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Scientists Look at Martian Salt for Ancient Life
eldavojohn writes "Is there life on Mars? Maybe not, but a better question might be whether or not it has ever existed on Mars? Scientists are claiming that the best indication for this will be in newly found evaporated salt deposits on Mars which they can use to check for cellulose. Here on earth, tiny fuzzy fibers have been found in salt dating back almost 250 million years making it the oldest known evidence of life on earth. Jack Griffith, a microbiologist from UNC, is quoted as saying, 'Cellulose was one of the earliest polymers organisms made during their evolution, so it pops out as the most likely thing you'd find on Mars, if you found anything at all. Looking for it in salt deposits is probably a very good way to go.'"
They're building landing pads for gay Martians!
Salt on Mars has been a topic of interest for a while-- I wrote about the implications of Martian salt for Astrobiology a couple of years back, in an article in Astrobiology
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I am no botanist, so I have to ask a potentially dumb question: are there any kind of cellulose-like variants that should be prospected as well?
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
"Here on earth, tiny fuzzy fibers have been found in salt dating back almost 250 million years..."
All this time I thought it was because of careless naked workers at the Morton plant.
Considering the harsh environmental conditions on Mars, only cockroaches could survive over there.
So you have to look for those black faecal pellets to find life on Mars.
RutSum.com
The salt people!
:-)
The salt people who?
The salt people who left this solar system eons ago!
There are only two steps in the gathering of ultimate knowledge. Open your eyes and, RTFM!
D.E.L.I.C.I.O.U.S. !
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
The article summary says that the cellulose found in 250 million year old salt is the oldest known evidence for life on Earth. That's not true, there's ample of evidence of life for billions of years before that. The article states that the 250 million year old salt is the oldest biological substance known, which is pretty cool, but there are plenty of other types of evidence for life besides just finding dead tissue.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Wouldn't this require a sample coming back here? It looks like they needed a Scanning Electron Microscope to see the cellulose fibers. It seems to me they would have to return a sample of the salts in order to see anything. Are there any plans for a sample return mission to mars anytime soon?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Here on earth, tiny fuzzy fibers have been found in salt dating back almost 250 million years making it the oldest known evidence of life on earth.
Earth cellular life evidence dates back to about 4 billion years if I remember correctly. Even some trilobite fossils date to around 530 million years ago. Perhaps they meant "250 million years since the formation of Earth"? Its a trick to make me RTFA to find out what they really meant.
Table-ized A.I.
No, these aren't the oldest known signs of life on earth. There are fossils way older than 250 million years. According to the article, this fuzz is the oldest known **biological material** on earth. Not the same thing.
wtf? we can look at huge bones older than this?
I thought Stromatolites were the oldest known evidence of life on earth?
What the article actually *says*, is that the fibers themselves are 250 million years old, making them the oldest known biologically-produced material. There's obviously older evidence of life to be found on Earth.
While I'm nitpicking, "Earth" is capitalized, as it is a proper name.
Causation can cause correlation
I wonder what the middle eastern religions, the trifecta judaism, christianity, and islam, will have to say about it. Either the universe is teaming with life, or we are the only ones. I find it hard to believe we are the only ones, so sooner or later will find proof of life somewhere.
And science fiction fans will know about Martian salt from Kim Stanley Robinson's vision of a terraforming effort in the trilogy beginning with Red Mars . The survival of bacteria is difficult to acheive on Mars due to the salty soil. Some years after first reading the trilogy, I still remember the nerdy joke some biologist in the trilogy says, that a certain bacterium is so halophilic that "it thinks brine has too much water in it."
So my fantasy about pouring salt on a giant Mars Slug to save the astronaut colony still holds hope.
Table-ized A.I.
Stromatolites are living, layered structures formed in shallow waters by a combination of microbial biofilms -- usually of blue-green algae -- and granular deposits. They are rare today but for about 2 billion years, following their arrival in the fossil record 3.5 billion years ago, they are the main evidence of life on Earth. Modern stromatolites still look like their fossilized forebears. But are the modern microbes remnants of ancient ecosystems or just latecomers following a similar lifestyle? A metagenomic study of the bacteriophage communities in modern stromatolites and thrombolites (like stromatolites but with an irregular internal structure) shows that stromatolite-associated phages are very different from each other and from any other ecosystem studied so far. This finding strengthens the hypothesis that modern stromatolites are remnants of ancient ecosystems.
They're building landing pads for gay Martians!
Gay Martians are born with their own landing pads. Sheeesh, don't you know anything about space?
Table-ized A.I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite
Quote:
"The earliest stromatolite of confirmed microbial origin dates to 2,724 million years ago."
The real reason we want to explore Mars?
Because we can
or, a variant after my favorite mountaineer (after the late Edmund Hillary):
Because it's there
Stopping us from dreaming will make humanity dull and suicidal. Even though none of us might actually come to live the day that humans walk on the surface of Mars, doesn't mean that it is wrong to dream about it and start planning humanities future today.
Don't hide in your house from wonderful things that could be. Embrace the future and help make dreams come true!
None of these, of course, are actually lifeless.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What's the probability that life on another planet evolved the same type of chemistry and the same type of macromolecules?
If they found cellulose, I'd argue that it is from organisms that originated on earth. Now if they found (micro)fossils that are completely different from anything we know I'd listen up.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
None of these, of course, are actually lifeless. Also, only one of them is consistently cold.
You make a moronic statement, and then attack me as a pretentious twit. It's little wonder that such a fuzzy mind cannot imagine anything beyond his nose.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You make a moronic statement,...
Please be more specific about which of my many reasonable and rational statements you consider to be 'moronic'.
since there don't appear to be any Martians left, I'd say they weren't worth their salt.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You made a clearly inaccurate statement about the locales you mentioned. That shows your ignorance. Did you honestly think such a stupid piece of rhetoric would pass muster around here? If so, then add that to the list of your stupidities.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wow, I guess we have our answer. The Mods REALLY hate the Dead Milkmen.
The lesson is learned. One must contain their pop-culture references to the approved Linux, Star Trek, Star Wars, Simpsons, South Park and Zero Wing canon. All else is anathema and must be labeled "Flamebait" so as to not taint the /. culture. If one questions this, one will get further modded Offtopic. By all means, don't fail to disappoint. Do your part and mod this down right away!
You made a clearly inaccurate statement about the locales you mentioned. That shows your ignorance.
Well, excuse me... I'm not polishing my doctorate thesis here. I'm typing Slashdot comments.
I said that the extereme regions of desert on the earth are essentially lifeless. What I meant is not that they don't have the occasional blade of grass or microscopic bug clinging to existence in a brutal environment. I meant that these places can't support human life. Which is the only type of life (if you are a human or a close equivalent) that counts.
In other words, the possible existence of microscopic bugs or one-celled proto-life forms don't mean shit outside of theoretical or theological context, which, in the real world where human and close equivalents actually live, doesn't mean shit.
And the allocation of public funds to investigate the remote possibility that some proto-virus or possible semblance of life might exist on a rock spinning in space millions of miles away is nothing more than a theft of public resources by anyone who would spend public funds (many billions of dollars of public funds) just to check this out.
Since the only people who consider this subject important are so-called scientists who want to rip off public funds in order to fund their fantasies and theologians who believe that the possible existence of life challenges their particular fantasies, then let them pay for interplanetary exploration with their own money. Not public funds.
And yes, you are a pretentious twit. Get used to it, because I'm not going to be the last person that points this out to you.
It should be possible to use spectroscopy to identify cellulose chains on Mars. Chemical reactivity with an appropriate enzyme might also work.
And it's not necessarily impossible to equip a rover with an electron microscope, although it might be ungainly.
But due to this 'criminal research', we now know interplanetary travel is 100% possible, and know exactly what is involved and needed to do it.
Now we know exactly what it would cost, and what materials are needed, and the time scale for building the ship, and the type of colony we would need to send with it.
By your logic, if the answers to the above questions happened to be 'its super easy and cheap', you personally just tried to rob humanity of that easy cheap ability.
Granted it isn't easy or cheap, but its not like you knew that or anything.
You want people that give us factual knowledge in jail? That is the crime. Look how well it worked out for all the governments and rulers that have tried it.
Some would say you should be in jail for that crime. It's not like you are using your mind anyway, so no real loss to you or humanity.
We don't know how many templates there are for life or the frequency of them. For all we know life follows a very similar chemical pattern everywhere it ariese. Or not. That's the point. We don't know, but it's worth looking into.
It is obvious why there is no life on Mars. The men made all the women go to Venus so they could watch football. Once they decided they needed women, they could not find Venus and refused to ask for directions.
If the mars polar caps do contain water ice a human community on Mars is possible.
A self-sustaining human community would want to know about any possible infectious sources. A self-sustaining extraterrestrial human community is necessary to avoid probable pandemics, asteroid impacts, or other situations that would have extreme adverse effects on Earth-based population.
Therefore this research is in the public interest, and only pretentious, greedy twits with no concept of the future such as yourself can't see even the basic potential listed above. And there's lots more that can come out of such research, but, as with you, I'm not writing my doctorate thesis here.
P.S. Preview is your friend, as is .
Not a sentence!
1) Thanks for the reference, I'd always wondered about that. What song is it from?
2) I think the problem with your theory is that it was already (at least partially) flamebait in the original context. Flamebait is flamebait, even if it has a pop-cultural basis.
3) "The Mods REALLY hate the Dead Milkmen." => You ignore Hanlon's Razor.
4) Even insightful, informative comments which are unconnected to the topic of the article are fair game for Offtopic mods. That would, of course, include this comment.
A self-sustaining extraterrestrial human community
...
A human community on Mars could never be self-sustaining.
is necessary to avoid probable pandemics, asteroid impacts, or other situations that would have extreme adverse effects on Earth-based population.
These problems haven't destroyed human life on Earth in 50,000 years. They would destroy human life on Mars within months.
Therefore this research is in the public interest,
Any research could be called public interest by this vague definition. Allow me to give a more precise definition - any research receiving public funds must be directed to a specific solution to an immediate life-threatening problem. Mars work doesn't qualify.
only pretentious, greedy twits with no concept of the future such as yourself
I'm only telling the truth to the star-struck geeks. I'm said nothing about spending public funds on myself, and scientists have told us that the future in concept and reality holds over-population, climate change, and ecological disaster. Funds spent on Mars follies would not be available to deal with these real problems here and now. Besides, the US federal government is broke and living on borrowed funds, as are the American people who supply the government with these funds.
And there's lots more that can come out of such research...
Pass the Tang, dude!
In conclusion, Slashdot space cadets MUST prepare themselves for the coming fiscal reality that gives nothing more than lip-service and trivial amounts of public funds to their fantasy projects. The country is broke and is facing massive problems that will shake the government to its core. The 20th century is over and so is the era of space exploration. At least we still have Star Trek.