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Possibility of Life On Mars Looking More Remote
Riding with Robots writes "The never-say-die robotic geologist Opportunity continues its extended explorations in Victoria Crater on Mars. The latest findings from the mission suggest that while plenty of water did exist in this location, it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold. 'Not all water is fit to drink,' said Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team. 'At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic. Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life.'"
I suppose it hasn't occurred to them that the rover might be in a Martian equivalent of the Dead Sea? There are plenty of inhospitable places on Earth, too.
I don't think it's a question of 'is' there life on Mars. It's more like 'was' there life at any point in it's history.
What we all really want to know is whether or not it has found oil yet. :D
... with this searching for life on Mars. This is getting ridiculous already... seriously. I understand the importance of finding life on another planet. I do. Seriously though, Mars is a big ball of dust with little atmosphere, no magnetosphere, no water... its practically a giant red moon with two little asteroids circling around it. Its only important because its a planet that we can land on without being crushed and/or incinerated. I know it sucks, especially for those who believe that there "must be life out there" like religious fanatics say there "must be a god" but really... nothing, NADA, suggests life is out there. Its ok to keep looking, but looking on Mars is like checking your pockets two more times for the keys you misplaced... better analogy, checking your pocket for the $100 bill you NEVER HAD TO BEGIN WITH. STOP IT. Go ahead and research it all day long. Get answers to some serious questions, whatever they may be in the name of science, but looking for life on Mars is beating a dead horse to DEATH. Its like someone typing over and over again about how looking for life on mars is like beating a dead horse...
20th century Marxism is not progress...
But it all died of heart failure due to too much salt.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Yes the idea that the life on Mars is all off looking for the remote would be so much more believable if they had like found a TV or something.
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"The rovers [can] do in a day what a skilled field geologist can do in 30 seconds." -- Steve Squyres.
Squyres was given the 2005 Wired Rave Award for science by Wired for overseeing the creation of Spirit and Opportunity that had, at the time, lasted thirteen times longer than expected.
As we approach sol 1500, this means the rovers have done about 12.5 hours of field geology. And that's being generous, as Squyres was talking about the combined work of both rovers and only one of the rovers has been operating at full capacity.
So maybe, just maybe, Andrew Knoll is a little premature in declaring the planet dead.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Even the word 'is' isn't necessarily a something that is necessarily obvious. From what we knew until recently, there could very well have been some bacteria living someplace deep underground.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
There's a difference between life and advanced, intelligent life.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Too salty? Is there such a thing? Here on Earth we've found life everywhere where there's energy and liquid water: even apparently-unliveable places like the nuclear waste tanks at Hanford or the superheated water of deep-ocean vents. Excessively salty water might kill off life not adapted to it, but there's no fundamental reason why life can't form in extreme saltwater.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
When a certain impertinent youngling pointed out that there have been so many 'turning points' in this terrible conflict that surely, the Illustrious Council must by dizzy by this time, K'breel denounced him as a traitor and decreed that his gelsacs be lacerated until he admitted his guilt and confessed his onerous crimes. The youngling confessed later that evening, and was immediately executed for his awful crimes.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Dunno about you but I'm a little saddened, and somewhat relieved, that there isn't a horde of little green men waiting to invade and take over our planet.
Am I the only one who thought this story was about the British TV show at first glance because of the capitalization? Great show, btw.
While the BBC series was a good show, I cannot imagine that the proposed US version of Life on Mars could have worked out as well. There is only so far that the premise can stretch, and the BBC was able to pull it off because the relatively short run allowed for it while a US network would not want to pick up a show that was only intended to run for a relatively short number of seasons.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
We are still waiting for the second down here on earth.
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When oceans and seas dry up they get saltier and saltier. Unless you know the total volume of water you don't know the concentrations of salts to make a determination of whether or not it can support life.
I say hit terraforming mars esp. with an ammonia ball. The likely hood of life being there is REAL slim. Worse, we could search for a hundred years. But if we send a mission to go past jupiter, capture an asteroid and send it back to mars, it would take over 20-30 years for all that. During that time, we could be looking over the planet. If it is found, then divert the asteroid, otherwise, let it hit the planet while we have little to nobody on there. With an asteroid coming say every 2-5 years, we could slowly raise the temp and gases while looking for anything of interest.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not really, not now. If you found anything that met some definition of "being alive" (self replicating, energy using, etc.) that would have profound implications on how some of us view the universe.
If we could charge them for watching our "instructional videos", so much the better.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You act all surprised. Guess how shocked I was when I found out this story had nothing to do with televisions.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
It's resting.
And you know this how, exactly?
What's your explanation of Viking's labelled release experiment? Were you even aware that there was something that needed explaining?
-- Alastair
It is mostly CO2, which makes this ideal for micro-aerophiles, or even an anaerobic lifeforms. In addition, we have plenty of low life at each pole. The dead sea is anything but. I will agree that the likelihood of carbon based life being there is DAMN slim, but slim is not the same as none. No chance would be the sun, or even the Venus surface (though it would be possible in the upper atmosphere).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Am I the only who has, for tears, 'known' that there is no life on Mars?
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
- Carl Sagan
Well we now know that high blood pressure killed the last of the Martians. Their love of salty food finally ended the reign of our pyramid building face carving brothers.
Its possible that the inability of the rovers to locate any evidence of life may be due to a serious morale crisis. Here's an article with details.
Have gnu, will travel.
Goodness, yes. Indeed, for all we know, a very salty liquid water environment helps get life started.
After all, one way to describe a living cell (leaving out its ability to replicate) is a system that maintains across a membrane various ion concentration gradients and uses them for various purposes. Surely one of the most primitive possible cells one can imagine is just a closed membrane with membrane-bound ion pumps actively maintaining a different ionic environment inside than outside, and using the gradient when necessary to effect chemical transport across the membrane.
We focus a lot on the issue of replication and imagine this must have been the first part of life to get going, that there were first a lot of free-floating self-replicating genetic molecules. But perhaps this is naive. In an ocean (or even big puddle of water) those molecules will never find each other. Maybe the first step in life is walling off the outside world with a membrane and controlling the ionic strength inside, thus defining a compact "walled garden" in which something delicate -- like self-replication of big genetic molecules -- can take place safely. And perhaps such a system is more likely to arise in a system that has high ion strength to begin with, and most likely larger random concentration gradients that can drive some kind of organization process.
I hadn't seen these Council of Elders stories in a while...
keep up the good work, man.
Every time I read an article like this, I'm amazed at how the term "life" is used. They don't mean life, they mean "life, as we know it on earth" (and often even more restrictive than that). Looking at the extremophiles right here on earth should be enough to see that life can adapt to many "unsuitable" environments. Are these people really that myopic?
If I'm not mistaken, the lethality of salty environments (for "life as we know it") is related to osmatic pressure at a cellular level. Too many assumptions there to rule out realistic adaptations (and "adaptation" assumes that the lifeform originated in a different situation) to such an environment.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Here on earth we have several strains of halobacterium that can live inside salt crystals and survive off sunlight and residual moisture. Our terrestrial ones generally like a hot environment too.
No, a high-salinity environment doesn't rule out life at all.
Nor do other extrenes. There's plenty of microbes that will live in concentrated acids and bases. In one of my wife's old labs, she once had to through out a jugs of concentrated NaOH solution because a fungus was growing in it...
There still could be. It's just looking a bit less likely, both the 'is' and the 'was'.
Karl Rove, is that you?
Choosing the answer you want and then altering reality to ensure that it's at least somewhat true is not the same as discovering the answer to the question.
That's not to mention the sheer irresponsibility of intentionally manipulating whatever ecosystem might (but probably doesn't) exist on Mars. Accidental contamination is one thing, but haven't we learned by now that we can't just impetuously troll the galaxy doing whatever we want? It's certainly caused us all sorts of problems down here.
Anyone care to explain that tag?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Or maybe high salinity and high acidity is what life needs to get started and the conditions on modern earth are the weird ones. Or maybe it doesn't matter because what life really needs to get started is ice, and when ice freezes and thaws repeatedly, you get pockets of water.
I think it simply doesn't make sense to try to draw conclusions based on so little data. We need to send a fleet of robots to Mars, robots that drill, search across the whole planet, etc. For the price of the Iraq war, we could have gotten this done...
Life has been found in boiling water, inside ice, inside rocks, exposed to high levels of UV, inside nuclear reactors, and even on the outside of spacecraft. It can probably even travel between planets. Life could probably survive on Mars even today, and it almost certainly could survive at some point in the past. It would be truly surprising if Mars were completely sterile. Whether there is, or has been, life on Mars or not, either way, there is something to be explained and learned. So, looking for life on Mars and finding that Mars is completely sterile (as you so unscientifically assume) is itself really important.
In different words, the point of these probes is not to prove that there is life on Mars, the point is to answer the question whether there is or has been life on Mars, and any of the three possible outcomes (always sterile, sterile now, and never sterile) is interesting.
Antibiotic, namely penicillin, came about after HOW much money on research? Keep in mind, that the world was looking for the safe silver bullet. These days, we spend billions looking in Yellowstone, Antarctica, even the ocean floor. And find the needle in a monster haystack the size of earth is billion x easier than finding the right microbe that will cure aids, or stop some other future plague. And yes, it might be expensive to find life on Mars. But it may be just what we are looking for. And that speaks nothing about learning about evolution.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Of course there is Life On Mars, just ask Sam Tyler.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Now start taking care of this planet, fools!
I'm all for planetary protection - I think you're right, at least for today, because we still don't want to spoil the evidence on the off chance that Mars has, or may at one time have had, life.
The big question in the PP world is when to admit we're wrong.
I'm not personally ready to make the bet at the moment, but there's a part of me that would love to grab some lichens from Antarctica and some other hardy organisms, and send 'em on a little trip. I won't live to see the results, but if Mars is dead, it'd be nice to get a few centuries' head start on the process of terraforming the place.
Suppose Mars really is dead. There are no predators. There's a fuckton of CO2. The bottleneck is probably nitrogen, but with that kind of starting environment, a decent nitrogen-fixer only has to evolve once, and it doesn't have to divide very rapidly to take over the planet. Instead of rocks, imagine lichens like dry-adapated UV-resistant stromatolites as far as the eye can see.
> but haven't we learned by now that we can't just impetuously troll the galaxy doing whatever we want? It's certainly caused us all sorts of problems down here.
We haven't learned that, because we haven't even begun to troll the galaxy. Problems down here? Sure, but "down here" has always been inhabited. Assume we decide, by whatever criteria we establish in the next century, that Mars is barren. How much worse could we make it? You got a fetish for rust or just hate lichens? :)
The Viking data seemed to show a *Martian* circadian pattern to gaseous emissions in incubated soil samples not present in sterilized soil samples (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/23/1951245).
Quite convincing now, but apparently circadian rhythms weren't much recognised / understood then.
As for this statement: "...it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold., tell that to the fish, or the many extremophiles found here on earth.
I still think that life was discovered on Mars, in 1976. See link for further, fascinating, details.
I'm almost certain this is going to be a flamebait post now, but that's ok - can I quote Carl Sagan, then, in arguing against the atheistic argument about the non-existence of god? (interestingly, Sagan had a very strange view of what he apparently thought believers in God thought that He is.... very, very strange ideas, in fact)
For all we know, there still could be life on Mars. Show me the where in the rules of life that it says that all life has to live like us. Just because we can't live on Mars, doesn't mean that some other organisms can't. Look at the small silicon based organisms living kilometres below the oceans surface. I'm sure we couldn't live like that, and before they had been discovered, scientists were probably saying that it was impossible to live that deep, or that silicon life forms were impossible. Nothing can for sure say that there is no life on Mars, only that we have not yet discovered anything.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
Exactly. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is on your side.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Well, this sounds a bit ridiculous. Aren't there countless species in our oceans on the earth? *Searches Google* http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_creatures_live_in_the_ocean "Question: How many creatures live in the ocean? Answer: That question has no answer, they discover new species all the time in the ocean. We know more about space than we do about our oceans." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_biology "A large amount of all life on Earth exists in the oceans. Exactly how large the proportion is still unknown. While the oceans comprise about 71% of the Earth's surface, due to their depth they encompass about 300 times the habitable volume of the terrestrial habitats on Earth." It appears we know more about Outer Space than we do about the Oceans. This salinity sticking point sounds like BS to me. /2cents
"Time is nothing; timing is everything."
Especially if you only look on the surface. The article itself talks about conditions when the seas dried up. Well, gees ... I'm sure everyone here agrees that a drying up sea is not a good place for life to start. But before that? And underground now? There may be extensive caves with melted ice. Mars hasn't lost all of its internal heat yet.
Bitter and proud of it.
This is just a restatement of the fallacy known as argumentum ad ignoratio.
Are there places on Earth near under water volcanoes where there are non-carbon based lifeforms which survive in temperatures greater than what scientists could ever have expected?
It can adapt to those conditions, of course, but can it arise there?
At the risk of starting some flames, I point to an argument often used by creationists: that a complex living structure cannot evolve from nothing. I'm not a creationist, that's for sure, but that argument seems valid in the case of Mars.
Unless conditions existed at some time that were far more benign than now, life would never have started on Mars. And I don't mean life "as we know it on earth", but simply life. A complex self-reproducing process cannot exist unless some special conditions allow it.
Scientists have never seen life arise spontaneously in lab conditions. They have synthesized organic molecules from inorganic ones, but the creation of any sort of being that can be undisputedly said to be "alive" still seems to be in the science fiction category.
If one assumes that life can arise spontaneously, then it must be a very rare event, needing some very special conditions. Maybe the exact combination and concentration of salts is needed, maybe some clay crystal to catalyze a reaction, maybe tides caused by the moon to allow those salts to be caught in tidal pools where they were slowly concentrated by evaporation, etc.
We know that life exists on earth and can adapt to extreme circumstances, but that does not mean life can arise spontaneously from inorganic matter in the same extreme circumstances.
As a poker player, I have a corollary to the Infinite Monkeys theory, which I call the Infinite Donkeys theory. This theory holds that every possible event, no matter how unlikely, will happen if given sufficient opportunity (in this case if you play enough hands).
Though we do not know the parameters of the Drake equation, it is starting to appear that one of them -- planets in habitable zones -- is much larger than would have been guessed a couple decades ago. Even if the odds of all the cards falling in the right order is infinitesimal, it will happen if they are dealt out enough times. Don't be so quick to write off extraterrestrial life.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Global Warming is very real, and has happened several times in the past, and will continue to happen. (with an ice age to follow each, its been proven before with loads of samples from the ground, or perhaps half the world missed this...)
Humans didn't cause Global Warming either, they only increased its speed by cutting down trees and producing loads more CO2 than the natural world usually does.
Oh well, an ice age will be around the corner too, and i bet some idiot will end up blaming Humans for that too.
Of course life on Mars is going to look remote, Mars is over 200 million km away!
0MG lol
Seriously
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
You missed the point, the post I was responding to seemed to say that the life we're looking for on Mars has to have stray televisions about the place. Clearly that's not what we're looking for.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Not sure why parent got marked informative, higher pressure is not what's being discussed.
Despite how interesting mars is with the possibility (and now confirmation of) water in Mars' ancient past, the planet seems to continue to show that it's just too sterile a place, and that if there is any life it's retreated to the last reservoir of water still there. Underground and hidden.
Now we learned a ton in sending probes and satellites to the red planet. In a decade it's changed from a pale red dot with the monolithic red face to a well mapped and explored surface. But no life, and only forensic proof that liquid water was once there.
I've had my eye over on what the Cassini mission has gotten with pics of Titan and Enceladus. Enceladus is a giant glacier, while Titan has lakes filled with liquid organics. Titan is obviously the next spot to look, since all the organic chemicals seem to me there is excess. And a probe to swim under the ice sheet of Enceladus after that would be cool. Europa seems similar to Enceladus, so maybe Europa too.
The point being, we've only tested for life on our moon and on Mars. Our moon never had a hope of life, so Mars is the only real place of possibility so far. So by any real count, we've only looked hard for life at on other place. It's stupid to claim completion after looking at one other place.
The probes would promptly be run over by speeding dragsters. Then the Martians would think that the planet is inhabited by big, loud, hostile creatures. Which happens to be fairly accurate.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's better that no life is found so that there will be less resistance to human settlement and teraforming in the future.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
No kidding, you can help the STI* Project by running STI @home. Please donate some of your spare brain processing power (after all you only use 10%) to help us find intelligent life.
*Search for Terrestrial Intelligence
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
the water may have been salty there, but does not mean it could not support life at some point. I cite the Salton Sea as an example, it once held life till it became unable to support it in the end. I also cite the Aral Sea, used to support a large amount of life and now it's a desert. Just because it finds evidence within it's limited capabilities, does not mean that that's how everything was all the time.
"Am I the only who has, for tears, 'known' that there is no life on Mars?"
I didn't realize anybody had gone to Mars and thoroughly scanned every square millimeter of it for life. Congrats to you and your accomplishment.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I thought it was already "more remote"...
"When oceans and seas dry up they get saltier and saltier. Unless you know the total volume of water you don't know the concentrations of salts to make a determination of whether or not it can support life."
....
Right you are AC.
Besides; having survived 38 years of the missus' cooking, I don't find the prospect of a little extra salt in a pond to be inimical with life itself. Now if they'd found meatloaf
Note that I don't claim that the rover is as "fast" as a human, but the 30-seconds-per-day is an exaggeration. And also it is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison because each does different things better. Humans walking around don't have X-ray spectrometers, but can "look" around faster than the rovers. And, your rudeness is not appreciated.
Table-ized A.I.
You really don't have a clue do you?
How we know is more important than what we know.
You are not debating, but insulting me instead.
Table-ized A.I.