Seeking Signs of Ancient Martian Life

StonyandCher writes in about a collaboration between NASA and a leading Australian exploration and mining scientist, Dr. Brent McInnes, to search for signs of ancient life on Mars. The plan is to develop and miniaturize the "Alphachron" — an exploration technology currently employed by the Australian minerals industry to determine the age of minerals. If the Alphachron can be miniaturized, it could fly with the next rover mission set for launch in 2010. "The highest priority is to understand when liquid water was present on Mars. 'The same minerals that can be found in [Western Australia]... can also be found on Mars,' McInnes said. Accordingly, by using the Alphachron to date minerals on Mars and thus tell when liquid water may have been present, it can be inferred when life may have been sustainable near the surface of the planet."

Comments

Finding water = finding life = meaningless

[patio11]

After you get past the fascination with vague sci-fi dreams of finding little green men, and accept that even finding microbial life on Mars would cease to be interesting after about 2 weeks, then you're left with no reason to go to Mars.

It is inferior to Earth in every possible way. It's hostile to human life and will be for, essentially, forever on a historical time scale. Terraform a planet? Someone has been reading too much sci-fi -- just try playing around with high school physics for about five minutes on exactly how much work would be required to lower an entire atmosphere one stinking degree, and then compare that to the power consumption of the human race. Mars is far, far away and the cost of transporting people and materials to it is untenable for any serious colonization. (Oh, and every kilometer between here and there is pure death to humans. Like everywhere else in space.)

There is no reason to do serious colonization, because the only argument for it is "Oh noes if the earth dies out we'll be wiped out", with the alternative to create a human zoo on Mars with a few dozen or hundred specimens of the species who will die within years (and likely within months) of being separated from their umbilical cord back to earth. (What do you think, a few hundred people are going to reconstitute civilization? Hah. Leave aside the fact that establishing 100 people on Mars would currently cost more money than the world has.)

Take a look around you folks -- this is our planet. We're stuck here. Get used to it.