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More Evidence for Early Oceans on Mars
DestroyAllZombies writes "More news about Mars. The good news: New Scientist reports that more analysis of Rover data supports the claims for widespread oceans in Mars' distant past. The bad news, from the article: 'An ocean of water once wrapped around Mars, suggests the discovery of soil chemicals by NASA's rovers. But the same chemicals also indicate that life was not widespread on the planet at the time the ocean was present.'"
Why is it bad news to learn that there was never any life on Mars? Wouldn't it be much worse news to learn that life was common there and was utterly wiped out?
I think most people would agree that a planet-wide extinction of all life would qualify as 'bad news'.
Water on earth tends to get "recycled" constantly: sea water evaporates makes clouds which make rain which eventually gets into rivers which go back out to the ocean etc. If Mars was covered with water, where did this water go?
Monstar L
But disregarding that, just because there was a lot of phosphorus in the water doesn't mean that life couldn't exist there. It just means life identical to the structure of life on earth couldn't exist there. Who's to say that life has to be built just the way it is on earth?
Now, lets go put some there!
They're stacking assumption on assumption.
I hope we don't find life on Mars, and that it never existed. Why? Because there will be one less argument (however frail) against terraforming the place.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
6,000 years is a long time.
While terraforming is cool, there may be severe health risks with finding unexpected life forms.
But, the cold? Will, a green house effect be enough to heat it? Are there any published estimates of timings and what effects may be had?
(BTW, who would like to have near Antarctic weather. Yes. It's cool, but...)
Six thousand years? Six thousand years is like a blink of an eye in terms of planets and such. Even six million years isn't a terribly long period of time geologically.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Was it an advert for time-share beach side appartments?
God Be Gone
*even more eagerly awaits a rover finding a giant, 2 headed martian dolphin fossil* :D http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384833/
Ooh ooh, or Frankenfish!
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
At least we know now why they keep finding fossilized surfboards.
Have a look around: McMurdo Panorama
Ahh... but you've been corrupted by "science" and that "evolution" fairy tale. All graduands of the Kansas school system know that the world is only 6,000 years old
henry -- the human evolution news relay
These little rovers are doing great, but they're penetrating the rocks how deep? A couple cm? I think the last paragraph should've been a little closer to the top:
"The researchers admit that the similar phosphate-to-sulfate ratio seen on opposite sides of the planet could also arise if wind mixed these materials together after the bodies of water disappeared."
The evidence may suggest similar water chemistry across the planet, but it doesn't prove it. I think we need to dig a little deeper, literally.
Good one. Of course I'm now imagining a theological argument along the lines of: The bible does explain what happened to the water on Mars, The great flood! It was the water above the firmament!
Do you know? The polar ice cap? Well, isn't it too small to be ALL the water? Underneath the surface? May I say: "Yeah right" ?
Reading the mars trillogy right now, and the whole series is facinating.
Is there eny evidence of underground aquifiers like in the books?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
* WHOOSH! *
...is what they said in the article:
"To a first order approximation, you couldn't have had a biosphere that was anything like the one on Earth," Greenwood says.
Maybe there was life that created phosphorus instead of converting it, that's what they are saying.
To the submitter: RTFA
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If there once were large pools of water on Mars, it's not the question why did it go, but much more one of why did it even form/exist ?
Was there an atmosphere once ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
And where there be oceans, there be pirates. And where there be pirates, there be buried treasure! Hoist up the sails, me hearties, and set course to Marrrrs!
Where were you when the voynix came?
"A Big Question in science is : Is the apparition of life on Earth a common event in the Universe or is it a unique and almost impossible event? "
Is that really such a question? Given that there are a bazillion (heh, scientific, I know) planets out there, there's a huge number of Earthlikne planets as well, making it likely that there is something similar elsewhere life-wise. Also, once we look past our "Star Trek" prejudices, there's the likelihood of even more different types of life in a variety of other environments.
In other words, it seems rather probably that there are other planets with a biosphere, so that answers your "big question". The bigger question is how common it is and what it is like. For this, we can only make the wildest of guesses, since it is impossible to generalize from a sample set of one.
Where were you when the voynix came?
You know that life is extinct on Mars? That would mean that you are the only person on this planet who knows that. The answer is that we do not know if Life does or does not exists on Mars. In fact, I think that we will never know until we go there. The problem is that somebody develops a test and once it is positive, another person will come up with a reason why it is inorganic in nature. That makes us back to square one. The issue is that it costs a lot of money to send up a multi-test machine AND will harvest for it. I find it highly unlikely that any life remains on the surface (but I could be wrong). So we will have to look in caves, gulleys, even underneath water ice (not likely under CO2 ice).
In addition, have life become extinct is not a big deal. It has happened here numerous times to high level organisms. It is quite possible that we could face new conditions that would wipe out all life except that we interfere. Or due to our recent nature of denying an issue, maybe we will be too late. But if life was on mars, it will be all over the universe.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Mars and Earth both once had much more elliptical shaped orbits that periodically took the two close together, Mars' orbit inside Earth's orbit, and the very last time the two planets nearly collided, they did a planetary "slingshot dance" around each other and Mars was slung outward into its current orbit, and Earth's orbit was lowered a bit closer to the Sun and made much more of a circular orbit, and all Mars' water was slung off the surface and captured by Earth's gravity where it formed frozen ice rings in orbit around Earth for an extremely long time. The ice rings' orbit eventually decayed and the ice fell to Earth, melting and raining down into our oceans.
BUT, there is no way we are going to find intelligent life in this galaxy, and life itself is going to be rare.
/., so I won't bore you with the "how short intelligent life" has been around, but consider life has been around roughly 4 billion years, and intelligent life perhaps .0025% as long. Now to really get to it, civilization has been around for maybe 30K years (.00075% as long), and automobiles have been around a hundred years. Imagine what the next million years is going to bring? I believe in the next 10,000 years exploring the galaxy will be possible after the fashion I suggest above, and it will take about 500K - 1M years to do it.
To understand why, consider the galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across. Super intelligent species are super intelligent because they crossed biological distances, and the same forces will cause them to cross galactic distances and explore.
some may say 100K light years is so large as to be impossible to explore. But consider this idea. What these civilizations will do is create cell sized artificial life. The DNA of the artifical cell will create a RF receiver that takes instructions from remote locations to build whatever analytical equipment is necessary to explore the planet. given we can already accelerate protons to near speed of light, why couldn't an intelligent race build something that sprays the galaxy with the artificial DNA? Clearly, it would need to be wrapped in some kind of seed, etc., but still, this is doable. Since you aren't sending around a huge multi-kilogram mass, the enormous energy requirements to achieve near SOL isn't there.
Now, the next point about intelligent life is that we are just at the very beginning of the whole thing. This is
Now, if intelligent life is really common, in this galaxy, then wouldn't there have been a race that could do do this already? I say YES! Of course there would have been, unless we are just incredibly lucky to be the most advanced. But given our evolution, that seems unlikely. What is more likely: that intelligent life itself isn't so common. Maybe even there is NO other intelligent life in the galaxy.
That's why I think SETI is a bunch of nonsense. If there were other intelligent life, it would have found us. It almost certainly would be > 10K years advanced to us, probably closer to 100M years or so, and it would have discovered us.
There are of course other alternatives, which I don't like too much.
1. Intelligent life is unstable, there is little chance of getting to through the next 10K years.
2. Intelligent life is inherently introverted (not social).
3. Life and consciousness are an illusion, and our deaths aren't worth other races' consideration.
But being an optimist, I will continue to believe intelligent life is just rare.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
Life could of existed on mars from my perspective. Remember folks, when the planets are formed, it is hot and there is lots of whirling gases and splashing seas of unknown chemicals at a certain point. The surface is hot and like a rock at first but mars has red dirt and sands like the ones found in zacatecas, mexico. Dirt just doesnt form after rock formation. Around the area where a sea should of been, you should see sands and not dirt. around where you see dirt, you should see dirt, not sands. Sands are formed from water or wind pounding on a rock surface for centuries. soil is made by small insects like earthworms who take in dirt and further mixes it with all kinds of stuff to make it work with plants. The Soil part is what seems to be missing in mars.
Intelligent life springs up everywhere. Then they discover television or its equivalent. Shortly thereafter, they amuse themselves to death(apologies to Roger Waters.) If you disagree, cancel your cable subscription and spend the next couple of months watching only network tv.
Why is this "good news" or "bad news"? It is simply (evidence of) facts. Facts are what they are - there is no "good" or "bad" about them.
If Mars' atmosphere was CO2 right from the start, then how were oceans formed? the slightest amount of water would have evaporated long before it had a chance to form an ocean.
If the observations are correct and there was water on Mars, then its atmosphere was different than it was today, and perhaps a catastrophic planetary-level event destroyed it.
There is no problem with the hypothesis that our galaxy has plenty of intelligent life in it but at the same time there is no contact yet between them and us:
1) the amount of time that humans exist on Earth is every small. Our recorded history is in the range of 10000 years, which is a very small amount of time, in cosmic terms, for other intelligent lifeforms to find us.
2) we have been sending radio signals to space for almost 100 years now. Considering the direction and width of radio emissions, the chance of a radio signal traveling in the path of a civilization is extremely small and most probably is not there yet.
3) perhaps alien civilizations have landed on Earth previously, found nothing interesting in terms of intelligent lifeforms, and got away to the next planet. Perhaps they will visit us again in a few thousand years.
4) alien civilizations are already watching us, but in ways we are unable to understand yet. If they are 100M years more advanced than ours as you say, then this is quite possible.
The real truth is that we are too primitive to make any definitive statement about the universe yet. We may be alone, we may be not. All hypotheses are far fetched, and we need to really grow up in order to find the truth.