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NASA Orbiter Reveals Details of a Moister Mars
Matt_dk writes "NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed a new category of minerals spread across large regions of Mars. This discovery suggests that liquid water remained on the planet's surface a billion years later than scientists believed, and it played an important role in shaping the planet's surface and possibly hosting life."
So just send an inflatable biosphere and some bacteria/moss/whatever, at let's see if that rock can still support life if it's given a little help.
Why wait? A stable biosphere outside of earth orbit would be a monument to humanity. Let's do it.
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Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.
Leave John McCain alone!
But in all seriousness, there is a reason why they use the word possibility. That means there may or may not be life. A fossil would mean there is proof of life. They say possiblity because it interests most people. Just saying they found more water than expected is boring. We already know there is water there. How much water there is doesn't mean much to most people.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
That's sounds nice. However, finding fossils is not going to be easy. First, the relevant rocks on Mars are going to be rare, assuming that life was much more prevalent in the past. Geologic processes work at the surface to grind that surface into dust, meaning that we need to find a lucky outcrop.
Then, we need to identify something conclusively as a fossil. Single celled organisms don't preserve very well, and the odds of something being preserved is really bad. On the earth, it has taken a long time and a lot of work to find good evidence of early single cellular life. And there are still debates about whether certain morphologies are organic or mineralogic in source. A lot of these questions are solved by pointing to modern microbes that look the same. Of course, with no modern Martian microbes, this line of reasoning is shut down w/o the additional assumption that life on Mars would resemble life on Earth.
Also, remember that our tools for identifying anything on Mars are absolutely horrible. The rovers are great, but have you tried looking at some of the pictures that come out of them with the intention of identifying things? It's tough. Some recent work has been put into figuring out how good the information collecting of the rovers is by replicating them on the Earth. And uh, the results are not promising.
Getting a fossil back from mars would be super, duper, mega expensive. It would be dumb as hell to just spend the money. We need to continue looking for small signs that point us in the direction of that possibility, which is exactly what has been going on and exactly what will continue to go on.