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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.
There's a chance of the existence of A HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL? Possibly somewhere in the region of my pants??? The fact that there is even a chance I must now search high and low! I Believe!
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.
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
Its rather retarded to think the our planet hosts the only life that has ever existed or will exist. Especially if you are not religious. While the requirements and conditions must be almost perfect for life to form as we know it, there are for all intents and purposes, infinate possiblities for such a thing to occur in the universe due to the shear size and mass available in it. While the odds are that it will probably have some sort of mostly random distribution across the universe, statistics and odds are just that. They aren't facts, and the possiblity that it existed/exists in our own back yard is there. And ... we can actually look there, so doing so isn't a bad idea. Worst case, we try out our methods for looking in someplace relatively close, as a practice run for checking out planets in other solar systems. You have to start somewhere, Mars is as good a place as any, and its not nearly as different from Earth as some of the other planets in our solar system.
... okay ... our types of chemical reactions can't occur on Mars ... it doesn't have to be the same type of chemical reaction! Or ... for that matter a chemical reaction. Could end up being that we are rare, cause the rest of the life forms in the universe are electrical reactions, or magnetic, or nuclear. Its just plain stupid to think we understand or know about all forms of life. What these scientists are looking for is mostly life forms like us, but also just signs of life in general in the hopes that if its not like us, they may discover some other form.
It is also rather retarded to think that because life formed on Earth as a carbon based organism that anything anywhere else in the universe will have done it the same way. Its extremely short sited to say 'life won't exist on Mars because no Earth based life form could live there'. Even on Earth we still find life that survives in places we never thought possible... and all of the sudden we find it and say 'holy crap, how the hell is it doing that?!' And then we figure it out that life doesn't have to work by the narrow little rules we have defined for it.
Life is, after all, just one big serious of chemical reactions, so
You sir, are too close minded to be a scientist.
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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.
Of course, given that we probably couldn't completely 100.00000000000% sterilize what we sent there, the next question is:
Is there life on Mars now? (that we've been there)
Sooner or later, we're gonna find our own bacteria on Mars if we keep sending stuff there.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
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
Mars is a big ball of dust with little atmosphere, no magnetosphere, no water...
Please stop already with displaying your abysmal ignorance. Mars has the largest (though now exinct) volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons, along with three nearly as big on Tharsis). You don't get those on a "ball of dust". Sure, there may not be much magnetosphere at the moment -- Earth has had periods like that too, during geomagnetic reversals. There's still life here.
As for water...if you don't believe the photographs, go get yourself a decent telescope and just take a look at Mars. See that white patch at the pole? That's ice, also known as frozen water. (Yeah, the winter icecap also gets some CO2 ice; the permanent cap is water ice.)
Perhaps Mars never did have life. But your analogy is like the guy who goes looking for his dropped keys under the lamppost because the light there is better than where he dropped them. We haven't begun to look in the really interesting places yet.
-- Alastair
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.
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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...
When has that stopped us before?
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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?"
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