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Blue, Not Red: Did Ancient Mars Look Like This?
astroengine writes "Using elevation data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, software engineer Kevin Gill was inspired to create a virtual version of the red planet with a difference. 'I had been doing similar models of Earth and have seen attempts by others of showing life on Mars, so I figured I'd give it a go,' Gill told Discovery News. 'It was a good way to learn about the planet, be creative and improve the software I was rendering it in.' He included oceans, lakes, clouds and a biosphere — a view of a hypothetical ancient Mars that looks wonderfully like home."
So the typical Martian was one ugly motherfucker, then? "Ain't got time to bleed!"
Props for realizing that a Mars covered with water would be blue, too. Such insight!
This is where using 2-3 minutes to read the fine article would have helped you out.
It is a software guy who just wondered what it would look like with earthly features. This is not based on any kind of facts other than the elevations.
It is an interesting exercise.
But I notice the renderings show a lot of nicely circular lakes, suggesting meteor impact craters. If Mars at any time had this amount of water and a thicker atmosphere there would likely be less craters and those that did remain would probably have different shapes due to erosion. It would suggest the meteorite impacts happened after the water evaporated and the atmosphere thinned.
Call me cynical, but this is pretty much a case of "Look, ma! We got some fancy 3D graphics now!". But it's not particularly interesting or novel from a technical viewpoint - even bad Hollywood movies have more professional graphics than this.
I mean, all he did was slap some Blue Marble textures onto a Martian height field globe. Wo-hoo, score one for physical simulation, and all that. As someone else has said, score one for the realisation that the planet would have been blue, if there had been large amounts of surface water. Wo-hoo! :-)
Now if he had done some actual simulation on where large bodies of surface water have likely existed: seas are sort of obvious, but what about rivers and lakes - these are extremely important for life, due to being sources of fresh water, as opposed to the inevitable salt water in the oceans. That, coupled with a simulation how life could have spread. Parameterised by how advanced the lifeforms are - move a slider from "basically just slime in the ocean" to "higher plants", and watch the green spread into those regions that could sustain it... that would be news. But this? They cover texture mapping and in-painting in computer graphics 101 these days.
That having said, the images *are* pretty, so it's not all bad. :-) Just not that much of news for nerds.
What, no pink unicorns?
People seem to forget that after its formation the sun was somewhat LESS bright than it is now so Mars would have been even colder in its current orbit. If there ever was large amounts of water on Mars I suspect that it would have spent most of its time locked up as ice sheets with the occasional melting due to impacts. Pretty much the way it is today.
All this warm wet life on mars stuff strikes me as nothing more than wish fulfillment - the same way people used to imagine Venus was a tropical paradise. Until the probes went there and proved those predictions to be some of the worst ever made in astronomical science.
Is it just me, or is that planet getting closer?
Many years ago the software Campaign Cartographer showed us this picture, of course with old mapping data but it was close.
I've been (very slowly) doing something a bit similar with the moon --- see here --- although differently; I've been trying to render everything and producing ground-level views rather than producing a painted sphere like TFA. (His looks better from a distance. Mine looks better close up.) I've been trying to use procedural texturing and atmospheric effects. The pictures above are rather out of date; rendering your own from SVN will look better.
Unfortunately rendering things the size of planets from very close up runs into big problems with floating point precision. The only renderer I've found which will do it at all is Povray, and even then there are loads of bugs --- volumetric effects for things like clouds is well buggered at this sort of scale. See this picture for an example. Plus Povray's is really slow at procedural surfaces.
Right now I really need to start again from scratch using higher-resolution terrain and gravity data from some of the recent lunar probes, and I also probably want to switch to a different renderer which works at higher precision. Any suggestions of a fast raytracer that does procedural isosurfaces, volumetric effects and works at double precision will be gratefully appreciated...
I will also share this test render with you, which I think is delightfully surreal...
I could do the same as this in SimEarth 20 years ago...
It had a pretty accurate height map of the planet it seemed and showed what it would look like terraformed. Maybe not in as super cool graphics but still.
So why does this guy get a Slashdot mention for something I could do at 8?
It implies that somebody (perhaps the submitter?) thought that the simulation is intended to be accurate.
As parent says - read TFA, it's meant to be a creative exercise.
Also read Kevin Gill's own explaination.
You have 0 clue about evolution or the processes involved in it.
Not to mention that evolution is not a constant speed. Evolution at those times is random and chaotic. Hell, it is practically an insult to call it evolution at those times.
The chance of evolution being always beneficial every mutation is still possible. Just like it is possible for a RNG to spit out a trillion 1s in series, it is still random, just not useful for most uses that we have for RNGs.
Life on our planet had many failures too. Massive failures. Some were environment, some were genetic, and some were warring between species that lead to massive death.
Evolution is not a constant storage device. If a branch of life dies off, so does every single thing that led to it, all those mutations are gone. If all humans died off now, that's it, done, no more species capable of going to space, or building technology. At least not for a few million years, some species related to us show signs of evolving towards a similar intelligence as well.
If the things that evolved eyes were to have died, huge setback, the evolution of eyes was a complex set of mutations that took a long time.
Admittedly we know of at least 2 different eye branches, but that isn't the point.
Earth was heavily bombarded in the early days. Not to mention the chaos our moon caused. (which is both a good and bad thing, but due to the time it lasted, overall bad since it hindered more complex life)
Mars is a much smaller body and is closer to large body, with 2 moons, it may have been more fortunate.
Wouldn't be covered, but it could have been partially covered for a short time.
Mars wouldn't have just suddenly up and died, it would have taken time. Life could have still been around all that time while the planet was dying, quite easily if it was just plants.
So now what would Earth look like, if it were rendered Mars-style?
(ie. if it were shown to have died a Martian death)
I think I see the Shire down there
Jepardy answers, not news headlines: Are Slashdot titles more like them?
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
Yes. Because amino acids inevitably evolve into green photosynthesising plants. The original comment made a bad assumption, but so did you.
...or it didnt happen!
Free Mars!
Well you asked the question in the title, again. Jeez. Tell me something, don't ask me something.
It couldn't possibly look that way. Mount Olympus would be smaller or non existent, craters wouldn't have reshaped the terrain as much, and on top of that, it is thought that Mars might have briefly had some plate tectonics. It depends on the time period they want to depict, of course.
Why does everyone always seem to assume that if your planet has water, it has (or could have had) life? Yes, water is necessary for life as we know it, but I'd be curious to know the carbon content of Mars, or the Nitrogen content of Mars. Both elements are plentiful on Earth and not coincidentally woven into our very DNA. There was some pretty complex chemistry going on in Earth prehistory and while it's very likely that similar events probably took place in our Solar System, there are probably very good reasons that life formed on our planet and didn't anywhere else.
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Planet Mars Feed @ Feed Distiller
If Mars ever had chlorophyl containing life, it would have left and oxygen atmosphere which Mars hasn't got.
Yes, because Oxygen is non-reactive and couldn't "disappear" into complex molecules.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Show the nerds a beautiful picture and they'll totally miss the point and dissect it to death. Good thing this is not a beautiful naked woman. They'd be complaining that the angle of the elbow isn't quite right and prove it with a mathematical formula.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
While a lot of people seem to be negative on this project, I think it's pretty damn cool and gives us an idea of what could be. We would need to terraform certainly, and quite possibly restart the core, but why not wonder?
Who knows? Our grandkids could be vacationing on Arsia Mons.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
When Eve and Adam eat the forbidden fruit God cast them out of Mars to Earth. Mars was destroyed
This is where using 2-3 minutes to read the fine article would have helped you out.
It is a software guy who just wondered what it would look like with earthly features. This is not based on any kind of facts other than the elevations.
Earth used to be the red planet when there was more Oxygen in the atmosphere.
on the other hand, if evolution is a lie like its being bandied about in certain schools, its entirely possible that God created it to look like this and it got screwed up over time.