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A Third of Mars Could Have Been Underwater
Matt_dk writes "An international team of scientists who analyzed data from the Gamma Ray Spectrometer onboard NASA's Mars Odyssey reports new evidence for the controversial idea that oceans once covered about a third of ancient Mars.
'We compared Gamma Ray Spectrometer data on potassium, thorium and iron above and below a shoreline believed to mark an ancient ocean that covered a third of Mars' surface, and an inner shoreline believed to mark a younger, smaller ocean.'"
Haven't we gotten past the point where the idea of Mars once having lots of water is controversial? I mean, it seems as if every new piece of evidence points in that direction, so what exactly still makes it controversial?
You mean interesting as in "Hmmm, we might want to have some means of space exploration in the next century at the latest"
A century is a very short amount of time on the solar timeline. The Earth won't fall into the Sun for 5 billion years or so, and even then, the Sun will have lost enough mass that models predict the Earth may be flung off into deep space rather than falling into the Sun.
The more immediate concern is that over the next 1 billion years, the luminosity of the Sun will increase about 10% or so, which should be fairly devastating to life on Earth. But, thats due to the Sun getting older, not the Earth getting closer.
At some point we have massive evaporation, which would tend to go catastrophic, i.e. Venus (water vapor is extremely potent as a greenhouse gas). A temperature above which proteins in most organisms coagulate would bring us down to archea. Photosynthesis in its current form also prefers lower temperatures. We know very little of what situations complex multicellular life can really adapt to, but we can say that Earth would no longer be within the range that we consider to be habitable when we do armchair analyses of exoplanets.
It's not life as we know it, Jim.
Interesting hypothesis.
/. threads about surveillance, taking away our freedom, etc.
I have recently read a book that was supposedly written by an alien. He claimed that: the Moon is empty inside and is a home to a race of living beings that are on a very high level of spiritual evolution, the global warming is caused solely by the sun (and the other planets of the solar system are warming up too), that there was a very advanced (more advanced than ours, both technologically and spiritually) civilization on Earth millenia ago, that vanished due to a world war in which nuclear weapons were used, that the fact that Mesopotamian or Aztec civilizations seemed to appear "out of nowhere" is due to the survivors of the ancient WW, the lack of visible "side effects" (radiation) of the WW is due to a terraforming technology that involved "changing the atomic state of chemical elements by shooting out protons and electrons using condensed streams of photons" (or however someone more fluent in English would translate this from Polish), which is the technology we are going to use to recover Earth after World War III (which is going to start in a few decades), that humans are the only race in our galaxy that does not preserve their memories during reincarnation (this ought to be a side effect of an artificial "law of Karma", and could be undone if we wish to), that there is a great disproportion between the state of our technological and spiritual advancement (again, the greatest in the galaxy), that we are in a constant danger from a few alien races that would want us dead (they're supposed to have weapons that could destroy souls -- a final death, reincarnation impossible) and Earth exploited to their benefit, that the "Galactic Union" is taking great measures to fend them off until we are able to defend ourselves, that aliens are not going to reveal themselves, because in the past such events started a few religious cults (which are the sources of religion on our planet, and that our planet is the only one on which religion ever happened -- everyone else just *knows* that reincarnation is happening, because they're *experiencing* it), and that the US government (or rather: whoever runs the government) is planning a *fake* "alien invasion", using their own half-baked UFOs to attack the Earth (and then take over all the armies of the world to "fend off" the fake attack, and then create a worldwide regime) -- as of the last one, I wouldn't be surprised -- the ground is already being prepared, see all the
My opinion: even if this is bullshit, every good lie has a kernel of truth in it. I'm going to sit and observe, and take action if some of the things that that (supposed) alien is claiming would turn out to be true.
"My opinion: even if this is bullshit, every good lie has a kernel of truth in it." The only thing with even a ghost of truth in that is that you can measure the sun's contribution to global warming by looking at temperatures and/or reflected light from other worlds. This has been done. The sun's output is very close to constant.