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A Lake On Mars May Once Have Teemed With Life (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Verge:
Once upon a time on Mars, there was a crater that had a massive lake that may have hosted life. Now researchers are saying that a whole variety of organisms could have flourished there. Sure, that life was probably just microbial, but this is another exciting step toward understanding just how habitable Mars may have been around 3.5 billion years ago. Petrified mud that was once at the bottom of the lake suggests that, at the time, the lake had different chemical environments that could have hosted different types of microbes.
The rocks also show that the Red Planet's climate may have been more dynamic than we thought, going from cold and dry to warm and wet, before eventually drying out. We still don't know whether life once existed on Mars when the planet was warmer and had liquid water. But today's findings, published in Science, give a much more nuanced and detailed picture of what this area of Mars could have looked like through time... "The lake had all the right stuff for microbial life to live in," says study co-author Joel Hurowitz, a geochemist and planetary scientist at Stony Brook University.
NASA's Curiosity rover spent three and a half years collecting data from the crater, and that data now suggests that a habitable environment existed there for at least tens of thousands of years -- and possibly as long as "tens of millions of years."
The rocks also show that the Red Planet's climate may have been more dynamic than we thought, going from cold and dry to warm and wet, before eventually drying out. We still don't know whether life once existed on Mars when the planet was warmer and had liquid water. But today's findings, published in Science, give a much more nuanced and detailed picture of what this area of Mars could have looked like through time... "The lake had all the right stuff for microbial life to live in," says study co-author Joel Hurowitz, a geochemist and planetary scientist at Stony Brook University.
NASA's Curiosity rover spent three and a half years collecting data from the crater, and that data now suggests that a habitable environment existed there for at least tens of thousands of years -- and possibly as long as "tens of millions of years."
I have a simple question for you Mr Faraday: how do your electrical parlour tricks affect anyone? What possible use can your moving wires have. Surely people must admit that this research serves no purpose for anyone. Can anyone justify the value of your research? I think not.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
It may also have once teemed with aliens from the planet Zardoz. We really don't have any conclusive evidence to say it *didn't*, after all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Indeed. The wise mandarins running the Ottoman Empire correctly saw that a mechanism for cranking a shaft by boiling water could do no better than replace a little boy, who might be employed, say, turning meat on a spit. What is the point of such things when child labor is cheap, and inattention can be discouraged by vicious beatings?
A more serious answer: if were we to ever decide to create a colony on Mars, what resources exist there would matter immensely. For now, we are going to do no such thing in the foreseeable future. But we might if we learned enough about Martian resources to bring the long term price tag down.
The rocks also show that the Earth's (Red Planet's) climate may have been more dynamic than we thought, going from cold and dry to warm and wet, before eventually drying out. We still don't know whether life once existed on Earth (Mars) when the planet was warmer and had liquid water. But today's findings, published in Science, give a much more nuanced and detailed picture of what this area of Earth (Mars) could have looked like through time... "The lake had all the right stuff for microbial life to live in," says study co-author Joel Hurowitz, a geochemist and planetary scientist at Stony Brook University.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The ISS served a purpose but no one has had the vision to build on what has been learned. The hardest, most dangerous, and most expensive part of exploring space is getting into orbit. The IIS should have served as the core component of an enlarged orbital construction and vehicle dock. The ISS and the old space shuttle program has provided a wealth of data on orbit repair and construction techniques and the physiological impact of those working for prolonged periods in that environment. We have multiple private sector companies capable of delivering materials into orbit. Build the initial ships on the ground but dock and re-launch them from orbit. Some of the newer and more esoteric space propulsion engines don't require millions of explosive chemicals required to get something on any size into orbit. And sooner or later all the private companies will go broke once when the number of satellites needing to be launched suddenly dry up.
And if Mars had water and life at some point in it's history it had to be when the planet still had a molten and rotating core to produce a magnetosphere capable of providing a minimal atmosphere of some makeup needed to support life as we know it as well as some radiation protection. If Earth's core faltered in the slightest and reducing the magnetosphere the planet would die a quick death and billions of years from know some intrepid space travelers would be looking to see if Earth ever supported life.
I'm about as tired of reading news about what might have been on Mars as I am hearing about how a new battery technology "might" increase energy density by a factor of ten.
Decades of this crap. Show me hard evidence of live (or fossilized) microbes, or give it a rest.
And alchemy led to modern chemistry. Not a bad deal, considering the number of lives enabled by modern chemical applications.