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Mars Orbiter Finds Evidence For Ancient Rivers, Lakes
Cowards Anonymous points out news that studies based on data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have found that vast regions of Mars contained rivers and lakes when the planet was young. The studies also suggest that the water existed for quite some time, often in standing pools, which are conducive to the formation of basic organic matter. NASA provides a color-enhanced photo of a delta within a crater. Quoting:
"The clay-like minerals, called phyllosilicates, preserve a record of the interaction of water with rocks dating back to what is called the Noachian period of Mars' history, approximately 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. This period corresponds to the earliest years of the solar system, when Earth, the moon and Mars sustained a cosmic bombardment by comets and asteroids. Rocks of this age have largely been destroyed on Earth by plate tectonics. They are preserved on the moon, but were never exposed to liquid water. The phyllosilicate-containing rocks on Mars preserve a unique record of liquid water environments possibly suitable for life in the early solar system."
Their obviously an underground civilization. Will make excellent troglodytes. Get their corbamite!
I guess the Martians didn't have enough powerboats and jetskis to create greenhouse gases to keep the planet warm enough to keep those rivers and lakes..
This proves that men really are from Mars.
What is that? Boy that sounds like a Cliff Claven quote if I've ever heard one. "Y'see Noam - it was back in the Noahchian period of Mahs when the mahtians would take baths in the wahtah and lakes. This has been proved with the phyllosilicahtes found up thah.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
All kidding aside, beautifull images, it's amazing to me that from searching for microscopic traces of water a few years ago we're now "finding data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealing that the Red Planet once hosted vast lakes, flowing rivers and a variety of other wet environments that had the potential to support life."
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I think that it's possible that we will (probably during our inevitable colonisation of Mars at some point) find evidence of bacteria on Mars that wasn't brought there from Earth. Especially if the theory of Panspermia is correct, and since Earth and Mars have been known to swap rocks every now and again, it's not a giant leap to imagine that an asteroid bringing life to Earth may have also brought life to Mars. Now, if Mars had standing pools of water, rudimentary bacteria could have existed at some point.
Of course given Mars' extreme cold, crap atmosphere and almost zero shielding against cosmic radiation, any bacteria that did land there may have died out instantly - I guess we'll either find evidence of really hardy bacteria or no evidence at all - but in that case could we really be certain that Mars *never* had life?
"And then I visited Wikipedia
Actually this was well known before. The detailed analysis by the recent probes and orbiters has only confirmed it and rejected some of the other theories to how these features formed (like the liquid carbon dioxide theory and the periodic floods on a dry planet theory).
This is all interesting. But what are the net benefits to mankind from the expansion of billions of dollars in Mar exploration? Was there water? Is there water? So what? Does any of this help address any of the many serious problems facing us here on Earth? Will we ever colonize Mars? Will a manned visit to Mars help societies problems in any way? Nope...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"Quaid.......start the reaaacctoorrr..."
Thar she blows!
Men of the Moon, quick! To the space whalers!
Well, maybe my "few years" > your "before" ; )
I hadn't heard about the periodic floods on a dry planet theory.
How would that work ? Subterranean seas, clouds only, extraplanetary h2o?
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
"'scuse me, 'scuse me, officer JPLNazi coming though... "
...vast regions of Mars contained rivers and lakes...
This has been OLD NEWS since the Viking orbiters, more than thirty years ago, though thanks to the demands of the mass media, the goldfish-like attention spans of the general public and the rigours of academic tenure, publishing, and funding rounds (not to mention PR teams at academic institutions, who often seem to know jack shit about the subject they're writing a press release on) it gets recycled every time there's a water-related Mars discovery. I'm sure I've seen three or four water-related stories based on MER (rover) research, then there's the Mars Express data, Mars Odyssey's spectrometer data (hint: why do you think Phoenix happened to land somewhere where there's water ice 5cm below the surface - luck?). Oh yeah and of course Phoenix is just about to drop ice scrapings into the TEGA oven and cook out any water, carbonates, in fact everything else that vaporises at less than 1000 degrees C.
The significant aspects of the two new papers (one in Nature, on in Nature Geoscience) are indeed the phyllosilicates, more commonly known as clay minerals. (if you're thinking of the clay in your back garden, imagine it after lying in an Antarctic dry valley for a three plus billion years, in a near vacuum, and hammered with UV. To the layperson this is what Arthur Dent would have identified thusly: "well, it's rock, isn't it?" It adds to the evidence for medium-term (up to 10^6 years) periods of free-standing or flowing water on the surface at essentially every scale, from regional morphology such as flash flood outflow channels, river deltas, coastlines and the like down to rock formations that are clearly indurated, contain silica minerals (google 'Spirit Tyrone') or haematite (blueberries, which are concretions formed in water-saturated rocks) and vugs (voids left by water-soluble crystals.) When you wet particular kinds of rocks that Mars is known to have a lot of, you get clays (phyllosilicates) as a result.
By the way the NASA image isn't
"colour enhanced"
-- that's CRISM data overlaid on a visible-wavelengths image. (CRISM is a spectrometer and is the instrument that ID'd these minerals.)
...standing pools, which are conducive to the formation of basic organic matter.
This statement is, uh, mistaken. What it's getting at is the notion that long periods of exposure to water is generally considered to be probably very very important if not essential to early life. ("organic matter" would be anything with a carbon atom in it, e.g. coal, plastic, methane, oil... it's one of those words that means something totally different in particular scientific context. Like "metals" (tho' that means at leat three different things to different sciences...)
Much much more at a popular search engine near you.
NASA needs to say they have found evidence of OIL on Mars.
Cheney and his neocon buddies will start to drool. Dick Cheney will order Bush to fund a mission to Mars. Bush will say that God told him that they need to liberate the Martians.
NASA gets unlimited budget - will come out of the DOD's budget.
WIN/WIN situation!
The gist is that as the atmosphere was stripped away and the grew too cold and low pressure for surface liquid water to persist for long enough to cause obvious landforms, it was going into underground aquifers and ice deposits. Every now and then a big transient source of heat (volcanic eruptions or magma plumes in the mantle, and impacts, basically) deliver a big pulse of thermal energy that melts a large quantity of water. Result, landforms like canyons, areas with very large boulders that were carried from "upstream" by the floods, etc. There are other causitive agents, eg collapse of crater-rim walls releasing lake water, ice damn collapse, Milankovic cycles warming areas, polar wander... (and if the new idea about the lowlands results from a gargantuan impact are correct, it seems likely that the upper crust migrated significantly over the planet to reach an equilibrium position with the lowlands at one pole or the other, the Tharsis bulge (Olympus Mons et al) near the equator, etc.
from searching for microscopic traces of water a few years ago we're now "finding data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealing that the Red Planet once hosted vast lakes, flowing rivers
Think back even further and it's come full circle. When Mars was first viewed through telescopes it was 'the place is full of canals of water!' Then for a long time it was 'No, no way there was ever any water on Mars.' Now we're back to there having been lots of water.
This is somewhat appropriate for this discussion:
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
--Arthur C. Clarke
These cheap landers with specialized probes show just how much more powerful our science can be when we interact with its subjects through matter-on-matter operations, rather than just interacting with energy as we do in telescopes, or interacting with information as we do in simulations.
When we actually send a human to Mars, a "generalized probe" with sensory and mechanical amplification equipment, we'll really be getting to work, down to brass tacks.
--
make install -not war
Mars is teeming with vampires in underground caverns. They've covered the surface with a layer of blood dust to protect themselves from the Sun's rays. It's time to start arming our probes and orbital satellite bases with SOLASERS, to focus the Sun's power through cracks we dig in their defenses.
Otherwise, the biters will just ride back to Earth our probes, and raise their earthling cousins into an army to destroy us while the Sun's back is turned.
--
make install -not war
but the fact that Venus has no signs of life proofs that women do not really exist and are just the results of a fevered imagination. This handily explains why slashdot, a bastion of clear thinking, has no women.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Some people say why go to space and let's focus on human problems on Earth. I am really fed up reading such comments, especially on fora where I would expect people to have other interests than food and playgirls. These people are obviously not nerds. Non-nerds's only interest in life is to eat well and live well, but nerds go beyond that. Nerds have passions: they are passionate about inquiring. Nerds want to know everything and not knowing the history of Mars is a very real problem for a nerd. A nerd is a machine posing questions and seeking answers for them, and unanswered questions act like real torture on the nerd's brain. Thus, by going to Mars and more closely examining its history, the nerds can solve the very real problem (for them) of not knowing everything about Mars.
And don't laugh, without nerds your societies would be still in the dark ages, praying to FSM for rain and trying to cure people with talismans. It is thanks to nerds that you today have highways, computers, and aeroplanes.
Of course I am not saying that passion for knowledge should be the sole reason for spending euros in research. Practical considerations are important as well, and space science does indeed help solve human problems, as scientific research always has secondary uses in other fields.
It has long been thought that earth's earliest years were dry, but recent research suggests that 4.3 billion years ago earth had liquid water.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I don't mean to troll, but honestly- who considers 'evidence of water' on mars news today? Does anyone have any doubts? I mean, we're about to, if we haven't already, scoop up a big pile of ice and analyze the contents. Do we need further evidence of water on mars? Yes yes, we should continue to do science...but not report it as evidence. That's like saying a study of tigers in Africa is evidence of life on Earth. Yes, we know there is life on Earth...spin it another way.
At this point, I think it will be obvious when we find microbial life on Mars and I'll really be irritated when I hear "evidence of life on mars" when its a few micro-organisms. What I want to hear about is the more complex life that is likely living underground. I have little doubt that if we ever make it to Mars and dig down or explore some of the caverns and lava tubes, we'll find all sorts of complex life surviving. Arthur C Clark had little doubt either...
Physically and scientifically, it's certainly possible to colonize Mars; nobody is disputing that.
The question is whether people are going to be willing to make the economic and social sacrifices to do it.
I don't think so. The societies that could afford it are so fearful, lazy, and self-absorbed that they will never finance colonization of other planets.
The only chance I see for colonizing other planets is if some large group of religious nuts makes it a priority. But given the general level of corruption in Christian and Muslim religious organizations, that's not going to happen either: churches want followers to sacrifice so that the church leaders can live it up, not to go to Mars.
These articles rarely mention that there are two camps in the scientific community, one of which is largely American, and rejects any evidence for recent liquid water on Mars, and the other of which is more European, and accepts it.
The Mars cratering model indicates that a billion year old surface on Mars should have multiple 100 meter craters per square kilometer, and maybe ten 50 meter craters per square km . Basically, if you see a picture of the Martian surface, and there aren't lots of little craters on it, then that is not a billion year old surface, regard of what the press release says. It isn't hard to find such images. Here is another, and another.
Oh yeah. This page at Malin Space Science Systems has a nice explanation of how the crater densities work to determine the age.
Indeed, that's a great little article, thanks.
However, it dates from 1994, and knowledge of Mars has increased enormously since then. I'd love to read something more up-to-date on the science behind Martian orbital reconnaisance, and about methods of analysis of the data from the various probes.
Do the actual scientific articles have quantitative scales that express mineral abundances? Otherwise, what's the point of figures such as those given in the press release? Can't we do better than "green means clay is present"? Clays form very readily from common minerals (like feldspars) and are likely to be present to some degree everywhere on Mars (as with oxides and other secondary minerals). How much is "a lot"?
the fact that Venus has no signs of life proofs that women do not really exist and are just the results of a fevered imagination
That fever is not imaginary --- Venus is extremely hot! (Around 460C.)
How this relates to women I have no idea.
You're talking total tripe, because we don't need free energy nor wormholes nor warp drives nor any other nonexistent inventions nor any new physics to make travelling to Mars cheap and widely available. All we need is *time* (a lot of it) for our engineering systems to mature.
Travel is a matter of harnessing energy, and energy is plentiful. The earth's surface receives a bit less than 150,000 TW of solar irradiation, of which we harness and use no more than 18-20 TW (that's just 20, not 20,000), so there's no energy shortage at ground level. Add solar energy collection beyond the atmosphere to our capabilities and the available energy becomes effectively infinite. That also means that travel within the solar system will be effectively unlimited in an easily forseeable future. It's a sure bet. The sun isn't going to dim any time soon.
What we do need of course is many centuries of good solid engineering to develop such a capability, because creating an infrastructure for widespread space travel is not something that can be done in just a few decades. But it's coming for sure, because there are no reasons why it shouldn't come and ample reasons why people will want it ... no doubt it will be fueled by the lure of profits like everything else.
We certainly do not need a change in the laws of physics nor any magic transports. Stop talking crap.
(New physics will undoubtedly appear over the centuries, but current physics is more than enough as a foundation for universal space travel. Energy is the only hard constraint on space travel given by the laws of physics, which effectively means that we are not constrained at all, at least within the inner solar system.)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I read Slashdot's science discussions much, and enough to recognize your username as one often associated with insightful commentary and debunkings of idiocy (which I consider good in general and in which I occasionally even post a comment). But your post on this matter is very disturbing.
Note that Clarke uses qualifiers: "is almost certainly right" and "is very probably wrong". You seem to acknowledge this, and attack it directly:
It is about as naive as those peopel who claim you can never know anything with 100% certainty.
With some disingenuous rendition of GÃdel's Incompleteness Theorem:
If that was the case then we certainly couldn't know it ( at least not for sure ), and thus it falls over on itself.
Next, two gems in one:
Indeed, a famous philosopher provided a quite insightful example, yet the naive continue to parrot Popper, even thou his claims are quite obviously self-defeating.
(emphasis mine)
1) It is petty and dismissive of you to say that anyone who agrees with Popper is merely parroting him.
2) It is pithy sophistry of you to claim name the object of your derision while withholding the not only the name of your alleged counterexample, but the explicit example itself. Who and what are you even talking about? Do you mean to cite GÃdel as your philosopher, as I have inferred [this is an important concept]? Or do you mean to reference Hume and his denial of the value of logical inference?
Hume could certainly deny the value of inference, but he could not deny its efficacy.
It is remarkable how many educated people, even physicists, will believe in a paradox simply because it has become popular.
Please consider that there is another option; that educated people, even physicists, "believe in a paradox" not because it is a paradox not because they are uncritical or unphilosophical or stupid, but because upon careful consideration it is the correct and indeed the only tenable position. Bertrand Russel was no theist, but he wrote quite lucidly explaining why he was technically an agnostic and not an atheist. Feynman thought similarly:
"That is, if we investigate further, we find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty: 'It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true'; or 'such and such is almost certain but there is still a little bit of doubt'; or-at the other extreme-'well, we really don't know.' Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity or absolute truth.
...
This very subtle change is a great stroke and represents a parting of ways between science and religion."
The endeavor of science is all about making wise inference. Wise means both bold when appropriate but also cautious, and *never* certain, because there could always be a "black swan"; we simply don't know. That is why science can never be complete even in principle: if we were to acquire "all" knowledge, we wouldn't know it, and in any case thereby wouldn't have acquired all knowledge. Woops! Another paradox.
If you have an axe to grind with the proponents of special creation or with pseudo-science at large, I empathize. But it is by abuse of and use of misunderstandings of scientific inference that they flourish. Perhaps I have grossly misunderstood the nature of your post, but it seems to me that it is your understanding of science and epistemology that is incomplete, inadequate, and/or mistaken.
"Noachian"? As in Greg Bear's "noach" (no channel) from the Forge of GOd?
I'm willing to bet that one day we will dig up fossils on Mars. The only problem is that no one wants to go there and no one cares. If I were a ruthless billionaire I'd be financing a sample return mission (probably personned).
Alas, I have no money, I'm a looney and the doctor gives me pills, so I will probably have to be content with watching the Human Race exterminate itself due to medieval religious superstition coupled with racial intolerance.
Stick Men
that quote is always missed by so many fools.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You say there is no reason to colonize other planets. I disagree. We are constantly living in uncertainty, on brink of destruction, on a tightrope. Will we blow ourselves to smithereens? Will the bees die? Maybe not. But probably something catastrophic will happen and then we want to have a backup. In the form of Mars perhaps. Or in the form of space stations, maybe. What is impossible today could be the reality of tomorrow. There is no particular law of physics that prevents us from going there; the rest is simply an engineering problem. A problem we will solve. Unless we blow ourselves to bits before that, of course.
You dismiss my assertion as tripe, then attempt to demonstrate that by resorting to magic wand technological solutions. If it's a simple question of engineering, why hasn't it happened yet? Don't give me "politicians" or "whining ecofreaks" - if there was cheap energy to be had that easily, we'd have done it by now. And as there's no sign of anything like that happening even now, when energy prices just went up by an order of magnitude, doesn't that tell you something?
travel within the solar system will be effectively unlimited in an easily forseeable future. It's a sure bet.
Care to put some actual folding cash money behind that?
There is cheap energy to be had easily. Why do you think that you can go to a nearby airport and purchase a ticket to fly anywhere in the globe for about 1 months of a working persons wage (in the USA) and end up literally anywhere on the surface of this planet in less than a day. OK, maybe a couple months wage, but it is easily within the budget range of an ordinary person if they have the desire for it.
BTW, Energy prices didn't go up an order of magnitude. Only one particular source of energy that is being controlled and manipulated for political purposes. Other energy sources are in fact becoming much more affordable and in fact is one of the things causing the current plunge in the price of oil, as demand has significantly slacked off as people are changing their energy consumption habits. Or are you paying attention to current events?
So yeah, I also consider your assertion to be tripe. There isn't a need for new energy sources to be discovered in order to make quick and routine access to Mars possible. Indeed, even using current conventional chemical rocketry, travel between the Earth and Mars will take less time and be far less hazardous than a crossing of the North Atlantic Ocean was in the 17th Century.
The real issue that is holding up any major human exploration of space and colonization of Mars is getting cheap and reliable access to low-earth orbit... the altitude of the Space Shuttle and the ISS.
As for actual folding cash behind getting that option going and running.... well, I'm waiting for the IPO of SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Armadillo Aerospace. There are a few other companies out there, several of which are working for this specific goal. And I am buying trinkets from these companies (hats, t-shirts) which is the only way you can invest in this stuff right now unless you are a multi-millionaire.
Given the opportunity, I would love to go up on a Zero-G flight.... and that is something which you can put some cash on the table, head to Las Vegas, and enjoy right now for a relatively inexpensive price.
Yeah, I'll take your money in a Vegas style bet as well if you want to put a 50 year horizon... heck 20 year horizon on when cheap and reliable transportation to several destinations in the Solar System will happen. Name the bookie and I'll get with you!
There is cheap energy to be had easily.
OK, I stopped reading there, because you're either an idiot or delusional.
Who is an idiot or delusional? For such a bold statement to be made about me, I hope that you know me, which you don't.
I'm pointing out that the average person has far more power and energy at their disposal than at any other era in the entire history of humanity, and indeed the last 15 to 20 years have been remarkable for a substantial fraction of the world's population "catching up" to standards long enjoyed in Europe and North America.
I will boldly assert that I have direct access to far more energy than my parents have ever even dreamed about having, and indeed earning relatively speaking compared to what they did indexed for inflation far less effort.
Energy is cheap and plentiful. General access to large amounts of energy to do amazing things like redirect water from Southern California to the Colombia River basin of Washington state (why that is done is another story) is an amazing tale, and but one demonstration of modern civilization and how much cheap energy we really have.
I think it is you who lacks an understanding of history and is doomed to repeat it.