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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.
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?"
If they actually believe this, and this is not just another publicity stunt then they should be immediately start planning a mission that will send several probes to this location to observe this phenomena and collect data. But they probably just want billions of dollars to try to send people to Mars.
This guy could use a drink!
Dude, that's religion racism.
Fuck all religions.
Cruz/Palin 2016 - Restoring America from the Liberal War against common sense
Nah.
Cthulhu / Dagon 2016 - Why vote for the lesser evil?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I would encourage everybody reading the parent post to actually read the article. Just take a look at the image at the top of the article: the overwhelming majority of the planet is heating up, setting all sorts of records, except for one small part of the ocean. And that part of the ocean is getting colder (it appears) because of all the melting fresh water (because the planet is heating up), which is screwing up a major circulation current. And _that_ is their evidence that global warming is a lie: taking a small part of evidence out of context, wilfully mis-interpreting it, and ignoring almost all the rest of the evidence.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
The parent is drawing their own conclusions from the article. Here is a key quote, but please read the whole article. It is actually quite good.
At this point, it’s time to ask what the heck is going on here. And while there may not yet be any scientific consensus on the matter, at least some scientists suspect that the cooling seen in these maps is no fluke but, rather, part of a process that has been long feared by climate researchers — the slowing of Atlantic Ocean circulation.
The Atlantic ocean's circulation patterns for that area are driven by density differences. Warm water from further south moves north along the surface and when it gets to Greenland it freezes as sea ice. That process greatly increases the salinity, and therefore density, of the remaining water and so it sinks and circulates south again.
This loop is critically important for certain favorable climate features of Western Europe.
If this is in fact what is occurring then this isn't evidence against climate change, it was one of the more extreme predictions OF climate change.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
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
don't worry, they will be. by a warming planet with more violent weather and less stable food sources
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
People who resort to hyperbole are worse than Hitler.
it's a standard aspect of propaganda. it's why we have the term "half-truths": they are literally half the truth
if reality is:
"john shot david. david shot john back before he collapsed"
the propaganda will say:
"david shot john"
completely true. but completely without context, leading to erroneous conclusions about what happened. but better than a lie, because it's actually the truth (half).
truth taken in pieces is far superior to lies when manipulating pridefully ignorant minds
the only antidote to simpletons and morons is to have an open mind and an intellectual honesty that is willing to reconsider one's beliefs, if evidence suggests otherwise. the problem is all the loud useless morons out there who have their beliefs, fixed, and they will never reconsider them. they would rather have delusions and half truths that confirm their mistaken beliefs
the wisest man is certain he doesn't know everything
the biggest moron is certain he knows everything
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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."
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
There was indirect evidence of flowing water (those river beds that have been photographed many times). My understanding is that while briny water was the best explanation even for those observations, there were other possible gas outflows that could have theoretically produced similar results, so what we have here appears to be the first direct observation of surface flows of water.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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 ?
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
Basically they are a passenger on the titanic saying "This ship can't be sinking, my end just rose 200 feet!".
--credit to a meme image I saw a while back:
http://d.justpo.st/media/image...
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.