Why Mars Is Not the Best Place To Look For Life

EccentricAnomaly writes "A story over at Science News quotes Alan Stern (former head of NASA Science missions) as saying: 'The three strongest candidates [for extraterrestrial life] are all in the outer solar system.' He's referring to Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"

Comments

Mars is closer and easier to send people to

[Joe_Dragon]

Mars is closer and easier to send people to

Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to

[Rei]

Mars ... has about 1/3rd of earth gravity.

Which is something for which we don't know much about the long-term health effects of. It might be no better than microgravity.

They have 10km deep canyons on Mars, can you believe this? Colorado River Canyons are dwarfed against that.

It's hardly the only massive canyon in the solar system, however. The Saturnian system has some impressive ones (like Ithaca Chasma), made all the more impressive in comparison to the size of the body they're on.

You have the desert. The beautiful sunsets, the amazing sun rises.

Sounds more like Earth than Mars. :P

With solar panels you can harvest sun

Between the greater distance and the electrostatic dust that clings to everything, not nearly as well as on Earth. At least with most other bodies in the solar system, you don't get dust clinging to all of your sensitive electronic equipment.

you can melt ice to get water

Water becomes more abundant the further out in the solar system you go.

you can create methane and O2 to ave rocket fuel.

Not readily. CO2 is such a sparse gas on Mars, and the process to convert it to methane is not trivial. On the other hand, say, on Titan, you've got an atmosphere already full of methane. LOX can be burned like jet fuel on Titan. Most of the solid bodies from Saturn on out, and to a lesser extent in the Jovian system, are covered with tholins -- all sorts of various complex organic carbon compounds, nearly all of which could be used for hybrid rocket fuel much easier than trying to produce methane on Mars. On any body with ice, you can produce LOX and LH anyway; fuel is not really the issue. At least there's lots of LH engines to choose from; there aren't many methane engines out there.

You can fly planes or ballons.

Only with *extreme* difficulty; Mars's atmosphere is so thin it's almost negligible. It's far much easier on Titan or Venus's habitable cloud layer (there's a layer of atmosphere in Venus with a temperature similar to a hot Phoenix day at a pressure similar to that of La Paz -- and even a normal Earth atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, so floating colonies are not out of the question. You could even walk outside in shirtsleeves, although you'd need a mask to provide oxygen and goggles to protect your eyes from long-term exposure to the trace carbon monoxide; the small amounts of sulfur dioxide may also be an irritant).

You can make a greenhouse and plant groceries.

You can do that anywhere. But it's not nearly as simple of a process to do sustainably as you're imagining.

On Europe: ... On Enceladus ...

It's far too simplistic to declare Europa and Enceladus's surfaces as being *all* ice. And it's not like anyone would live on the *surface* of such a world when you could so readily go underground for radiation shielding. And those are but two bodies amount the vast many possibilities in the solar system. And who says that colonization needs to occur *on* a solid body anyway? It could just as well be done in space, with only mining done to solid objects (which might not even be planetoids/moons), so you don't have to have your people locked deep in a gravity well. And if you're going to choose a gravity well, why choose a deep one when it might not actually offer any health benefits?

Anyway, this is a whole red herring, because this was a discussion about exploration and the search for life. Colonization is so far off of a topic it shouldn't even warrant consideration at this point in time.

Because it's closer.

[Nidi62]

Mars is closer to us than Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Not just physically, but culturally. Literature, film, etc, Mars has played a big role in the past 50-75 years. If you hear "little green men", the average person is going to immediately think "Mars". More people are more likely to know the name Mars as opposed to some moons orbiting Saturn ( and yes, I'll admit I had to look in the article to double check that they are in fact moons of Saturn). If you are trying to get funding for something, you go for something people will recognize, because they will be more likely to support it. Ask for something they've never heard of, and they might start wondering if it's really all that necessary. It's sad, but it's true.

Also, people might confuse Europa with a continent, and Enceladus with a Mexican dish. :)

Re:Because it's closer.

[Jimbookis]

Mars is closer to us than Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Not just physically, but culturally. Literature, film, etc,

Yes, that I have never quite gotten into or understood that Europan tentacle porn as much as I have the Martian three fingered face hugger porn. Titanian porn makes me feel inadequate.

Europa

[MrVictor]

Yes, Europa has a probably has a better chance of having life in its subsurface oceans but there is that wee problem of penetrating through its icy crust. How the hell are you going to penetrate through 20 kilometers of ice (minimum estimate) without using a massive thermonuclear bomb? And then if you did, any life in the vicinity of the blast would be annihilated and then the thawed hole would freeze over before a probe could find anything. Yea, forget about Europa.

This seems unfair

[JoshuaZ]

This seems unfair at multiple levels. First, we understand the basic Martian environment a lot better than other environments so sending things there are easier. Second we know from the Viking probes that Mars has weird chemistry going on in its surface. We still don't know what exactly happened there. The basic results of the Viking experiments seemed to be consistent with life but no complex carbon compounds were found. We now know that this may have been due to the presence of perchlorates in the surface material which could have destroyed the organic compounds when the samples were heated. Mars is still one of the most promising locations for life.

That said, there are less good reasons why Mars is a frequent target. Sending things to Mars takes a lot less time than sending things to the outer systems. That means if one is a scientist one would rather work on a project that sends something to Mars than something that goes far away. Second, Mars has a place in the popular mind that these various moons do not.

The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general. The repeatedly canceled Europa missions would be in the cost range of a few hundred million dollars. This is a tiny amount when one compares it for example to how much money the US spends on Afghanistan monthly. The US has messed up priorities. That's why even as we speak, the Russians are doing a sample return mission to Phobos which will launch in a few weeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt. If the Russians were still dirty commies the US would be in an absolute panic and we'd have congressional hearings asking why the US isn't doing something similar. I hope that as China becomes more of a boogeyman the US will start taking space seriously again, if not for the good of humanity, at least for old-fashioned xenophobia. And I suppose that in the long-run I really would prefer that functioning democracies explore and colonize space than other countries, but that's so far in the future at the current rate of exploration that it doesn't seem to be immediately relevant. Right now, we need to just get some people substantially interested in exploring beyond our little rock.

Re:This seems unfair

[Pence128]

$100 million is about what the US spends on Afghanistan in 36 hours. It would last 6 in Iraq.

Re:Take from the rich and give to the... rich

[dgatwood]

You do realize if you try that, you simply change the names of the 1% as they take over the transfer...

Although you are technically correct (the best kind of correct), that's a rather useless way of viewing money. In the U.S., the top 20% have about 85% of the accumulated wealth, and the top 5% have almost 60%, which makes it a remarkably lopsided distribution, with the vast majority of people living below the mean.

What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.

The bigger problem I have with your post is the assumption that the rich have predominantly earned their money. There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.). The vast majority of working class income falls into the first category. The vast majority of upper class income falls into the latter category. So any tax scheme that does not tax the upper class more than the working class is unfair because it takes away money that the working class have earned to allow the rich to keep more money that they haven't earned.