Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Methane On Mars May Indicate Living Planet

Posted by timothy on from the or-a-big-bean-dinner dept.

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."

6 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. SBD by Mud_Monster · · Score: 5, Funny

    Mars is farting, hehe.

  2. Greenhouse gas! That stuff is worse than CO2 ... by NotBornYesterday · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  3. Re:Martian planetary defence system by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This joke and others like it would be a lot funnier if not for the fact that methane is odorless. It's not the methane you smell in farts, it's all the other stuff the gas picks up on its passage through, well, a tube full of shit.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  4. Methane on Mars, 2004 by mbone · · Score: 5, Informative

    This was reported by Mars Express in 2004.

    1. Re:Methane on Mars, 2004 by sighted · · Score: 5, Informative

      IANAS, but it appears that since these findings were obtained by a completely different process, they provide important confirmation of the Mars Express data--and extend that knowledge in an important way by adding location-specific information. From TFA: "According to the team, the plumes were seen over areas that show evidence of ancient ground ice or flowing water. For example, plumes appeared over northern hemisphere regions such as east of Arabia Terra, the Nili Fossae region, and the south-east quadrant of Syrtis Major, an ancient volcano 1,200 kilometers (about 745 miles) across."

      --
      Saddle up: Riding with Robots
  5. Let's take that seriously for a moment by Kupfernigk · · Score: 5, Insightful
    We've only explored one planet seriously, and looked at a tiny bit of a moon with extreme temperature variation. Almost everywhere we look on the planet - water, air, surface, crevices in rocks - we find lots of living things and the remains of even more. We find things like thiobacter concretivorans chewing up nuclear reactors. We find complex features that arise through different biological routes - image forming eyes evolve separately at least twice. We find a variety of body plans. We find two different data storage systems, DNA and RNA. The evidence so far is that life appears all over the place and can inhabit moderately sever environments so long as it has a source of energy, an electrolyte, and some stuff around the place suitable for building molecules based on carbon backbones.

    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."