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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.
... 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...
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
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
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.
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 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
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...
David Bowie lyrics from the early 70s: "It's on America's tortured brow That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow. ....
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?"
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
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.
This is just a restatement of the fallacy known as argumentum ad ignoratio.
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.
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.
We know the odds are greater than zero, because we have proof that it has happened once. "Infinitesimal" was probably a bad choice of word, as the anthropic principle shows the odds have to be finite. That is, we're here, so it can and does happen. It sets a lower bound on probability.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.