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Mars Soil Appears To Be Able To Sustain Life
beckerist writes "Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected. Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, told journalists: 'It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. ... It is very exciting for us.'"
The problem with having the totality of human knowledge at one's fingertips is the necessary base knowledge. I know nothing about plant life, beyond that I need to mow the lawn every so often. I wouldn't have known to look up lichen as a possible candidate for growing on Mars. I thought lichen was like moss, and needed darkness and damp conditions.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
i.e. We're still missing the magic ingredient: Nitrogen. Getting a sufficient quantity of nitrates to Mars might end up being the biggest problem with colonization efforts in the future. We obviously have water. CO2 can be reprocessed into O2.
The soil is not toxic. Now all we need is Nitrogen and a good method of bootstraping industrial production on Mars. (Shipping heavier technology would be impractical.)
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Has everyone forgotten Mars has no ozone layer? The soil may contain the necessary minerals and other nutrients, but it's baked under UV rays and (last I heard) full of peroxides and other unfriendly chemicals as a result. Starting with plants is putting the cart before the horse; we should be thinking about extremophiles if we're serious about this. And would it be ethical?
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
they go to great lengths NOT to bring life to mars. Read up on "bio-barrier". If the spacecraft get contaminated during construction or prep they have to re-sterilize it. They want to find life, not spread it.
If you accidentally bring life to Mars, that makes it about impossible to discover it and know for sure it's Martian life and not something you brought, or that mutated from something you brought.
Although I agree that if we determine there is NO life on mars, I say our next probe is sent with a well-planned variety of "colonizer" lifeforms to begin teraforming of the planet so it's at least borderline useful by the time we can send people out there.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You know, I see people say this kind of thing all the time, but I have never seen any kind of statement about how fast Mars will lose its atmosphere, except in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy where it is asserted that the rate of loss is actually quite slow. The only one of your links which actually addresses the rate is Wikipedia: "It is generally thought that Mars could once have had an environment relatively similar to today's Earth, during an early stage in its development. This similarity is predominantly associated with the thickness of the atmosphere and abundance of water, both considered to have been lost over the course of hundreds of millions of years. The exact mechanisms which resulted in this change are still unclear, though several mechanisms have been proposed." Uh, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your view. So, can you provide a reference for the speed at which Mars is supposed to lose a human-breathable atmosphere?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"