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Scientists Have Spotted the Signs of Flowing Water On Mars
New submitter universe520 writes: Using neat imaging technology that allows them to determine the chemical compound of a substance by looking at the light reflected from it, scientists have spotted the traces of flowing water on Mars. By looking at the dark streaks on some photos of Mars, Lujendra Ojha from Georgia Tech has found compounds that are made in liquid water—meaning that water may be trickling down those streaks when the climate is just right.
From the linked Economist piece: Details remain to be worked out, including where the water in question originates. Possibly, it derives from subsurface ice. Or it might condense out of Mars’s thin, dry atmosphere. Wherever it does come from, though, the amounts in question are modest in the extreme. But even modest amounts of water are intriguing to biologists. If Martians evolved during their planet’s earlier, wetter phase, the continued presence of water means it is just about possible that a few especially hardy types have survived until the present day—clinging on in dwindling pockets of dampness in the way that some “extremophile” bacteria on Earth are able to live in cold, salty and arid environments.
Life on Mars has already been discovered by somebody, but they're rolling out this news slowly so people don't flip their shit.
Alright we got some liquid water, time to for a trip to Mars.
Is "neat imaging technology" a technical term? Technical terms make my head hurt.
MAAAAAHHHZZZZ!
Using neat imaging technology that allows them to determine the chemical compound of a substance by looking at the light reflected from it
The author has never heard the term "spectroscopy?"
This guy could use a drink!
hey, look - flowing water....and there it goes!
Dude, that's religion racism.
Fuck all religions.
before the Apoco-lip-sync or something like that.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap05...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Here's hoping something like Tardigrades evolved on Mars too, if so, they'd probably still be revivable today even after a couple billion years.
An opposing opinion: http://www.popularmechanics.co...
"If Mars is equally lifeless, that will make exploring--and later settling--the planet much easier. We can go there and return without this particular worry, and we can introduce Earth life without concerns that we'll damage indigenous creatures. Astronauts won't have to be quarantined, and the environmental impact statement, or its interplanetary equivalent, will be easier to determine. On the other hand, if there is life on Mars, things get a lot tougher."
Pics or it didn't happen...
Seriously, I wanna SEE some water, not pictures of where we think water used to be, where it was 10 minutes ago and left just before we got there....I wanna see water...real flowing, sparkling, water.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
" If Martians evolved during their planet’s earlier, wetter phase..."
... no.
Ah
And then, I want to send a lander there to extract it, put it in little plastic bottles and sell it for $1+E08/liter: "Martian water. Sustainably sourced from a planet unspoiled for 4 billion years."
We need to send a Curiosity-class rover to this area. We should have a few on standby for just this sort of thing.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
There are signs of regularly flowing water in my bathroom. No need to get excited about aliens. Although...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The idea that science and Christianity are compatible is a comfortable lie(for some). You would never accept a new vaccine because someone had a vision in a dream and then woke up and wrote down the formula. You would use the scientific method to determine if a vaccine works or not. Religion demands that you take the word of some unknown person having a revelation thousands of years ago as the truth for some pretty important questions. You are forced to not investigate and not question. This is the antithesis of science.
Is it just me or this is the 3rd or 4th time NASA confirm water on Mars? Or is it the fact that it's "flowing" water? Wasn't that already confirmed already?
Elok
We could send cucumbers to Mars and manufacture pickles
Like a movie once suggested: The Pickle
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
The oldest paper I know of on the topic was presented to 4th Annual Mars Society Convention at Stanford University on August 24th, 2001 and has far more content. The pdf http://palermoproject.com/Seep... is from this page
That's a year after the Malin and Edgett paper in 2000, "Evidence for recent groundwater seepage and surface runoff on Mars", which was published in Science and got a lot of attention. Or this one, from 2002, which suggested that the reason the water carving the gullies was liquid was due to salt content suppressing the freezing point: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...
Pretty interesting really, my first thought was that the pressure was too low, but the Martian atmospheric pressure is right near the triple point of water. For liquid water to be there the pressure must have gone up above the nominal 600 pascals to 611 or higher, and the temperature above 0 deg C.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Mmmmm.... salty.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
They've had strong suggestions of flowing water (all those small geological remnants of rivers), and even some suggestion that water was flowing at this period in time, but this is the first time they've been able to definitely demonstrate seasonal flows of water. Previously, so far as I understand it, the "river beds" they've shown could have been explained by CO2 outflows or something similar.
What makes this exciting isn't so much surface flows, because frankly I think any life would be wiped out by the pretty extreme radiation on Mars' surface, but rather that where there is flowing water on the surface, there is likely to be liquid water under the surface; dozens, hundreds or even thousands of feet below, and that raises the possibility of life on Mars that is able to withstand the fairly nasty surface conditions.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Water saturated with perchlorates? No, I would not want to be that first human.
One anecdote that is related indirectly to the topic is the ignorance of the nature of stars. Someone in my family didn't know that stars are like our sun but much further away. There was no malice or contradiction of beliefs and they took it as a VERY awesome fact, but that sort of gap in knowledge combined with religious fervor can, and does, lead to the outright denial of even the possibility of life elsewhere.
Indeed.
The first person to clearly state the hypothesis that stars are other suns like ours, but much farther away, was Giordano Bruno-- who also said that since they're like the sun, they undoubtedly also have planets with life. A pretty far-thinking hypothesis, considering that Copernicus' work saying that the Earth circled the sun (instead of vice versa) was still newly published when he asserted it.
Of course, he was burned at the stake for it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Also, after a quick search, I found "religionism". I should have searched before my original comment and I'm sorry to have annoyed you.
ACK! ACK! Brand
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
It would be like drinking rocket fuel.
The ultimate energy drink!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So there were canals on mars all this time!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
And you're still a great teacher! Your friends/wife/kids must absolutely adore you!
Oh wait, you're probably single and friendless with such an attitude.
"Dude, that's religion racism."
Because religious beliefs are encoded in your DNA, right!
The discovery says nothing about past or present life, but it does mean that there WILL be life on Mars.
If these signs are indeed water as we know it here on Earth, what does this tell us about the overlying upper Martian atmosphere? Any signifigant changes to what we have previously analyzed or hypothesized ? Is it possible that another type of atmosphere or environment could exist under the overlying crust ?
I want to apologize first for probably being too cynical, but I have to say this.
Applying Occam's Razor to the question:
Which of the two scenarios are more likely?
A. There is water on Mars.
B. There is a government agency, that a lot of people work for, who need money from a Congress that is in the middle of a budget battle, who have concocted a publicity stunt in order to justify their continued existence.
Proverbs 21:19
very interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
future trips could have an electronic "nose" that follows any oxygen gradients, perhaps finding archaic bacteria making O2 on mars. imagine that!
or, alternatively, bring these earth bound archeobacteria perchlorate reducers, or just the enzyme, with you, and make salt water and oxygen at the same time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Those damn tardigrades though. Ain't nobody messin with them. Not even entropy.
Cute little devils too. I've got a lot of them living in my roof gutters.
Dunno if you saw this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12...
http://serc.carleton.edu/micro...
Since they've already survived in space, I suspect Mars would not be too difficult. I'm just not certain how much oxygen they need.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It would be like drinking rocket fuel.
The ultimate energy drink!
Great, as long as plants crave it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Let's put aside the long timelines and asteroid impacts and focus on more recent exchanges. We keep sending probes to Mars, and I don't think we sterilize them before we send them. I know space is a harsh place, but bacteria on Earth live in some exceedingly harsh environments. Is there any way to guarantee that nothing survived the journey, and that any life that may be on Mars wasn't in fact brought over by us in the first place?
And if we found bacteria there, how would we prove whether it is native or our own? We haven't even discovered all forms of higher life on Earth, let alone created a database of every bacterial strain. Could a "new" bacteria we find there actually be a less common form native to Earth that we've never catalogued, that managed to survive a probe ride and thrive over there? I keep expecting scientists to announce they've found bacterial life over there, only to eventually realize far later that it's actually Earth life.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Fuck that! Until they discover oil, it's not worth going!
Yep!
We had the same idea, but I think you're undervaluing it; 1 million per ml would be my price.
Yet Catholics eat bacon and oysters - no absolute inflexible literal interpretation for them.
theories do not ever become "Laws" any more. It doesn't fit well with the way Science is conducted.
I'd put it the other way around. All science does is Laws. The underlying assumption of science is that it's playing with universal truths, universal rules. Hydrogen is hydrogen; whether it's in hydrocarbons, in water, in hydrogen gas, in the heart of the sun, or in the first atoms in the universe.
Natural philosophy was traditionally based around more limited observational rules. You had a rule for calculating the eclipses of the moon. Another for the orbits of Jupiter and maybe Saturn. Whole books for the behaviour of objects, when falling, rolling, or being thrown. None of them connected to any of the others.
When the first universal theories started to be devised, they emphasised that they were touching on old-school philosophy: The idea of fundamental "Laws" of the whole universe. "Laws" from which the local rules could all be derived. It must have been heady stuff.
Now it's all universal. Hence there's no reason to mark some theories out as special from the others. Hence the "theory of relativity" is still called theory, even though it's more universal than Newton's "Laws", and even though it's about as empirically verified as any theory gets.
Evolution is the currently accepted scientific theory of speciation
Again, that's probably backwards. Various theories, like Darwin's natural and sexual selection, explain the observation of evolution. Evolution isn't a theory, it's the phenomenon being theorised about. In the way that Newton's Laws (and now general relativity) were the theories that explain what we observe about gravity.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Find me one person that would not want to be the first human in all of history to drink water from a different planet.
You were presumably the sort of kid who stuck his finger in an electrical socket to see what would happen. I took the more scientific approach of asking my little sister to try first.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
We keep sending probes to Mars, and I don't think we sterilize them before we send them.
Yes they do.
There's even a special requirement for wet Mars:
A special region is a region classified by COSPAR within which terrestrial organisms could readily propagate, or one thought to have an elevated potential for existence of Martian life forms. This is understood to apply to any region on Mars where liquid water occurs, or can occasionally occur, based on the current understanding of requirements for life.
If a hard landing risks biological contamination of a special region, then the whole lander system must be sterilized to COSPAR category IVc."
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
that's where the canals come from, duh.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Let's put aside the long timelines and asteroid impacts and focus on more recent exchanges. We keep sending probes to Mars, and I don't think we sterilize them before we send them. I know space is a harsh place, but bacteria on Earth live in some exceedingly harsh environments. Is there any way to guarantee that nothing survived the journey, and that any life that may be on Mars wasn't in fact brought over by us in the first place?
And if we found bacteria there, how would we prove whether it is native or our own? We haven't even discovered all forms of higher life on Earth, let alone created a database of every bacterial strain. Could a "new" bacteria we find there actually be a less common form native to Earth that we've never catalogued, that managed to survive a probe ride and thrive over there? I keep expecting scientists to announce they've found bacterial life over there, only to eventually realize far later that it's actually Earth life.
indeed https://www.rt.com/usa/160636-...
and to quote Laszlo Toth on the older probes which searched for Martian life by digging a scoop of Martian soil and vaporizing it to look for organic compounds to indicate there might be life there, "No! It means there was life, but you just burned it up!"
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.