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Methane On Mars May Indicate Living Planet
Riding with Robots writes "NASA is announcing today that the definitive detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere means the planet is still alive, at least geologically, and perhaps even biologically. 'Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,' said one agency scientist. The gas was detected with observations made over over several Martian years with NASA telescopes at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Both biological and geological processes could explain the methane."
The dog did it.
maybe something about a space burrito would do well with this crowd
Mars is farting, hehe.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
:D
Proof right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Fartpants
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I think I heard somewhere that methane gas contributes to Global Warming. If Mars is going through Global Warming shouldn't it be renamed to Solar, or even Universal, Warming?
Hmmm, I wonder if there are any space probes nearby, lets spend a trillion dollars to find the bug only to discover its one of ours we seeded there. Oh dear the technician had oral thrush.
They'll destroy their environment! If they don't slap some limits on those gas emissions, or come up with a workable credit-trading plan, they'll end up with a dry, dusty, desert planet in no time!
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
we don't know all the ways in which methane can be produced. Now which is more likely?
So the martians weren't knocking out our probes because they thought we were attacking - they were just embarrassed about the smell. And to be honest, this revelation does lower my opinion of martians. I think a few eons of evolution might help to teach them some manners.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
over 40 years ago Lovelock pointed out that you can tell there is life on earth because the atmosphere is HUGELY out of chemical equilibrium.
And it is maintained that way due to life on earth.
He also argued that by the same reasoning, there ain't life on Mars.
I suspect this bit of disequilibrium is not enough
to indicate life.
"Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways,
Like...? /talk to me nerdy
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Next we'll hear about extracting this for fuel to propel our next-generation inter-galactic probes.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It's coming form the under ground city's there.
Meth on Mars may indicate Martians who need to go to rehab.
There was at one time a LOT of cows on Mars.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
Next mission to Mars should focus on that and should take along a drilling platform. May as well answer the question.
the WAR ON MARS for oil by BP, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, and so on and so forth.
Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout
It's not worse than CO2, because it decays relatively quickly in the atmosphere. That's why this find is significant, it means the methane hasn't been in the atmosphere that long, which means there's still an active process on Mars that's putting it there.
http://www.mhall119.com
Has any probe carried a mass spectrometer? If not that should be a high priority to find out which isotopes are being produced as well, would help answer the organic vs. volcanic question.
This was reported by Mars Express in 2004.
there's still an active process on Mars that's putting it there
Oh, that's just James. He had beans for lunch again.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...geological process for ya!
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Well, obviously whoever smelt' it dealt it.
Who's to rule that possibility out?
On our own planet, even?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I think we need a qualifier for "relatively quickly" and "that long" when talking about geologic timescales. When dealing with this sort of thing "relatively quickly" could mean anything from a few months to several million years.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If Mars is geologically active, then it may make geo-thermal power a very real possibility. At the same time, it gives heat for a station as well as greenhouse. If it is biological in nature, all the more interesting.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hey, why are you loosing time with Mars? Venus is full of naked women!
I suspect that we don't know enough about how planets with atmospheres but no life behave to be able to determine if there were a chemical equilibrium or not. I also suspect that the people at NASA and most credible scientists believe that the chance of other life in our solar system is very small, but should be investigated anyway.
Putting aside some books written by people who thought the Earth was flat, the evidence to date is that where life is possible, there you find it. If you even half accept Popper's falsificationism, it is up to the people who believe that life doesn't appear wherever it is possible to prove that there is no life on Mars. People who believe that life on Mars is probable are actually just accepting that the cumulative evidence of experience is likely to be correct.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"The gas was detected with observations made over several Martian years with NASA smeloscopes at Mauna Kea, Hawaii."
Or perhaps it is just that the people at NASA have figured out that holding up the _possibility_ of other life in our solar system is their surest bet for justifying their continued employment? It is obviously a geologic process, but planetary science is boring... "little green men", on the other hand, is a subject that really gets the ignorant taxpayers excited.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Are any of the Mars Rovers near the methane plume sites?
Maybe these dog have been on Mars:
http://www.gibbleguts.com/the-farting-dogs-harmonics.html
And here I thought that "relatively" was a qualifier.
http://www.mhall119.com
Martians with telescopes could smell my farts? Would I be famous Mars wide?
What? You never suspected that the Martian canals were in fact open sewers?
I hope Martians don't take up smoking.
Our sun and solar system is a second generation system, made from the rubble of a previous star that went nova billions of years ago.
Jupiter, and Uranus have red spots that indicate Methane in their lower atmosphere. Some moons of Saturn have lakes and rivers of methane (Titan and Europa). That indicates that methane is older than the solar system and was created in the previous solar system that this one is made from.
Consequently, the presence of Methane doesn't say anything about the presence of life.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Hey, if it's "obviously" a geologic process, would you mind exactly WHAT process it is? Keep in mind that Mars has no current volcanic activity. And if there is/was no life, it's not a fossil fuel.
Funny how every time NASA is about to get it's budget cut (Obama) that they suddenly reveal they found something to do with life on mars?
One of the biggest myths of modern times is the belief that coal and oil are the fossil remains of prehistoric plants and animals. These deposits were created from abiotic hydrocarbon gases deep within the earth. This discovery of methane on Mars may lead to the further discovery of hopanoids or hydrocarbon fuels on Mars and possibly a biomass of organisms similar to ones that are found deep within the earth. Thomas Gold predicted all of this years ago(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold). His seminal paper "The Deep,Hot Biosphere", which explains this is available here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=49434 -Johanus
My guess would be methane hydrate trapped beneath the surface being released due to rise in temperature or drop in pressure brought about by the martian summer. Even without tectonic plates, you've still got expansion and contraction due to temperature differences that may be cracking rocks and developing new fissures. Of course, that would be somewhat of a random occurrence; if the methane is released consistently from the same places every summer, that would tend to prove me wrong. But then, I'm a software engineer, not a geologist.
The Abiotic Theory of the origin of petroleum argues that not all the petroleum reserves on earth may come from organic material, but rather from hydrocarbons buried by other means. In other words, it is possible to have buried hydrocarbons that are not "fossil fuels".
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Until we can determine whether or not there is life on Mars the LIFE project ( http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F07%2F1447217&from=rss http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/life/ ) which has a high risk of contaminating Mars with Earth life needs to be stopped. The risk was large earlier but this clearly makes it unacceptable.
Biological huh? Perhaps that's why the Mars Polar Lander stopped communicating as soon as it landed- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Polar_Lander
>Based on the fact that "ninnie" is a Spanish word for "girl"
Based on the fact that the word is "ninnle", not "ninnie", reading: You fail it.
Maybe it just isn't as old as we thought it was...
Well, it is and it isn't. It's WAY more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 and, as it doesn't break down instantly, does have a notable effect on Earth. (The life expectancy is something like a decade here.) That said, it breaks down into CO2 here, so it largely just adds to the CO2 content.*
That said, Mars has a different chemistry at play since there's virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere. What I want to know is, what's the life expectancy of methane there? The article says "short", but in planetary science terms that could mean millions of years.
* Although all of the freaking over cows emitting methane has me wondering: where do people think the cows GET the methane, ultimately?
Direct evidence they do: http://the-martians.co.uk/upgrade/
:D
There go all my karma points, but it was worth it
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
"...and Uranus would have been burning fiercely."
The last time I ate Thai food this very thing happened to me!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
While everybody here is having fun with fart jokes and other ha-ha's, you actually bring up an interesting issue in population biology which will have direct implications for colonization of Mars, terra-forming, and the introduction of hazardous or beneficial biota. So, if anyone has some spare time and wants to do a serious calculation, figure this one:
Assume the following, all based on available Mars science and on basic biology:
- Assume that Mars is sterile - either never had life, or had life which is now all dead and not ressurectible.
- Assume though that prior conditions have left a fertile ground, with porous rocks or soils with sufficient organics or other metabolically useful materials that primitive or extremophile biota can live on them.
- Assume that at some level below the surface, lets say 10 to 100 meters down, that temperatures are reasonably constant and temperate, and that soils are moist, perhaps with periodic liquid water flows.
- Assume that a single species that could thrive on that medium is newly introduced - just one small speck of a colony, or even just one microbe.
- Assume no competition from any other species.
- Assume that the species is mall enough to percolate easily through the medium.
- Assume that its growth kinetics and population density and dynamics are the same as would be seen in Earth soils or a petri dish.
The questions to answer then are:
- How quickly would the population spread itself across the planet?
- What would a geographic mapping of its distribution look like year by year?
- At what point would the mass of metabolic by-products be detectable by remote sensing?
- Is it possible that prior Mars landings could have infected the planet to the point that it is now detectable?
Of course, environmental, seasonal, geographic, and substrate-nutritional issues would profoundly influence the situation, but as I said, ASSUME, that Mars would be no different than a funky but favorable test tube for that organism.
And, by the way, does anyone know what NASA or other agencies do to try to NOT inoculate the planet when they send probes there?
Wait, methane = life? So that's why aliens always begin with our anuses when studying us.
Property is theft.
I'm going to go ahead and call it now. anyone running odds on it? my call is that they will find microbial life in the next 10 years, buried in the topsoil/mud around some kind of geological source of heat.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It is obviously a geologic process
Good thing we have folks like you around to figure this stuff out. Otherwise we might be duped into thinking that professional astronomers with degrees in the field and years of research experience under their belts might actually know something. Tell you what, you'd better send an e-mail to NASA right away informing them of your oh-so-informed conclusion. Let us know how that works out for you, okay?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
But then, I'm a software engineer, not a geologist.
So maybe before posting on this subject you should, you know, learn some geology?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You're probably wasting your time. Posts like GPP's show a preconceived political agenda with no willingness to consider the actual facts.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I heard that mauve has the most RAM.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I doubt the risk is that high. The surface is pretty lethal to any organic life. There's UV, temperature extremes, and an oxidizing environment. I doubt even spores can last long. The organisms would have to get below the surface. That's several steps that spores and bacteria have to overcome to get somewhere they might be able to survive in. This experiment actually has relevance in that it'll give us an idea just how much risk there is from contamination.
lets go there and kickstart the environment
1) Find physical phenomena.
2) Claim publicly that it might indicate life or the conditions for life regardless of the actual data involved.
3) Get funding.
4) Repeat.
It's not worse than CO2, because it decays relatively quickly in the atmosphere. That's why this find is significant, it means the methane hasn't been in the atmosphere that long, which means there's still an active process on Mars that's putting it there.
... WHOOOOOOOOSH!
It could also be older methane that has been trapped under ice and being released during the summer thaw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Reading this article http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090115-mars-methane-news.html gives the impression that they're talking months. From the article.
The methane plumes started to show up in the northern hemisphere spring of Mars, gradually building up and peaking in late summer. At one point during the study, the primary plume contained about 19,000 metric tons (21,000 tons) of methane, comparable to the amount produced at the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Pit Point in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Short-lived
Outside of the plumes, methane concentrations were very low, showing that the gas didn't get very far or last very long in the atmosphere. In fact, its lifetime was even shorter than expected or could be explained by the usual method of methane destruction, photolysis (reaction with sunlight).
So it sounds seasonal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Stale, stale, stale. There is nothing new here. Except that the Princeps-Designate is opposed to human space exploration and NASA might be trying to drum up public interest.
Get your ass to Mars! - Get your ass to Mars!Get your ass to Mars!
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
Do you think their cows are green?
They say men are form mars and well do like farting.
Indications of life on Nepture!
"Neptune...primarily of hydrogen and helium, contains a higher proportion of "ices" such as water, ammonia and methane, along with the usual traces of hydrocarbons and possibly nitrogen.[11] " Wiki
Must be the same Scientist claiming global warming after Earth lost almost three degree's in the past decade.
Love these Scientists!
Good Bye Carma!
We are getting closer and closer to that movie Total Recall....where they live inside a dome, built on the ground (in this case to keep the methane in)....I just wonder where those big martian built :P
rods are located that will slowly bore into the ground and return the atmosphere to Mars....
But on the atmosphere on the Proterozoic Earth wasn't like this and there was plenty of life. Oxygen didn't start to appear in the atmosphere until ~2.2 billion years ago.
No fancy space walking required right? Just drilling?
It would be fascinating to see the results of core sample drilling done on Mars. I suppose a rover of some sort could be fashioned to perform this task; however, as the late great Harry Stamper said, "drilling is an art".
Just wondering...
Since we have been looking at the planets with telescopes coupled with spectrometers for a very long time, why has it taken so long to detect and verify a simple molecule like methane?
OK, in the infrared we must get past the atmosphere, but aren't there IR space-based spectrometers? Even simple spectrometers could not have missed the unique signature; from balloons even. Is the S/N so low? It seems Mars would have been an obvious target.
What may end up being more intriguing is how the methane is being destroyed - they can't seem to think of a non-biological way to destroy that much methane that quickly. Their leading hypothesis seems to be another set of critters that use it as an energy source.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
There is heat in the core, methane, water, and public interest. Can we PLEASE start colonization now?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Mars just had to fart.