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Martian Methane May Be Created By Lifeforms
Following our recent discussions about the growing evidence pointing to possible life on Mars, reader skywatcher2501 writes with news of a study that has ruled out one possible explanation for the levels of methane seen on that planet — that it might be replenished by disintegrating meteors entering the atmosphere. So two theories remain: either the gas is created as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water, or it is a by-product of a lifeform's metabolism.
that Martians need some beano eh? Also, first post BTW...
Methane concentrations peak in an area on the planet opposite the famous face on mars.
Now the ecozealots will decry our spoiling of the natural martial environment, and will protest any attempt at colonization or terraformation as the destruction of a precious natural world.
"Mars Farts"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"There's something alive in here!"
That it is life. I've said it before so I won't reiterate with a long post, but if there's life on Mars, that proves life isn't just unique to Earth. This planet isn't a fluke. If there's life on Mars, then it can be *anywhere*
What an amazing thing that would be.
Almost as good as the BBC TV series...
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
...that would have to be a lot of life, no? Or would the gas have been created by long-dead/extinct lifeforms, and the gas is just that stable in the atmosphere?
Also, titan is almost literally drowned in Methane (as in, lakes and oceans of the stuff). There ain't that many meteors floating around for that volume, and there's no volcanic activity to speak of, IIRC.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It seems possible that life existed in the distant past on Mars, leaving behind methane deposits much like oil and natural gas deposits here on Earth...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
This spells disaster in the form of global climate change on mars! Who wants to be the first to martian up and buy some methane offsets?
... we're missing critical information in the report. The keep mentioning "levels of methane" but they don't tell us what these levels are - and more importantly, how much bio mass would be required to create those levels. They also don't mention if it's saturated in certain areas (like around live volcanoes).
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Could it be possible that there was life on mars... and not any more? Those long dead critters are continuing to decay and release the gas.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
"So two theories remain: either the gas is created as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water, or it is a by-product of a lifeform's metabolism."
Or C: There is some, as of yet, unidentified method of methane production.
... get ready to hear this word a lot: "cross contamination" from the bombardment period.
I know - I know. I'm not advocating it - I'm just saying: Don't be surprised.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
It makes enough methane for the whole planet, that's for sure.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
where are you?
Either there are microorganisms living in the Martian soil that are producing methane gas as a by-product of their metabolic processes, or methane is being produced as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water.
I think that it would be really exciting to find the first possibility true, and there's ample precedent for it here on earth.
They are farting methane and causing Martian Warming!!!!!!
I say we put a carbon tax on them, maybe after not collecting any monies from them for a few decades, the U.N. will get serious about sending someone to Mars, even if it is only to send someone with a sternly worded letter....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I saw recently that NASA was leaning towards judging structures on a few meteorites as organic in nature. Meaning, we could have been derived from, or seeded life on Mars. Multiple times.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You can go to Mars, but don't drink the water, because water always wins.....
I wonder if you breathed in Martian Methane if you would become a fart monster who wanted to invade Titan or something.......
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I, for one, welcome our new flatulent Martian overlords.
I bet Adam Richman is already eyeing the place with a challenge in mind.
The Methane is being caused by the Bugalo who eat martian sagebrush and fart methane. I say we go there and start ranching them, maybe buy the whole planet using a giant diamond as payment or something. Of course China will beat us to the punch and we will have gone the Wong way.....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
the byproduct of an invasion force from Alpha Centauri building up under the Martian landscape. They'll land on earth and take our women for sure. Then we'll be doomed. Who wants to look at the hairy guys?
There's a small worm hole from the local Taco Bell leading to Mars.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Carbon offsets are for Methane too as Methane is C(H4)...
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
...welcome our new flatulent Martian overlords.
Who knows, it could just be a piece of pre-animate matter caught in the matrix.
The latest issue of WorldWatch magazine had an interesting piece on the contribution of methane to AGW ... the general conclusion was that convincing humans to alter their diet (less/no meat) will have more impact than convincing them to alter their driving habits.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Would they be looking at earth through telescopes of a kind unknown (and unrecognisable) to us thinking "yeah, that might be a nice planet to colonize, but it's so hot and the atmosphere is full with volatile oxygen, can't imagine anything surviving there."?
Does this mean our rovers are trespassing on Mars?
Obviously the solution is to genetically engineer the bacteria in ruminant stomachs to produce no methane....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Absolutely. They could teach us a lot. They would probably tell us that their planet did adopt the Martian Climate Summit resolution. But unfortunately the mammal's flatulent emissions were not taxed at a high enough rate to cancel out the anal footprint. A heavier tax burden would have surely enabled them to control their atmosphere's methane pollution.
Back in March, there was an article in "Nature News"(the Nature News article is subscription, but a decent summary was posted by "The Free Republic") that the mineral Olivine when incorporated in a hydrothermal system may generate methane.
On Earth, the predominate source of methane is considered biological in origin, and the presence on Mars has been considered a possible indication of life on Mars. Recently, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at The Woodlands, near Houston, Texas, researcher Bethany Ehlmann (a PhD student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island) proposed a geological process could be a potential source for methane. The article reports that under a hydrothermal process the mineral olivine can undergo conversion to serpentine, with methane and hydrogen as a by-product.
Not surprisingly, there are potential problems with the theory. Though the presence of the mineral could have been a source of methane, the surface mineral is ancient, 3.8BY. Too old to be the source of the methane currently detected. It may be though, that the conversion is active subsurface, and the generated methane reaches the surface via fissures, etc."
Cows ruined their own planet before they came to earth millenia ago.
Its this migration that the child's nursery rhyme is referencing in the line "the cow jumped over the moon".
They're now doing the same to the earth.
As I understand it, we know there's olivine on Mars and that there's water on Mars. Assuming the laws of physics operate the same on Mars as on Earth, then you have all the explanation you need for methane on Mars. Serpentinization is the process of reacting olivine with water. It generates methane as a byproduct.
The question isn't whether serpentinization is a source of methane, but rather whether it is the majority source or not. My take is that if the methane production was due to life on Mars, there'd be a lot more methane being produced than a few hundred tons a day. I don't see life on Mars staying in one place over millions much less hundreds of millions of years. But I suppose there's a chance it could happen that way (say if life on Mars is a relatively recent phenoma).
Parent poster wasn't really talking about abiogenesis but evolution (perhaps he used too strong words, "complete isolation")
Even if there was some exchange of material at the beginning, any lifeforms that subsequently conquered any of the two planets would be evolving in isolation.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Sounds a bit like the "God in the Gaps" line of reasoning. Well, to be fair, "lifeform creates methane" is testable and all ready been shown true on Earth. I guess I'm just cranky after debugging all night...
Wow, I almost wrote "to be fair", imagine the flame fest that would have started. What can I say, my fingers type the first word that matches phonically.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
I for one welcome our flatulent Martian overlords.
I posted like I caught rabies on DU, how did I do?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I thought I had heard that Mars' atmosphere is weak because the plant's core is not molten like the core of Earth. Is this still the theory?
For those who aren't familiar with the idea, Earth's molten core creates a magnetic field that blocks the solar wind from the Sun. The solar wind would blow away Earth's atmosphere if it weren't there.
So, if Mars somehow got a molten core, by adding mass, or simply spontaneously, air would remain, then seas could form, etc.
The presence of methane from biological processes holds hope for a Green Mars someday.
Best regards.
That must be some lifeform.
How is it possible for there to be methane on Mars, yet it's a cold as ice. You FAIL Al Gore!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Taxes solve everything like my neighbor working extra hard and having more money than I do. Now his house looks as crappy as mine and I am happy. Thank you Envy, best of all of the seven sins!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
And ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the argumentum ad hominem.
Let us take a moment to ponder this posters ability to take a tone of superiority, all the while unawares of the stupendous amount of ignorance being displayed by his own statement.
Truly a remarkable creature.
Don't light any matches.
Well, James Lovelock, in his Gaia book from the 80's, states that he compared
the
distance from thermodynamic equilibrium of the gas environments of Earth
and Mars ( he did it for NASA) and found...
There is life on Earth, and it sends the gas environment FAR from thermodynamic equilibrium!
There is no evidence for life on Mars because the gas environment is very close to, if not at,
thermodynamic equilibrium. (NASA has a sad, and fires his ass.)
Let me know if this study changes his conclusions.
That's a pretty long-winded. Why didn't you just say "...theories remain: either the gas is created as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water". Oh, right, the clip and story already did. :P
Omeganon
Pull my tentacle.
Have gnu, will travel.
I can picture it now:
Herd of cows spotted on Mars
Article date: April 1, 2010.
You know vhat she'll say
Hey, they even carried a decent photo; even science gets past their Narrow-Minded, Censoring Overlords.
My problem was the article came through as an email update from Science News, which had since pulled the larger write-up with the only to buy the article.
My GUT feeling is that there's life on mars. I can smell it. Hell I can almost taste it!
(The above is a joke. Actually I have no idea if there is life on Mars).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Obviously the solution is to genetically engineer the bacteria in swamps to produce no methane....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
You can find more at DU or FreeRepublic, Take your pick!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I, for one, welcome our new flatulent microscopic Martian overlords.
Typo. Sorry.
Best regards.
Why would interstellar civilization be much different? They could evolve from creatures like us; the "negative" traits of ours that you describe are a byproduct of us being highly expansionist as a species.
Yup. But some where along the progression of evolution, a successful civilisation has to drop some of these negative expansionist trait to be able to advance without obliterating itself. With great capabilities (like interstellar spread) comes also great power (like much more advance power source) and much more potential of destruction which has to be contained to avoid collapse.
---
As a small example, most of our instinct such as the Uncanny Valley, the tendency to think about everything as an "Us versus Them" problem or other forms of racism, stems from the remote past where our hominid ancestor were living in small packs/tribes. Where it paid, from an evolutionary point of view, to discriminate against outsiders, because thus you were discriminating in favor of the pack / the tribe and such most probably discriminating in favour of (distant) relatives.
But, humanity luckily learned to somehow overcome such instinct and push away the boundary of what it considers in a "Us versus Them" thinking, in order to be able to function in much bigger units than a pack / a tribe. Leading possibilities to build cities, states, and civilisations. Which were able to achieve much more advanced stuff than what was available to a small group of animals.
I suspect that, in order to achieve even bigger projects, like space colonisation, a civilisation needs to go beyond regional conflicts and reach a global planetary collaboration, to pool together the necessary resources & knowledge.
Currently, some of our terran population is spending a crazy amount of budget in local wars, while its local space agency is only having a fraction of it. Of course if we're spending more money in trying to find creative ways to inflict misery onto other member of our own specie, we're never going to reach an interstellar level of civilisation.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
obligatory Bowie quote
Wouldn't carbon-14 measurement of the methane tell us whether there is live involved or not?
Mine is made by VP Racing....
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
true, but he has a point~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My friend's dad, Dr Newbold at Aberystwyth university has been working on this for years. Apparently adding garlic to the feed has a large effect on methane production too.
so.... you're a girl, huh?
Monkeys might fly out of Uranus.
Neither the source nor the sink of Martian methane is understood, as was discussed by Lefèvre & Forget in Observed variations of methane on Mars unexplained by known atmospheric chemistry and physics (Nature 460, 720-723 (6 August 2009)). Unlike the statement in the spacefellowship.com writeup, the observed methane plumes require a very quick absorption of methane on the surface, which means that the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is not " a few hundred years" but months or less, maybe even hours or less. Since the shorter the lifetime, the larger the production required to match the observed plumes, we don't know the methane production on Mars to within even 3 orders of magnitude.
We don't know the source, we don't know the sink, and we don't know the production rate, so I personally don't see how biology can be ruled out, despite the editorializing in Lefèvre & Forget.
Large underground herds of cows, that is.
The climatologists weren't quacks. As respected a source as the journal Nature made that clear. They were called quacks by people like Limbaugh, who make their millions by stirring shit without any interest in the consequences, as long as they get high ratings, and by the mainstream press, who are too stupid to understand the science and were therefore influenced by the asshole pundits like Limbaugh who were the first to speak on the matter.
So the question now is: Are you an idiot who believes anything the scientifically illiterate press tells you, or are you an idiot who believes anything politically-motivated pundits tell you?
Here's an interview with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, where he concludes that Life is the most likely and simplest explanation for all the methane on Mars. Surprising to hear a very mainstream scientist say so and so openly. http://jonja.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=8193
As Nick Boston pointed out (http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf)
this is the worst news the human race has ever received.
The idea is that the Fermi Paradox must be the result of a Great Filter which stymies the creation of long lived intelligent races. The easier it is for life to evolve, the more likely it is that the Filter lies ahead of us, rather than behind.
Therefore microbes on Mars is bad bad news.
I did like the last sentence about the wonderful *cough* Mrs Palin, though.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
And ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the argumentum ad hominem.
Let us take a moment to ponder this posters ability to take a tone of superiority, all the while unawares of the stupendous amount of ignorance being displayed by his own statement.
Truly a remarkable creature.
It's fine to attack a person instead of his argument when that person reads Free Republic or any other extreme right wing, racist libertarian nonsense. Because you see, that person is scum. They're never going to change their views because the American education system (or home schooling more likely) has left them without the ability to learn. So tell me, why not attack the person? If you did it more often, preferably with those guns you love so much, your country wouldn't be quite so fucked. Good luck with your next civil war. I hope both sides lose. Death to America.
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2005/05/67315
It's just that the Martians have started to use the iFart app
Have you seen this - relevant to the discussion I think: http://www.livescience.com/space/090718-survivor-microbe.html Could be something like this causing the methane on Mars. And whether or not, is reason to be very cautious about possibly accidentally introducing new Earth lifeforms to Mars in future space missions, until we know what effect they may have on the planet - and perhaps also on Earth if they get returned to Earth after evolving further on Mars. (see my other posts to this topic for why I think this may be a cause for concern and caution until we know a lot more about terraforming).