. Just a stone. It's life span is a few billion years. It thinks, lives, reproduces, but far too slowly for us to notice.
Refering back to the acetylene life, what if we slowed down normal chemical rxns associated with life on earth down immensely, but they still worked for some other type of organism?
Why does life have to exist in our four dimensions?
Is it that hard to believe that life could be made up of large-scale mechanics? Earth-life is chemical in nature, but getting down to the nitty-gritty of the chemistry sends you back to physics. Couldn't we have large-scale life, using the mechanics of chemistry, but on much larger atomic particles?
Just a few things that came to mind when I read this article.
--;
"Our instrument, designed by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), detected minute quantities of aromatic hydrocarbons from microorganisms and lichens present in the rocks and ice," said JPL researcher Arthur Lonne Lane."
Mmmmmmmmm...aromatic hydrocarbons......
In case you were wondering....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromatic_hydrocarbon
WIKIPEDIA----
An aromatic hydrocarbon (abbreviated as AH), or arene is a hydrocarbon, the molecular structure of which incorporates one or more planar sets of six carbon atoms that are connected by delocalised electrons numbering the same as if they consisted of alternating single and double covalent bonds. After the simplest possible aromatic hydrocarbon, benzene, such a configuration of six carbon atoms is known as a benzene ring.
PAHs and the origins of life In January 2004 (at the 203rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society), it was reported (as cited in Battersby, 2004) that a team led by A. Witt of the University of Toledo, Ohio studied ultraviolet light emitted by the Red Rectangle nebula and found the spectral signatures of anthracene and pyrene. (No other such complex molecules had ever before been found in space.) This discovery was considered confirmation of a hypothesis that as nebulae of the same type as the Red Rectangle approach the ends of their lives, convection currents cause carbon and hydrogen in the nebulae's core to get caught in stellar winds, and radiate outward. As they cool, the atoms supposedly bond to each other in various ways and eventually form particles of a million or more atoms. Witt and his team inferred (as cited in Battersby, 2004) that since they discovered PAHs--which may have been vital in the formation of early life on Earth--in a nebula, nebulae, by necessity, are where they originate.
The interesting thing is that life as we know it can form out of combinations of stellar particles, is it just a random occurence? It is possible that Mars has life and we just haven't found it? Of course, but we will need a machine that can dig deep in the ground with greater power, mobility and flexibility.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Hey, I know you! You're the guy who planned the introduction of new species to Australia, right? Hence making the continent more easily colonized in the long term by Europeans.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
I think it's false to imply that if we find life in a Mars like place on Earth, then there must be life on Mars. After all, on Earth, life may have developed somewhere/sometime friendlier and adapted to these harsh conditions. Mars may not have a friendly place or had a friendly time.
Mars ain't the same as Earth and life ain't simple. For that matter, science ain't simple. But we're learning and that's cool.
I predict life will probably be found in all hospitable sites in the solar system, and it will all be more or less similar to Earth biochemistry. That is because meteorites bounce back and forth between the planets and moons all the time. About 30 Mars meteorites have been identified on earth so far. Considering how many get lost in the ocean and jungles, its likely that thousands have hit earth. And earth has probably, sent out many itself, though its larger gravitation means not as many as Mars.
Life has been found in nearly all deep drill holes in Earth, indicating that bateria can exist in rocks for million to hundreds of millions of year, more than long enough for a meteor to travel to another planet.
A second guess I making is that life may have originated on Mars first, because the surface of this smaller planet probably stablized quicker than Earth's. Then it infected Earth. Whether it lasted on Mars is unknown.
I just LOVE scanning for lifeforms!
Life forms!
You pretty little life forms!
You precious little life forms!
Where are you?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Make sure you read the whole title. It's quite misleading otherwise.
If they do find life on Mars it'll be fun to watch the kooks try to explain that Mars is only 6000 years old. And there were dinosaur babies on a Martian ark. And a tree with apples that two Martians ate from. etc etc
Trolling is a art,
The simple fact is that to any reasonably educated scientist who understands roughly how the Earth fits into the universe, there is nothing unique or special about our position. As such, if life has evolved on Earth, it would be expected a priori to evolve anywhere else where suitable conditions existed. It will be very difficult to prove the falsifying hypothesis - that there is no life on Mars - but, given the existence of life on Earth, that is the hypothesis that needs to be proved. Anybody who lets their religion get in the way of their understanding of the universe deserves to be tied to a chair and lectured by Richard Dawkins for a few hours (now, sadly, Jay Gould is dead.) Unfortunately, like the animals in Animal Farm, I increasingly find myself looking from fundamentalist Muslim to fundamentalist Christian and being less and less sure of the difference.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I would like to give this article -3 Flamebait modifier. Thank You.
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
Earth's atmosphere is in disequilibrium, because lifeforms constantly replenish certain chemicals - methane, for instance.
The atmosphere of Mars, what there is of it, is in equilibrium. So, if there ever was life on Mars, it's dead now.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
worked out pretty well for the frogs, right?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
That would explain a lot about where Willy Wonka got them and his wardrobe. Or maybe it's just where Johnny Depp came from.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Wow a low /. UID who is a moron, how interesting.
Remind me again why people would WANT to colonize Mars? If we are hurting that bad for space, why not move to Antartica, the bottom of the ocean, of the middle of the desert? All of those would be no more harsh than Mars and they're easier to get to. Is it just the novelty of it? What is the point? Do people LIKE the idea of living completely on artificial life support 24/7? Is it about fat people wanting to be lighter?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I mean, gee, if there were bushes of Marsberry and plenty of tasty Martian foxes and so forth, I would be all for protecting this endemic species. But I don't recall any studies that indicated this was the case.
Mars gravity = 0.38 Earth gravity.
ESPN2 should singlehandedly fund the effort.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
If martian soil and conditions provided a perfect environment for some species of bacterium, how long would it take to cover the planet in such bacteria? (bet those dust devils would whip them about too)
Logic, macros, and more
Why can't they just look at the other views, and use common sense to pick the best plan of action?
I don't know about the other "evolutionsists", but I did exactly what you suggest. I looked at creationism, intelligent design, evolution and thought to myself "gee, this evolution thing seems the least wacky, let's use that!"
Damn you reds. If it can be done, it will be done.
"Good God, some Earth microbes were found in a frozen volcano in Norway -- and everyone throws a fit? Let me guess -- that ice is water right? And oxygen all over the place, plus that huge air pressure ..."
... uphill, both ways ..."
"Back when we were evolving
"Trust me, those microbes are living in a God**** utopia over there on Earth, those punks wouldn't last five minutes -- back on Meridiani Planum."
[Thanks, everyone -- I'll be here all week -- please try the veal]
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
People make the assumption we will recognize life because we have at least a basic (actually; a pretty damn good) understanding of physics at the above-nuclear, or chemical, level. There is this thing called the periodic table that not only categorizes known elements, but makes pretty good estimates about unknown things as well. These reactions are what makes UP the ENTIRE OBSERBABLE UNIVERSE!
The reason life is almost assuredly carbon based has to deal with ways you can get energy - life requires an energy input - and the options available to syntheize new molecules to do things with. Carbon is a VERY SPECIAL ATOM. There is a great quote, from somewhere I can't remember, along the lines of : "Life may turn out to be just another property of the carbon atom."
I'm sure the great FSM and his noodly appendage has touched every atom in the universe. That isn't falsifiable, and isn't science. Spiritual arguements have no place in exobiology discussions.
Yarrr!
..don't panic
Unfortunately, there is nowhere on Earth that scum like GWB et al can't reach.
The only solution is to get off the planet.
Larry Niven once wrote that the reason that the dinosaurs became extinct is that they didn't have a space program.
Granted, one needn't go so far as to colonize planetary surfaces to ensure the survival of the human race; orbital colonies can do that as well.
(I plan to move out to the asteroid belt my own self, once such a thing becomes feasible, and then, eventually, out to the Oort Cloud and interstellar space (although, admittedly, by then I will probably be no longer a human).)
Research that would be difficult or impossible to do here on Earth, due to its gravity (e.g., some metalurgy, chemistry, and biology) might be easier to do on Mars.
Research that would be dangerous to do here on Earth (e.g., with virulent pathogens or self-replicating nanotechnology) can be done on Mars or other planets with less chance of endangering life on Earth.
(Again, though, much of this research could probably be better done using orbital facilities.)
Our species is a voracious virus, seeking to inhabit every environment.
It's what we do.
It's what we are.
It is our destiny.
And so on.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
How exactly did life begin? Oh yea, that is right, we have no frickin idea.