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NASA's "Opportunity" Rover Finds New Evidence For Once-Habitable Mars
nedko.m writes "NASA's Mars rover 'Opportunity' found clay minerals in an ancient rock on the rim of the Endeavour Crater on Mars. The discovery suggests that neutral-pH water — slightly salty, and neither too acidic nor too alkaline for life — once flowed through the area, probably during the first billion years of Martian history. Opportunity's latest discovery fits well with one made recently on the other side of the planet by the rover's bigger, younger cousin Curiosity, which found strong evidence that its landing site could have supported microbial life in the ancient past. Such observations could help scientists map out Mars' transition from a relatively warm and wet world long ago to the cold and dry planet we know today"
(ducks)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
No need for cynicism, this is all about politics and a public that doesn't recognise the immense scientific value of sampling a new world, with or without life. The endless stream of articles about water -> life from NASA is a pretty astute move if they want to keep getting funding.
there may have been water on it. so what.
Finding evidence of past water is an indication that it might have had life. I don't know what would be more interesting, to find that Mars once had life, or that it was habitable for a billion years and never developed life.
But anyway, that's what.
Free Martian Whores!
Exactly. Life in the solar system would change our view of life in the universe.
Right now, the only instance of a planet developing life is Earth. We extrapolate from there. But the big question (intelligent life) also hangs on the probability of life evolving into intelligent life.
If we find that life is actually a pretty common event in the universe, but it rarely evolves beyond bacterial or small organisms, it might change our equations on how likely we'll find some other space-faring race.
But if we find that life is rare, it'll also change it.
The combination of these two makes a pretty damn big differences on all "are we alone?" questions.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What we know with certainty is that life in the universe is rare, as far as we know earth is the only planet that has it.
That's total nonsense. And you contradict yourself in the next sentence:
Everything else about life elsewhere is simply hypothesis and statistics, but unproven.
We know nothing about life in the universe. Nothing. Zero, nada, zilch, null. Until we have a much larger data sample, it is all just theoretical. Completely true, and until the intervention of interstellar travel, unavoidable.
That is exactly why we're looking for any clues we might find. That includes not only Mars, but also Europa, for example, where some scientists believe we might find primitive life.
We know for sure that there's life on Earth. We can exclude most of the other planets and moons as they can not possibly sustain any life based on anything we can imagine.
But that's just the solar system. For the rest of the universe, we have, for example, just recently changed our estimate about how common planets are. We thought that most suns wouldn't have any, now we think almost the opposite.
We have just started having methods to find planets of earth size.
But still, life somewhere else in the solar system would be a pretty big deal.
Intelligent life is even rarer, given the biomass of earth.
Wrong. Biomass is not the deciding factor. Right now, our sample size indicates that 100% of planets with life at all will bring about intelligent life. But that could just be due to the anthropic principle. We don't know if Earth is a rare exception, or if there's something to evolution that will result in intelligence in most cases.
Again, getting closer to an answer here, in either direction, would be a pretty big deal.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org