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Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Ancient Lakebed
astroengine writes "The site where NASA's Mars rover Curiosity landed last year contains at least one lake that would have been perfectly suited for colonies of simple, rock-eating microbes found in caves and hydrothermal vents on Earth. Analysis of mudstones in an area known as Yellowknife Bay, located inside the rover's Gale Crater landing site, show that fresh water pooled on the surface for tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of years. 'The results show that the lake was definitely a habitable environment,' Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told Discovery News. The finding was announced at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco."
I find it incredible that we're getting all these results today, that it isn't some scifi or something. JPL, NASA etc are really doing a great job.
I mean, it's pretty much been determined that Mars used to be habitable. We may be only a short time from someone finding real microbe fossils there.
At the same time, exoplanet research is exploding. Someone just found oxygen in the atmosphere of some exoplanet. In the near future, we may be able to detect signatures of life on exoplanets, at least spectroscopically.
Disclaimer: My niece works at JPL. I'm therefore somewhat biased in favour of them, and may not be completely objective. However, I believe my interest in these matters to be true. I was fucked in the ass by a goat yesterday.
I suppose the assumption is that, if there was one habitable environment that persisted for tens or hundreds of kiloyears, there were probably others. I also suppose that life would be more likely to maintain its foothold in an environment where lakes tended to persist for many years, as opposed to appearing and disappearing with the seasons.
Not really true, at least in terms of conditions for life being better than on Mars. The Late Heavy Bombardment probably ended about 3.8 Ma ago, and even the more conservative estimates have life leaving identifiable marks by 3.6 Ma, and there are arguments for rocks even earlier than that -- and we don't have many of those. Life seems to have appeared on Earth not long after the crust cooled enough for such to survive.