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Intraterrestrials: Mars Life May Hide Deep Below
astroengine writes "Almost every month we see news dispatches from the Mars where the nuclear-powered rover Curiosity finds water-bearing minerals in rocks and other circumstantial clues that the Red Planet could have once supported life. But in terms of finding direct evidence of past or present Martians, the rover barely scratches the surface, says geochemist Jan Amend of the University of Southern California. Using Earth life as an example, some species of microbes live miles below the surface, without sunlight or oxygen, metabolizing chemicals that are the result of radioactive decay. Most intriguing of all is the microbe Desulforudis Audaxviator that dwells nearly two miles down, a life form that would feel right at home inside Mars' crust. 'This organism has had to figure out everything on its own,' says Amend, 'it splits water into hydrogen and oxygen for metabolism.' Amend hopes to drop probes deep underground in some of the world's most inhospitable locations over the next few years, creating a possible analog for future Mars subsurface studies."
what are you blathering about, the wars of choice waste so much money the space budget (and all other science combined) is of no consequence
we do have the cash to do science, and we'd have a lot more not spending hundreds of billions every decade to slaughter innocents
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
You want to find aliens without a military? You'll be sorry when xenobacteria are shooting laser beams at your family.
>> Amend hopes to drop probes deep underground in some of the world's most inhospitable locations over the next few years
Where? Beijing? Mexico City? Or the real kind of inhospitable like the Gobi desert or Antarctica? I'd think once you get far enough underground pretty much anyplace would be inhospitable...to humans.
I wish I had a few hundred million to push NASA out to Encelaedus or Europa. I bet we could just take samples of water spewed up from below to find evidence of life it it exists on either moon.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
hah, think of what the last 75 years have brought us: nuclear weapons, ICBM, satellites, lasers that can shoot down aircraft, rail guns, bioweapons, genetic engineering......now you're talking about a species centuries advanced from ours that can not only travel interstellar space but wage war on that scale? wouldn't matter if we had a military or not, we'd be dead meat before we even knew we were being attacked.
Hey, if we're just speculating, why stop at microbes?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
In former Soviet Russia, you don't search for aliens, aliens search for YOU.
I probably make more money and pay more taxes than two average slashdotters put together, professionals that are half a century old are generally like that....
we've caused many times more (hundreds of thousands) of Iraqi deaths than Saddam did. those people never attacked us. The villagers and goat herders of Afghanistan did not attack us either, Al Qaeda and the "Taliban" that hosted Bin Laden left there long ago and fled to Pakistan and other parts.
Now we are not "winning" in Afghanistan, and are negotiating with the Taliban groups because we are failing to "bring Democracy" (at gunpoint, which of course is doomed effort)
In the past, things like infrastrucure and wars were seen as benefitting future generations as well as current, so it was seen as ethical to borrow.
Current borrowing is largely to pay for retirement benefits that current retirees did not want to set enough of their own money aside for and another trillion of other spending that has nothing to do with fuure generations that the current generation does not want to pay for.
It is unethical borrowing. Forget the incremental cost of ongoing wars -- you could cancel the entire $700 billion military budget and barely recover half a year's borrowing.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Panspermia is the theory that life is ubiquitous and travels from planet to planet and star to star. Less unlikely than it seems. For example, dormant spores trapped in salt crystals 25 million years old rejuvenated themselves when released. Life is hardy.
Which of three theories seems on the right side of Occam's Razor:
That life is unique to Earth (where it is all DNA/RNA based)?
That life originates in novel non-DNA based ways independently on each planet?
or that DNA-based life is mobile, seeds planets from above, and then evolves to suit each new environment?
(Wait, I think that could be a Slahdot poll...)
I believe we will find the same is true for life in the the seas of Europa, and elsewhere, too.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
At this point, we've learned enough about the hardiness and versatility of microbes that I would frankly be surprised if we found a completely sterilized Mars. In the history of the planet, many rocks knocked loose from Earth have landed there, and we know many organisms that could have survived the whole trip. If absolutely nothing took root, I would consider that a mild surprise. With extremophiles being found at pretty much everywhere we looked, we should be ready to find terrestrial extremophiles living even on Mars. That's definitely worth a few articles and TV specials, but it wouldn't really change the way we see the universe. Much more exciting would be to find Martian life of a totally independent genesis. Somehow I find that deeply unlikely, given that life genesis seems to only have happened once even in a place as comfy as Earth.
Well, enjoy your status as a second tier nation in a couple of hundred years while everyone else is running around the solar system claiming its resources.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
NASA these days is staying alive more by issuiing a weekly
PR-bulletin than by good old scientific or technological achievement.
It's their Swan-song, in a way.
Life happened when Earth was in general far far less comfy to life than it is now. Mars likely had similar conditions very early on, but for a number of reasons (lower gravity, lack of magnetic field), it lost the thick atmosphere that would have made liquid water possible for extended periods of time on its surface. The hypothesis is that Mars may have evolved a biosphere during that period when it possessed a dense atmosphere and liquid water. In that case, even after most of the atmosphere disappeared, some portion of the biosphere that had adapted to living deep underground would have continued on even after the surface of the planet had been rendered completely uninhabitable.
And, of course, we do not know for certain that the entire surface is uninhabitable. We have a damned small sample size, and have landed no probes in places like Valles Marineris, where the atmosphere is considerably denser and liquid water may last longer (we have observed fog there). If I was looking for life closer to the surface, I'd bee doing it in the deepest points of Valles Marineris.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Because fiscal responsibility never helped anyone in the future.
For all we know, we might be more popular than Meercat Manor.
I for one welcome our new laser-beam toting xenobacteria overlords.
(Oblig...)
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Or yet funnier: Scout ships that already detected us, and harvester mother-ships on route as we speak.
So is that what we need to do to smoke them Mars critters and varmints out . . . ?
And maybe some natural gas, on the side, to power our Mars colonies . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's called investing in the future. I'm sure that building all those aqueducts in various Roman provinces cost the Republic, and later the Empire, vast amounts of coin that if it could not be directly gained, had to be borrowed. The plus side was prosperous cities that were major economic generators. This idea that the only thing any state should worry about is the nebulous creature known as "fiscal responsibility" is pretty strange, first of all because the term has real meaning. Borrowing money to build infrastructure like highways will certainly throw major liabilities on a government's balance sheet, but no one seriously says that the only measure of fiscal responsibility should be liabilities.
Look at this way. At some point in the next century or two, the major industrial powers will likely begin some sort of race for solar system resources. But that race will not be built out of nothing. It will be built out of a whole series of major investments, many (if not most) by governments. Each one of the stepping-stone advances may seem on paper at that moment to be an utter waste of time and money, but at the end of the day, being in that race is only made possible by having made those other investments along the way.
If the US wishes to sit it out, that's fine. In short and medium terms, it will be a net gain, and give some temporary economic advantage over the Europeans, the Chinese and the Japanese (and, pretty soon, Brazil, I'll wager). But at some point, when they've made advances far in advance of the Apollo program, the US will have to rebuild what it gave up in the name "fiscal responsibility", and it may find that that is a lot easier said than done.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ah yes, the old space FUD.
Ask the Germans and Italians how that went as they furiously tried to become grand colonial powers at the end of the 19th century.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There is no life on Mars. Stop dreaming.
We'll strip mine the other planets later.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
99.5% of our military spending is on things which will be utterly useless in such a case, I've counting the $4 Billion spent on nuclear weapon maintenance as potentially useful.. Decades spending a tenth of the defense budget on pure science (physics, chemistry, biology) would be the better investment for such a future.
Right here on Earth. And Germany and Italy still exist today... Say, Germany looks a lot better than the US, have you noticed that?
Please do.
Think about what the next 75 years will bring us. Science is advancing at such a rate that we might be a species capable of interstellar travel ourselves very soon.
Interstellar? You do know that means "between stars" don't you? At the moment we're quite impressed that we have got an unmanned probe out of our own solar system in 35 years.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No, you must be wrong, because in Hollywood movies, alien ships capable of interstellar travel are still always susceptible to small arms fire.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Some people are more than ready to spend other peoples money but are unwilling to spend their own.
Fundamentally, you do not own your own money/wealth. You live in a society that allows people to accumulate individual wealth almost infinitely beyond their needs. This is not some rule of nature, it is a distorted version of civilisation.
A CEO does not need to have thousands of times the wealth of his workers. It doesn't do him any good, never mind society as a whole.
When someone spends $500m on a yacht, he is simply thumbing his nose at society. There is no particular reason why the overwhelming majority of the population couldn't pass a law limiting wealth to ten times a reasonable average. The billionaire is ALLOWED to get away with having that money, he has not in any way EARNED the right to it. Working hard is no justification for anything. Plenty of miners, postmen and cleaners work a lot harder than any CEO.
Oh, and a big hi to all the libertarian mods out there. .
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think that's possibly the most depressing comment I've seen on a technology news website.
Look. I value knowledge too. But I don't like overpaying a lot for it or ignoring what else could have been done with the money spent.
What I think is mildly depressing here was the argument that launching the occasional very expensive space probe somehow is an "investment" or will give an advantage in some future space race. It doesn't follow logically.
Here's what I think the real argument is. I want space probes therefore space probes must be good for something. The rest of the argument is merely a fleshing out of a possible "something". The big things that are missing are a) cost/benefit discussion, and b) opportunity costs.
Now, consider also that this bit of wish fulfillment was done in response to a mention of fiscal responsibility and a near complete ignoring of the unhealthy economic situation of the present US. Where will the money come from? Why ignore the situations in countries like Greece or Japan who have spent too much and now have limited options for spending more?
If MSL could find a fresh crater, it might have a chance to sample potential microbes / organics before the UV and peroxides break them down. The craters left by the tungsten EDL weights would be ideal but their craters are too far away....
Fundamentally, you do not own your own money/wealth. You live in a society that allows people to accumulate individual wealth almost infinitely beyond their needs. This is not some rule of nature, it is a distorted version of civilisation.
I disagree that your original assertion is a distorted view of civilization. It is fundamentally a self-contradictory statement. To say that you don't own the money and wealth that is "yours", that is, which you own is an inherently false statement of the classic form, "A is not A".
A CEO does not need to have thousands of times the wealth of his workers. It doesn't do him any good, never mind society as a whole.
We don't do such things because of need, but merely because it's a better idea than the alternatives we come up with. It's worth noting here that no one else needs that wealth either. As to whether wealth does the rich any good or not - it's not your place to decide what is good for other people. No one should ever have that authority.
When someone spends $500m on a yacht, he is simply thumbing his nose at society.
That's ok. Society needs their nose rubbed in this sort of thing every now and then. It means either that the person provided something of immense value and demonstrates that to the rest of society (who has a nasty habit of ignoring contributions to society from the wealthy). Or it means that they obtained wealth via deception or coercion with the acquiescence of society (in which case it's a scornful reminder that society let that happen). Either way, this is a means to attack envy and greed in society.
There is no particular reason why the overwhelming majority of the population couldn't pass a law limiting wealth to ten times a reasonable average.
The particular reason is that such a policy would take money out of the hands of the people who make things, create jobs, and power society. And put that wealth in the hands of people who can't balance a budget or manage a thing. It's very harmful to society to do that. There are other reasons as well, but they don't stand out like this one does.
Sure, not all the wealthy fall in that category. But it's the primary reason we should tolerate wealth.
The billionaire is ALLOWED to get away with having that money, he has not in any way EARNED the right to it. Working hard is no justification for anything. Plenty of miners, postmen and cleaners work a lot harder than any CEO.
Bottom line is that a CEO has tremendous responsibilities and does a job that matters a lot. None of those other guys do. That's why he gets paid a lot more. And none of those guys are doing a job for which they'll get hated till the end of time no matter what they do.
The amount of resources marshalled to enable interstellar travel implies mastery of forces that can obliterate human civilization in a single blow. If aliens wanted to kill us, there wouldn't be a war. They could just accelerate a big rock at us and obliterate all civilization in a single strike, regardless of how big our military is.
Generally speaking, destruction is easier than construction. It takes a lot of effort to assemble castles out of chaos, but a good thwack in the right places is all it takes to bring it all down back into chaos. It's just moving with entropy vs. moving against it.
Here is my second comment entitled "Life IN Mars"; my original comment on this was so long ago that it has vanished. Let me merely add that eventually we will find life inside almost every extra-terrestrial planet-sized-or-larger object (assuming we get there), with the probable exemption of solar objects.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
'This organism has had to figure out everything on its own,' says Amend, 'it splits water into hydrogen and oxygen for metabolism.'
It's hard to believe that geochemist Dr. Amend said that about Desulforudis Audaxviator, since D. Audaxviator is completely intolerant of oxygen, and its sulfate reduction mechanism is right there in its name!
If anyone had bothered to follow the links in that discovery.com article, they would have found this useful article that quotes the original discoverers of Desulforudis Audaxviator: "Tullis Onstott classified the microbe under the genus Desulforudis for its ability to get energy from sulfate and its rod shape... Living deep underground for such a long time has also stripped D. audaxviator of the ability to use oxygen as an electron acceptor in its metabolic pathways, thus making it a strict anaerobe. Instead of oxygen, sulfate is used as an electron acceptor...These [2157] genes allow the microbe to live in almost all conditions except in the presence of oxygen." (my emphasis)
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.