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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."
because if you build a fancy machine and dont test it before you actualy get there, What happens when it doesnt work, you dont know if thats actualy a real reliable reading. It doesnt make any sence to send untested equipment millions of miles to search for something when you dont even know if it can find it at all.
XML - A clever joke would be here if
Now the question is not whether Mars can support life
Is it even possible for water-based life to exist at such a low pressure? And I don't mean dormant spores waiting around for better conditions.
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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
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.
I wouldn't even doubt that.
Sure, spores which could survive for thousands of years inside pyramids or for several years in cold vacuum on the Moon didn't actually grow or thrive there, but we do have extremophiles which feel happy in only a notch more moderate conditions.
And if pressure is a problem, you can go under the ground -- you can get as high pressure as you want there.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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]
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?
No. Because we currently have no means to examine any planet outside of our own solar system closely enough to determine if such things are present. It's hard enough to determine at this distance if there even are any earth-like planets out there. And any telescope capable of seeing that clearly at that distance is more than a few years off. (Read: not in our lifetime)
If we are going to find any life with the tools we have, it will be in our own solar system.
i wonder what happens, when the nasa couln't keep their tools sterile.
what happens if life from earth is being found on mars and keeps surviving.
that would be interesting.
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.
can your computer respond to a temperature or salinity change in a meaningful way? i.e., would it be able to sense danger to itself and move away? would it seek out nutrients, such as electricity? If it is programmed an equipped with appropriate sensors.. then yes. And it doesn't make it alive. Beside, many living things cannot do such things (eg. sense danger and move away). There are organisms that cannot reproduce (not species, but individuals) - and they are living too... I would say my fried she is not alive because she cannot have children... if you make something limited (out of Lego bricks, say) that can do all of the above, you'll have created a very rudimentary form of life. I do not think so. I think that it would soon be feasible to construct mechanical/electronical... device that could accomplish all things simple bacteria can. I am not sure whether it would be alive. I cannot define life, but I not agree with this simple definition. It is an ad hoc definition appropriate at the time when it was developed. Our technical abilities changed since then, but our toys are still not alive. And about the consciousness - yes I see the problems. And I am an atheist. When I am saying "soul" I do not mean "eternal soul" or something like that. I just feel that there is something that differs living things from technical devices we can imagine now (however advanced). And I also think that this difference can be scientifically described in the future (and we would be able to create real living things then).
Deliriant isti Americani.
Well, this is tough to answer, largely because we don't really have an understanding of how life here on earth went from single-cellular to multi-cellular. In fact, the only thing that we can say for sure about this is that it took a really long time (read: 100's of millions of years).
Now, although this is pure speculation on my part, I would suspect that in the universe as a whole, life is probably fairly common. The steps of creating simple, self-replicating molecules are actually pretty straitforward (and the early stages of organic compounds are easy to make with a bit of methane), so finding populations of these kinds of biomolecules (and even cells) wouldn't be very suprising.
What I would expect to be much more rare would be intelligent life. Look at earth. Hundreds of million years to make multi-cellular life, followed by hundreds of millions of years to make humans. To my mind, that says that it is difficult for all of these steps to happen, and that conditions probably need to be just right.
Then again, if it is simply a matter of getting the ball rolling and then looking for a series of low-probability events, the law of large numbers tells us that given enough time, it will happen.
Who knows? It's too bad that we will likely never really have any solid idea (at least in our lifetimes), given how just plain BIG space is and how little of it we have the ability to visit.
There is plenty of experimental evidence that bacteria could survive the processes involved in such transfer (asteroid/comet collisions with planets, capture of debris by other planets, then entry into atmosphere).
Actually, collisions are probably a minor portion of the Earthly source of bacteria on other planets.
Various astronomers have written about the Earth's "dust tail", similar to a comet's dust tail, but blown off from Earth's atmosphere by the solar wind. This tail is thin, and mostly molecular. But it is known to contain fine dust, up to and including particles the size of bacterial spores. There aren't many such spores in the outer atmosphere, but there are a few, and this is a much gentler way to escape the planet than being blown off in a collision strong enough to toss you into space.
Astronomers have dealt with this because the planet's dust tail is thick enough to interfere somewhat with some astronomical observations in some frequencies. So it's useful to know about it before you aim your telescope.
Anyway, chances are that our planet has been contaminating the outer planets, and the rest of the galaxy, with bacterial spores for 3 to 4 billion years. We don't really know how well they can survive in space. Probably well enough to reach the rest of the Solar System. Whether they'd actually survive the trip to other stars and their planets is pure conjecture.
But it's an interesting idea. Definitely good for occasional sci-fi use. And it's something that people interested in ultimate origins should consider. It's not easy to collect actual data on the topic, though.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.