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Surprising Further Evidence for a Wet Mars
Riding with Robots writes "When the robotic geologist Spirit found the latest evidence for a wet Mars, 'You could hear people gasp in astonishment,' said Steve Squyres, the lead scientist for the Mars rovers. 'This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there.' The latest discovery, announced today, adds compelling new evidence for ancient conditions that might have been favorable for life, according to the rover team."
... that gimpy wheel was a blessing in disguise. I think those little robots have been remarkable ... especially lasting years past their estimated '90 day' lives. If only the produce in my fridge could last that long past its estimated use date.
Now how about looking in places that will show us the existence of LIFE on Mars....like say in the polar ice caps or subterranean caverns? I dont think even MORE evidence that there was water on Mars would be that shocking...
...that robot/space telescope exploration gets you a lot more bang for the buck than trying to put a man back on the moon. Hopefully the next President will kill off this return to the moon business and start putting money into stuff like this again.
Perhaps "ought to". But that doesn't bode well for glass bottles holding ammonia solutions.
Until you hear what the guy actually says, would you back the fuck up? Don't assume something's sexist based only on the interpretations of it that come to your mind. That's not feminism, it's closed-mindedness.
We still find new and interesting things here on Earth after a couple of million years of hominids running around. I fail to see how *anything* short of walking talking Martians would really be a shocker on Mars given how little we've covered of it.
> may have already passed through all of them.
Well, since we don't have any self-sustaining colonies off of the Earth, I'd say there is at least ONE difficult step we haven't passed yet.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I don't get why people keep being surprised that there's water on other planets. I would be surprised if there wasn't. With hydrogen and oxygen being two of the three most common elements in the universe with only helium in the middle, you have a simple compound made up of the two most abundant reactive elements in the universe. Given that hydrogen is so abundant, oxygen stands a good chance of finding hydrogen to bond with, and if it finds hydrogen it doesn't take much to get them to bond. Earth really isn't as special as people seem to want to make it out to be.
There's still this pesky little thing called olivine, a volcanic rock. It's an interesting mineral in that it decomposes rapidly in water, and Mars is covered with thousands and thousands of square miles of it. There is water on Mars, perhaps, not as much as news stories in the press would imply, but the olivine puts an upper limit on the amount of water Mars has had in it's past. I want to know how the scientists can square the evidence of water and the olivine. There have been different epochs in Mars' past. I suppose it's possible that after Mars' wet period ended where most water either froze or evaporated and disassociated with the hydrogen escaping into space then there was a period of volcanism that covered large areas of Mars with olivine. Sadly, I'm not familiar with the sequence of what was formed when. It is hard to date the surface of Mars except in general terms.
There may have been life on Mars. There may be significant amounts of water in the form of ice on Mars. It's exciting and it will take a long time to sort the geologic or areology of Mars. We should be going to explore Mars because it is an interesting world, not because it might have water or harbored life. Those discoveries are the icing on the cake. Because if those are the reasons we go an don't find anything, that will tell us something, but we will be disappointed and may not be able to get public support nor the tax dollars for future missions. We should look for evidence of life and water, but that shouldn't be our sole focus nor should we expect to find either.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Before they even landed, it was obvious that they'd find water and "possible evidence of life". This will need more study! That means continuing careers and bigger management empires.
It's easy:
1. get observation
2. concoct a theory INVOLVING WATER OR LIFE which explains the observation
3. report observation as evidence for water or life
The scientest who says "nah, it's just a reaction involving volcanic stuff and light, etc." is due for a bad employee review. He's not a team player.
Maybe I'm not reading that the right way, but if I remember my college math classes correctly, the outcome of other random events does not affect the probability of any given random event. If you roll a six-sided die (kinda sad I have to specifically say six-sided), and you roll a six four times in a row, the probability of rolling a six again is still the same. No matter how many other species advance enough to reach interstellar travel, the probability that humans do so is still the same.
Unless you're talking about a species being advanced enough to see humans as a threat and nuking us from orbit, of course.