Slashdot Mirror
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.
We welcome our rock eating microbe overlords...
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
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.
...still searching for new source of NASA funding.
Mars had an atmosphere before it's core cooled and it lost it's magnetic field, so it would have been significantly more hospitable way back in the day. It wasn't always a "dried up" "reddish rock".
Tens of thousands of years just ain't gonna cut it. Water may be necessary for life, but it is not sufficient.
Tell that to the iron respirating microbes of Blood Falls that were in their transient little pool breathing oxygen normally until one sudden winter the surface froze and never receded. All they "needed" was a pool of water and some chemically active elements, like iron and sulphur -- both present on Mars.
Transient lakes are not a good environment - anything that gets started gets nipped in the bud when the lake dries up.
You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years, and probably oceans, not lakes. Find some banded iron formations and we'll talk.
You're in luck! We found a formation right next to Mars! You're living on it! And we even have rocks from Mars on Earth -- ejecta from impacts -- and estimate that tons of Earth has been spread about the solar system, possibly seeding live just about anywhere that could support it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just as sceptical as the next person. I'll rightly dismiss any claim without evidence, but I refuse to have a closed mind to possibilities for the very same reason: Every time we've declared places on Earth devoid of life, we've found it thriving there. Used to think life couldn't exist at the bottom of the ocean, wrong. Used to think no life could survive subduction into the crust, wrong. We've had to re-define what life "needs" to survive so many times it's more truthful to say, "we're not really sure where life can't survive." So, if you make an unevidenced claim like, "You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years" -- I'll give you the same sceptical middle finger: Fucking Prove it, or you're full of bullshit.
Why down vote this? The core cooling is one of the leading theories on how Mars lost it's magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, radiation and energized particles from the sun and deep space were able to blast most of the atmosphere away.
Latest evidence is that life on Earth started a lot faster than that, maybe even less than half a billion.
Mars cooled faster than Earth (in part because of the incident which led to Earth's Moon), and early Mars had a magnetic field and relatively thick atmosphere. It took over a billion (maybe 1.5, maybe as long as 2) for Mars to dry up.
It's entirely possible that life started on Mars before it did on Earth. It's even possible (unlikely, but not impossible) that life started on Mars first then transferred to Earth via meteorite.
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.
They don't call it the Red(neck) Planet for nuthin'
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!