We don't know that, and microscopic life that branched off from Earth life billions of years ago - or even evolved independently, is of immense interest to science and to humanity too. It could lead to new drugs and treatments, new ways of making nano structures, new processes, it could be amazingly interesting. Also there is no reason at all to be so sure it is microscopic, just because it isn't on the surface of Mars. The surface of Mars is highly hostile to life, especially the very surface of the soil. There could be macroscopic life underneath.
It's absurd to even think of humans - all robotic space ships are sterlised, how can you sterilise a spaceship with humans inside? There is no vessel or spacesuit that can keep all Earth life inside a habitat suitable for humans. Sorry for those of you who fantasize about sending humans to explore the planets, but that's the reality with current technology. And once the life escapes from the human habitat, even as a few microbial cells, the Mars winds will take them all over Mars. It won't kill all of it because of the extreme resilience of bacterial spores. Then it just needs to find one damp patch, ice warmed by the midday sun, or by volcanic activity - and it will grow, spread, create more spores and spread again. Exponential process, starts slowly perhaps but then more and more rapidly until the whole planet is covered by modern Earth life of some form or other. With the billions of years of extra evolution over the whole of the Earth, Earth life would be like cats and dogs invading Australia, it would swiftly wipe out any native life that might have kept a fragile foothold on Mars so far. Also we have never tried seeding an entire planet with life before, with all that space for evolution and no competition to speak of (possibly no competition at all) it could evolve into anything, who knows what will emerge, maybe something that transforms the surface of Mars into conditions hostile to us or the plants we would like to plant there. It's a mad idea to send humans before we understand Mars, terraforming, and life, far better than we do right now.
Facebook posts too. It's not just people chatting to their friends, a fair bit of techy discussion goes on there too and though you can back things up manually, few people ever do.
For that matter this slashdot comment is created in the cloud, I don't have a backup of it (though I would make one manually if it was particularly important to keep it)
Also some things nowadays are created in the cloud. E.g. your emails in gmail - if you don' t have a backup solution, never permanently stored on your computer. Also wikis (each wiki needs its own backup solution, and the website owner might not be up to date with backups), and documents that are edited in the cloud such as google docs.
Just to say no-one has yet mentioned that there are the customers as well, who may be waiting for the new product. Or if no-one knows about it yet, all the people who may find it useful once developed. As a sole trader developer myself, so no issues with employers or employees, and no questions about being hired by someone else - they are the ones I have uppermost in my mind when developing products.
If you do need to move, then the tips about offering to be a consultant after the move, and making sure your code is well documented before you leave seem like good advice. Also explaining the situation to all concerned and trying to make the transition as easy as possible for all concerned.
There's no need to way up the pros and cons about how much you will be benefited long term either way, it's the only decent thing to do as a human being who cares about others. Which you obviously do by your question. If you don't care about others then life soon isn't really that much worth living.
Some scientists seem to reason like this: because human beings have evolved to be fit to survive, therefore, one should act to ensure ones own survival and venefit as paramount.
But that's a confusion of things - the mind and body are shaped by evolution for sure, and with capacities and capabilities that help us to survive, but no moral imperatives arise from that, we are able to think independently and can make our own decisions about what to do with the mind and body. Evolution has just developed a body and mind with certain capabilities.
Similarly when you buy a new car, many of them are carefully developed to be driven safely at enormous speeds well beyond speed limits, over 100 mph, but that doesn't mean you have to drive at 100 mph all the time, or at all.
And physically some things are just impossible to evolve. You can't evolve a bird with heavy wings and strong heavy muscular legs, because useful as heavier bones would be on the ground, it wouldn't be able to get off the ground. Similarly some things that might be of survival value in the mind may be incompatible with other things.
In the same way I think it is surely impossible for evolution to create a living intelligent being sensitive to emotions and feelings of those around them without any sense of sympathy for others and recognition that they have the same issues and problems and suffering as you have yourself. Because sympathy is something that arises naturally as soon as you have a mind that is aware and sensitive in that way.
You can fight against feelings of sympathy, you can hide them, you can run away from them, your life can be just a huge struggle to ignore them, but I think no human being really doesn't have those feelings at all no matter how much they may think they are immune from them.
Some, e.g. perhaps autistic ? may seem to have much less awareness than usual of other's feelings and emotions - But when that happens, then they are to a fair extent handicapped from functioning properly as a social animal. And I think still, not immune from sympathy.
"What is clear is that, while people on the spectrum may not respond easily to external gestures/sounds, they do respond most readily if the initiative they witness is already part of their repertoire. This points to the selective use of incoming information rather than absence of recognition. It would appear that people with autism are actually rather good at recognition and imitation if the action they perceive is one that has meaning and significance for their brains.
As regards the failure of empathic response, it would appear that at least some people with autism are oversensitive to the feelings of others rather than immune to them, but cannot handle the painful feed-back that this initiates in the body, and have therefore learnt to suppress this facility.
An appare
I'm glad it is so difficult - sadly - because hardly anyone seems to consider the consequences for Mars (and possibly Earth) of a human exploration.
l love reading the stories in sci fi. Sounds great. But consider - Mars is so close to Earth that it is just about possible that many Earth organisms could live on Mars in various niche locations e.g. underground or in caves etc. And if earth life was introduced to Mars it would surely quickly terraform at least substantial areas - not to human breathable standard - but to a level where plants could grow etc.
Sounds great in some ways - but what about the scientific interest of any mars micro-organisms that may be there already - they wouldn't stand a chance.
Since it isn't teaming with life, can be pretty sure that at most only a few micro-organisms have been shared between the planets to date. Sending all the micro-organisms on a human spaceship there is much much more significant than e.g. sending a few high level animals to Australia that don't belong there. Surely would wipe out the entire Mars eco-system - whatever it is.
Or if there is nothing there yet - what will the Earth spawned life evolve into given an entire planet and no competition - Darwinian test-tube type experiment on a grand scale when all we can do on Earth is to experiment with small quanitites of sterlised air in labs
Surely huge chance of unexpected organisms evolving, possibly quite rapidly, and very possibly even dangerous or deleterious to human life.
Lots of other disadvantages that could happen. And only one chance to get it right as you just can't reverse it - spores last for millions of years and the first Mars human mission would put millions, billions of new spores into the Mars atmosphere. Blown in the dust, you could never clean them all up again.
Stick with robots (sadly) for now. Humans far too risky for Mars and science and potentially for Earth too.
Or make sure your PayPal account never has significant funds by withdrawing funds frequently - okay unless you do earn lots in a very short period of time.
Another example is the temporary freeze of the funds for World of Minecraft was just reading about that - recent case took weeks to undo - can happen just because of unusual pattern of activity as in that one:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103385-PayPal-Freezes-750K-in-MineCraft-Devs-Account
Yes, the frame in which the 3K background radiation has no dipole moment due to motion through the background.
It's a Global Local frame to coin a word.
The frame is defined locally, then to get a global frame you have to stitch together local frames for each point in the universe. No single global frame, but a globally defined time line so e.g. you can say what the age is of any point in the universe and give every event in the universe an absolute time since the big bang, to within the limits of accuracy of measurement of the dipole moment.
But for distances of 50 million light years pretty much the same frame of reference for both points, to first approximation can just use the local frame with dipole moment vanishing in either location.
Humans are the very worst choice for a search for current life on a planet - they are bound to introduce myriads of new micro-organisms to the planet.
After that chances are that most of the life you discover is life you introduced yourself. Or fossils.
With the strong Mars winds, long lived spores (some can live for hundreds of thousands of years) of micro-organisms hitching a ride with the humans will spread throughout the planet and can never be eradicated, and some will surely find any habitats that are suitable for life.
They may outcompete existing life, or just outnumber them, with evolutionary advantage that they come from a planet richer in life that may have followed evolutionary pathways never explored on Mars and vice versa, Mars may have the micro-organism equivalent of marsupials, some path never explored on Earth, or even totally different basis of life without DNA, pre-biotic - or just different in some interesting way e.g. 3 strands instead of 2 or whatever.
Then finally the accidental or inadvertent introduction of new life to Mars may cause major changes to the climate even as far as inadvertent terraforming maybe in ways we don't like, and may even lead to evolution of new species that are a nuisance or even dangerous to future colonists.
Why the hurry? If we learn to live in the Oort cloud, probably with fusion reactors for miniature suns, then humans will spread through the oort cloud and then reach other stars - the Ooort Cloud does spread a long way from the sun, and mingles with the comet clouds of other stars as stars pass each other in the galaxy. In not that long time geologically we will colonise the entire galaxy.
Seems almost inevitable that will happen if our technology continues to evolve, fusion is hard to do but only on timescale of decades, we are so close to it that it will surely happen quite soon on timescale of centuries. With fusion suns life in the Oort cloud could be very pleasant, probably in spinning space habitats to simulate gravity
One wonders what could stop this in fact. Once a few comets in the Oort cloud are colonised, hard to think of anything that could stop the process. And is it right for humans to colonise the galaxy? Why have no other alien species done the same and reached us already in the history of the galaxy?
What puzzles me is - how can NASA have a manned flight to Mars program compatible with its planetary protection policies...
I can't imagine any way a human could land on Mars without bringing hosts of microbes and microbial spores to the planet.
It's easier to survive under the sea or on land on Earth than mount an exhibition to Mars, and would have better chance of surviving an asteroid impact - no need to build spacecraft and travel back to Earth as you are already there.
Evem the biggest impacts in the past were survivable e.g. at bottom of ocean and with the resources a Mars settlement would have, unless unlucky enough to be at the impact site.
To deal with that make sure you have say 3 undersea hideouts, each staffed with say a dozen researchers at any time. Would be popuplar bases for undersea exploration and study so no problem keeping them inhabited at any time, and make sure you have supplies, equipment etc. enough to make them self-sustaining for several years - again no problem, a submarine can be self sustaining under sea for several months.
For that matter any of our nuclear subs would survive an asteroid impact if far enough away and could continue under the sea for months, eventually surface when all the fires etc. have died away.
Another problem is that introduced Earth micro-organisms could evolve to be hostile in similar way. If micro-organism, and with entire planet to spread over, and high radiation levels, and many generations in each day, and no competition, evolution could be extra-ordinarily rapid once life from Earth takes hold at all.
Within maybe a year you could have equivalent of billions of years of evolution on Earth for microbes - in a completely different environment. With different versions of it in all the niches on Mars.
Could cause major problems for future terrraforming of Mars. Could also similarly to native Mars microbes be of danger to Earth life evolved to be no longer recognised as food, who knows, a lot could happen with a planet wide experiment like that, and with all the possible habitats - ice, methane, underground volcanoes and what-not.
That is what might happen if there is no Mars life already there, or if Earth life turns out to be better suited to Mars than life already there, maybe because of things that have evolved on Earth and not on Mars, like introducing European mammals to Australia.
What about microbes developed by parallel evolution. We know what can happen if you introduce a plant or animal from another continent on Earth. But most of the smaller microbes can disperse in the atmosphere and mix world wide. We don't know what happens if you introduce a new variety of one of those to a new planet.
What if it treats oxygen as a poison and has developed the ability to remove it from the atmosphere and "fix it" - just to throw out an idea, might explain why there is no oxygen in the atmosphere if there is life there e.g. in underground caves.
Although it mightn't be able to attack many earth organisms - that goes both ways. It may be invulnerable to attacks from them too, it may spread e.g. a mold might spread over the world and it might be that there is nothing that has yet evolved on Earth to eat it - even if it has organisms that eat it on Mars.
Yes, very likely to have shared DNA in my book. Much exchange of material between the planets in the early solar system from impact debris and volcanoes and microbes can survive the transition from Mars to Earth. Still very interesting, would have evolved independently of Earth probably for millions or even billions of years, and in a very different environment.
some spores can survive for millions of years and the winds will spread them througout the planet.
But probably the number of places on the planet where life can start is small.
Anyone know if anyone has done a study of how likely it is the planet is already contaminated?
I'm most concerned about any martian life that may already exist on Mars. The more life we introduce the greater the chance we introduce a species that can out compete it.
As with not yet discovered species on Earth but more so, the Mars life may have unusual and interesting properties and could be lost before we even find it. Also the native life if it exists may be the best life to use as a basis to help terraform the planet.
So I think a very thorough exploration with remote controlled robot landers well sterilised needs to be done first.
Lots of other issues. E.g. do we really need Mars to be habitable now. If we try and because of our inexperience in terraforming it goes haywire, then will we be able to recover from it. May we our some other life form really really need it in the future? If not before may be needed when our sun goes Red Giant, Mars may then become habitable naturally without our interference, and may be just what is needed then.
Just at thought, at this resolution, you could probably do HOLOGRAPHS too:).
Real time ANIMATED HOLOGRAPHS.
Also of course the 3D specs idea, wearable head sets.
The idea of being able to vary the resolution of your display continuously up to some huge resolution is awesome.
We relay on cleartype at the moment to see many screens reasonably crisply. Presumably really high resolution displays would look much crisper.
If I look at my screen I'm using right now, with a critical eye - though it is much higher quality than my older screens, you can pick out the pixelation if you look carefully, e.g. for brackets (). With higher resolution it would probably look at least as good as a printed page in its crispness.
I think you can't really understand how much better it will be to have higher resolution displays until you can see them for real.
One thing it might do is make it easier for the eyes to focus exactly on the screen, and so reduce the tiredness of the eyes you get from long sessions at the computer.
Have you seen this - relevant to the discussion I think:
http://www.livescience.com/space/090718-survivor-microbe.html
Could be something like this causing the methane on Mars. And whether or not, is reason to be very cautious about possibly accidentally introducing new Earth lifeforms to Mars in future space missions, until we know what effect they may have on the planet - and perhaps also on Earth if they get returned to Earth after evolving further on Mars.
(see my other posts to this topic for why I think this may be a cause for concern and caution until we know a lot more about terraforming).
Of course if you can establish with reasonable certainty that life won't spread, or won't cause inadvertent terraforming that's another matter.
But - the scientists are giving conflicting messages there. They sterilise their spacecraft to make sure no life does get transferred to Mars so clearly believe that is possible - yet at the same time are proposing a human manned mission to Mars which just could never be sterile in the way a robotic spacecraft is.
They also argue that life could exist on Mars because of similarity to Earth conditions - those very arguments also suggest that Earth life could spread widely on Mars.
It doesn't add up. If it matters whether life gets transferred from Earth to Mars, as I believe, don't go there, except via telepresence.
Don't take the risk.
Investigate thoroughly. Find out if the risks are real (as I believe they are). Then if they are real, again, don't go.
If somehow you can establish that it is safe then you can go but only once sure that it really is safe.
The thing that really concerns me is that it is a one off experiment. Once you introduce life to Mars, you can't remove it again, it is done and dusted. And it is our only nearby almost Earth like planet. It may be very valuable in some way or another at some time in the future because of its similarity to Earth, and it would be very easy to spoil it by inadvertently introducing life to it too soon.
I agree with your other reasons as well BTW good points. But for me this is the overriding reason for not going to Mars except by telepresence at our current stage of knowledge of planets and terraforming.
It's an argument for not going anywhere as human explorers where you could inadvertently start off life on a new planet that doesn't have it yet.
Telepresence is okay, same technology used e.g. for exploring the deeps of the sea too deep for human explorers to visit, or nuclear reactors etc, and this technology will surely continue to develop so that it is almost the same as going there yourself - though you would need to be in orbit around Mars to do it because of the lightspeed time lag from Earth to Mars.
You can't rule out an argument just because you don't like the conclusions, if the reasons for it are cogent. I believe the potential dangers are real, hard to quantify but a risk that one shouldn't responsibly take without much more knowledge than we have now.
Conditions on Mars are similar to those in cold Anatartic deserts on Earth where life survives, similar enough so that there is a possibility life may get a foothold there. Then once it does, life has a way of modifying its environment to make it possible to spread.
In that way just a few organisms from earth, from e.g. the faeces of a human explorer or just hijacking a ride on skin cells that flake off the skin could establish a foothold on Mars, then after the first human explorers leave, the most hardy of them could multiply and spread, carried by the wind they could spread widely and fast. Next time you return to Mars, the planet could be covered in patches of organisms derived from skin bacteria or organisms that live on human faeces, but evolved - would evolve rapidly since there are so many generations, similar to the way disease organisms evolve in hospitals.
Mars is cold now but scientists who study it think that it may be possible to make it much warmer by starting some process that gradually releases the CO2 and water vapour into the atmosphere. Life might well do that. After as short a time as a few centuries, it could become as warm as Earth nearly, with dense atmosphere especially at the bottom of volcano craters and water on the surface and running streams. The gas however can only be kept for a few hundred thousand years, then escapes and after that the planet is so dry and with little CO2 left that from then on, the planet is then an inhabitable desert (bar heroic intervention with colliding comets etc).
It would be possible to terraform responsibly, decide what you want to seed the planet with first, choose organisms that you know work well and that will spread, and create good conditions for further development. But I don't think we know enough to do that yet. Also I think the planet may be needed in the future, for the reasons I gave. Do we really want it to be an uninhabitable desert for billions of years into the future after a brief flourishing of a few hundred thousand years of life?
Can still do robotic exploration and explore Mars by telepresence. And there are plenty of places in the solar system that aren't suitable for life such as the asteroids, moon, mercury etc.
In our solar system it only rules out Mars, Europa, Titan just possibly (not the surface can't imagine Earth life would live there but maybe below the surface) and some of the minor moons with active venting - and just possibly the atmosphere of Jupiter too which is fairly warm at some levels.
A remote possibility also for the higher atmosphere of Venus, maybe earth life could survive there.
At least according to current knowledge, the rest of the solar system is likely to be fine for human exploration. Conditions are so harsh that any life we seed will be limited to our habitats (unless life evolves to be able to spread in a vacuum).
Yes I agree, it is probably only single cell organisms if there is life there, since life on Earth took a long time to progress beyond single cells, and probably only single cell organisms could be transported by meteorite to Mars.
But a single cell is a very complex thing, here on Earth anyway so it could be easily ha
Yes I agree. It is something I am quite passionate about.
If people travel to the surface of mars, then they are bound to introduce earth micro-organisems - plant or animal, as soon as they or their spaceship sets foot on the planet - look at how the spacecraft have to be sterilised at present.
There probably has been some transfer of life between the planets through meteor impacts, but rare and only of a few organisms.
This will introduce a whole new biota. It's like introducing organisms from one continent to another on the earth, but far worse. Although conditions on Mars surface are harsh, it seems quite possible that a few organisms will survive, maybe by getting into the ground below the surface so shielded from the sun and the reactive chemicals on the surface of the planet.
If there is any life in Mars, maybe in deep underground aquifers, it is very liikely that it will become extinct as a result of the earth lifeforms invading the planet.
Even if there is no life on Mars, this is like a big uncontrolled experiment in terraforming. Who knows what plant or animal life may evolve from it and spread to cover the entire planet?
Newly evolved Mars organisms may be viruses, fungi, and other disease organisms hazardous to human life and prevent future colonisation of the planet. After all the life would be evolved mainly from micro-organisms that live on human beings. So they may become dangerous to earth life, so that Mars can no longer be visited because of the risk of returning the newly evolved Mars organisms to Earth..
Newly evolved Mars organisms could also release gases and transform the Mars atmosphere in ways that we don't want to happen. They are bound to transform the soil and atmosphere in some way or another if they spread and are prolific.
Or they could be totally benign, improve the soil and atmosphere, evolve in ways that are beneficial to us and to the planet, and produce useful products, even fruit and vegetables etc. But in our present so very limited state of knowledge of terraforming, this isn't the moment to begin an uncontrolled and unintended experiemnt in seeding Mars with a random sample of life from Earth.
Humans can explore Mars robotically as we do at present with great care to sterilise our explorers.
There may be reasons for humans to orbit the planet by spacecraft too, with great care as a crash of a spacecraft with humans on board would be potentially a disaster. But if you orbitted above the planet and explored its moons Phobos and Deimos, you could maybe build a base on them and then explore Mars by telepresence with carefully sterilised vehicles.
Once you know for sure that there is no life on the planet - BUT HOW CAN YOU EVER BE CERTAIN - and also KNOW MUCH MORE ABOUT TERRAFORMING, you could carefully introduce a few selected micro-organisms to the planet perhaps. And establish a benign biota there BEFORE ANY HUMAN SO MUCH AS STEPS ON THE PLANET.
But there are also strong reasons for never terraforming the planet at all. If you do terraform it, then the gases are released. The gravity isn't enough to hold onto them. So within a few hundred thousand years, the gases are all gone. After that point, no future terraforming is possible again, except by heroic methods such as changing the orbits of millions of comets so that they hit Mars.
We - well our descendents - may need Mars later on - when the sun gets much hotter, and Earth is no longer habitable. It may be just the stepping stone we need in our outward migration towards Jupiter as the sun expands to a red giant. And maybe by then we will have the wisdom to be able to do it properly and responsibly.
So probably we should treat it as a preserve, and not terraform it until then, if at all wise.
There are plenty of other places to explore. The moon. The poles of mercury where there is believed to be ice, so could be made short term habitable to humans. Asteroids. Moons of ju
Slashdot Mirror
We don't know that, and microscopic life that branched off from Earth life billions of years ago - or even evolved independently, is of immense interest to science and to humanity too. It could lead to new drugs and treatments, new ways of making nano structures, new processes, it could be amazingly interesting. Also there is no reason at all to be so sure it is microscopic, just because it isn't on the surface of Mars. The surface of Mars is highly hostile to life, especially the very surface of the soil. There could be macroscopic life underneath.
It's absurd to even think of humans - all robotic space ships are sterlised, how can you sterilise a spaceship with humans inside? There is no vessel or spacesuit that can keep all Earth life inside a habitat suitable for humans. Sorry for those of you who fantasize about sending humans to explore the planets, but that's the reality with current technology. And once the life escapes from the human habitat, even as a few microbial cells, the Mars winds will take them all over Mars. It won't kill all of it because of the extreme resilience of bacterial spores. Then it just needs to find one damp patch, ice warmed by the midday sun, or by volcanic activity - and it will grow, spread, create more spores and spread again. Exponential process, starts slowly perhaps but then more and more rapidly until the whole planet is covered by modern Earth life of some form or other. With the billions of years of extra evolution over the whole of the Earth, Earth life would be like cats and dogs invading Australia, it would swiftly wipe out any native life that might have kept a fragile foothold on Mars so far. Also we have never tried seeding an entire planet with life before, with all that space for evolution and no competition to speak of (possibly no competition at all) it could evolve into anything, who knows what will emerge, maybe something that transforms the surface of Mars into conditions hostile to us or the plants we would like to plant there. It's a mad idea to send humans before we understand Mars, terraforming, and life, far better than we do right now.
Facebook posts too. It's not just people chatting to their friends, a fair bit of techy discussion goes on there too and though you can back things up manually, few people ever do.
For that matter this slashdot comment is created in the cloud, I don't have a backup of it (though I would make one manually if it was particularly important to keep it)
Also some things nowadays are created in the cloud. E.g. your emails in gmail - if you don' t have a backup solution, never permanently stored on your computer. Also wikis (each wiki needs its own backup solution, and the website owner might not be up to date with backups), and documents that are edited in the cloud such as google docs.
Just to say no-one has yet mentioned that there are the customers as well, who may be waiting for the new product. Or if no-one knows about it yet, all the people who may find it useful once developed. As a sole trader developer myself, so no issues with employers or employees, and no questions about being hired by someone else - they are the ones I have uppermost in my mind when developing products.
If you do need to move, then the tips about offering to be a consultant after the move, and making sure your code is well documented before you leave seem like good advice. Also explaining the situation to all concerned and trying to make the transition as easy as possible for all concerned.
There's no need to way up the pros and cons about how much you will be benefited long term either way, it's the only decent thing to do as a human being who cares about others. Which you obviously do by your question. If you don't care about others then life soon isn't really that much worth living.
Some scientists seem to reason like this: because human beings have evolved to be fit to survive, therefore, one should act to ensure ones own survival and venefit as paramount.
But that's a confusion of things - the mind and body are shaped by evolution for sure, and with capacities and capabilities that help us to survive, but no moral imperatives arise from that, we are able to think independently and can make our own decisions about what to do with the mind and body. Evolution has just developed a body and mind with certain capabilities.
Similarly when you buy a new car, many of them are carefully developed to be driven safely at enormous speeds well beyond speed limits, over 100 mph, but that doesn't mean you have to drive at 100 mph all the time, or at all.
And physically some things are just impossible to evolve. You can't evolve a bird with heavy wings and strong heavy muscular legs, because useful as heavier bones would be on the ground, it wouldn't be able to get off the ground. Similarly some things that might be of survival value in the mind may be incompatible with other things.
In the same way I think it is surely impossible for evolution to create a living intelligent being sensitive to emotions and feelings of those around them without any sense of sympathy for others and recognition that they have the same issues and problems and suffering as you have yourself. Because sympathy is something that arises naturally as soon as you have a mind that is aware and sensitive in that way.
You can fight against feelings of sympathy, you can hide them, you can run away from them, your life can be just a huge struggle to ignore them, but I think no human being really doesn't have those feelings at all no matter how much they may think they are immune from them.
Some, e.g. perhaps autistic ? may seem to have much less awareness than usual of other's feelings and emotions - But when that happens, then they are to a fair extent handicapped from functioning properly as a social animal. And I think still, not immune from sympathy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Autism_spectrum_disorders
"What is clear is that, while people on the spectrum may not respond easily to external gestures/sounds, they do respond most readily if the initiative they witness is already part of their repertoire. This points to the selective use of incoming information rather than absence of recognition. It would appear that people with autism are actually rather good at recognition and imitation if the action they perceive is one that has meaning and significance for their brains. As regards the failure of empathic response, it would appear that at least some people with autism are oversensitive to the feelings of others rather than immune to them, but cannot handle the painful feed-back that this initiates in the body, and have therefore learnt to suppress this facility. An appare
I'm glad it is so difficult - sadly - because hardly anyone seems to consider the consequences for Mars (and possibly Earth) of a human exploration. l love reading the stories in sci fi. Sounds great. But consider - Mars is so close to Earth that it is just about possible that many Earth organisms could live on Mars in various niche locations e.g. underground or in caves etc. And if earth life was introduced to Mars it would surely quickly terraform at least substantial areas - not to human breathable standard - but to a level where plants could grow etc. Sounds great in some ways - but what about the scientific interest of any mars micro-organisms that may be there already - they wouldn't stand a chance. Since it isn't teaming with life, can be pretty sure that at most only a few micro-organisms have been shared between the planets to date. Sending all the micro-organisms on a human spaceship there is much much more significant than e.g. sending a few high level animals to Australia that don't belong there. Surely would wipe out the entire Mars eco-system - whatever it is. Or if there is nothing there yet - what will the Earth spawned life evolve into given an entire planet and no competition - Darwinian test-tube type experiment on a grand scale when all we can do on Earth is to experiment with small quanitites of sterlised air in labs Surely huge chance of unexpected organisms evolving, possibly quite rapidly, and very possibly even dangerous or deleterious to human life. Lots of other disadvantages that could happen. And only one chance to get it right as you just can't reverse it - spores last for millions of years and the first Mars human mission would put millions, billions of new spores into the Mars atmosphere. Blown in the dust, you could never clean them all up again. Stick with robots (sadly) for now. Humans far too risky for Mars and science and potentially for Earth too.
Or make sure your PayPal account never has significant funds by withdrawing funds frequently - okay unless you do earn lots in a very short period of time. Another example is the temporary freeze of the funds for World of Minecraft was just reading about that - recent case took weeks to undo - can happen just because of unusual pattern of activity as in that one: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103385-PayPal-Freezes-750K-in-MineCraft-Devs-Account
Yes, the frame in which the 3K background radiation has no dipole moment due to motion through the background.
It's a Global Local frame to coin a word.
The frame is defined locally, then to get a global frame you have to stitch together local frames for each point in the universe. No single global frame, but a globally defined time line so e.g. you can say what the age is of any point in the universe and give every event in the universe an absolute time since the big bang, to within the limits of accuracy of measurement of the dipole moment.
But for distances of 50 million light years pretty much the same frame of reference for both points, to first approximation can just use the local frame with dipole moment vanishing in either location.
Humans are the very worst choice for a search for current life on a planet - they are bound to introduce myriads of new micro-organisms to the planet.
After that chances are that most of the life you discover is life you introduced yourself. Or fossils.
With the strong Mars winds, long lived spores (some can live for hundreds of thousands of years) of micro-organisms hitching a ride with the humans will spread throughout the planet and can never be eradicated, and some will surely find any habitats that are suitable for life.
They may outcompete existing life, or just outnumber them, with evolutionary advantage that they come from a planet richer in life that may have followed evolutionary pathways never explored on Mars and vice versa, Mars may have the micro-organism equivalent of marsupials, some path never explored on Earth, or even totally different basis of life without DNA, pre-biotic - or just different in some interesting way e.g. 3 strands instead of 2 or whatever.
Then finally the accidental or inadvertent introduction of new life to Mars may cause major changes to the climate even as far as inadvertent terraforming maybe in ways we don't like, and may even lead to evolution of new species that are a nuisance or even dangerous to future colonists.
Why the hurry? If we learn to live in the Oort cloud, probably with fusion reactors for miniature suns, then humans will spread through the oort cloud and then reach other stars - the Ooort Cloud does spread a long way from the sun, and mingles with the comet clouds of other stars as stars pass each other in the galaxy. In not that long time geologically we will colonise the entire galaxy.
Seems almost inevitable that will happen if our technology continues to evolve, fusion is hard to do but only on timescale of decades, we are so close to it that it will surely happen quite soon on timescale of centuries. With fusion suns life in the Oort cloud could be very pleasant, probably in spinning space habitats to simulate gravity
One wonders what could stop this in fact. Once a few comets in the Oort cloud are colonised, hard to think of anything that could stop the process. And is it right for humans to colonise the galaxy? Why have no other alien species done the same and reached us already in the history of the galaxy?
What if it has a moon - that would give it tides even though spinlocked itself.
What puzzles me is - how can NASA have a manned flight to Mars program compatible with its planetary protection policies... I can't imagine any way a human could land on Mars without bringing hosts of microbes and microbial spores to the planet.
It's easier to survive under the sea or on land on Earth than mount an exhibition to Mars, and would have better chance of surviving an asteroid impact - no need to build spacecraft and travel back to Earth as you are already there.
Evem the biggest impacts in the past were survivable e.g. at bottom of ocean and with the resources a Mars settlement would have, unless unlucky enough to be at the impact site.
To deal with that make sure you have say 3 undersea hideouts, each staffed with say a dozen researchers at any time. Would be popuplar bases for undersea exploration and study so no problem keeping them inhabited at any time, and make sure you have supplies, equipment etc. enough to make them self-sustaining for several years - again no problem, a submarine can be self sustaining under sea for several months.
For that matter any of our nuclear subs would survive an asteroid impact if far enough away and could continue under the sea for months, eventually surface when all the fires etc. have died away.
Another problem is that introduced Earth micro-organisms could evolve to be hostile in similar way. If micro-organism, and with entire planet to spread over, and high radiation levels, and many generations in each day, and no competition, evolution could be extra-ordinarily rapid once life from Earth takes hold at all.
Within maybe a year you could have equivalent of billions of years of evolution on Earth for microbes - in a completely different environment. With different versions of it in all the niches on Mars.
Could cause major problems for future terrraforming of Mars. Could also similarly to native Mars microbes be of danger to Earth life evolved to be no longer recognised as food, who knows, a lot could happen with a planet wide experiment like that, and with all the possible habitats - ice, methane, underground volcanoes and what-not.
That is what might happen if there is no Mars life already there, or if Earth life turns out to be better suited to Mars than life already there, maybe because of things that have evolved on Earth and not on Mars, like introducing European mammals to Australia.
What about microbes developed by parallel evolution. We know what can happen if you introduce a plant or animal from another continent on Earth. But most of the smaller microbes can disperse in the atmosphere and mix world wide. We don't know what happens if you introduce a new variety of one of those to a new planet.
What if it treats oxygen as a poison and has developed the ability to remove it from the atmosphere and "fix it" - just to throw out an idea, might explain why there is no oxygen in the atmosphere if there is life there e.g. in underground caves.
Although it mightn't be able to attack many earth organisms - that goes both ways. It may be invulnerable to attacks from them too, it may spread e.g. a mold might spread over the world and it might be that there is nothing that has yet evolved on Earth to eat it - even if it has organisms that eat it on Mars.
Yes, very likely to have shared DNA in my book. Much exchange of material between the planets in the early solar system from impact debris and volcanoes and microbes can survive the transition from Mars to Earth. Still very interesting, would have evolved independently of Earth probably for millions or even billions of years, and in a very different environment.
some spores can survive for millions of years and the winds will spread them througout the planet.
But probably the number of places on the planet where life can start is small.
Anyone know if anyone has done a study of how likely it is the planet is already contaminated?
I'm most concerned about any martian life that may already exist on Mars. The more life we introduce the greater the chance we introduce a species that can out compete it.
As with not yet discovered species on Earth but more so, the Mars life may have unusual and interesting properties and could be lost before we even find it. Also the native life if it exists may be the best life to use as a basis to help terraform the planet.
So I think a very thorough exploration with remote controlled robot landers well sterilised needs to be done first.
Lots of other issues. E.g. do we really need Mars to be habitable now. If we try and because of our inexperience in terraforming it goes haywire, then will we be able to recover from it. May we our some other life form really really need it in the future? If not before may be needed when our sun goes Red Giant, Mars may then become habitable naturally without our interference, and may be just what is needed then.
Sorry, digital ANIMATED HOLOGRAMS at 2540 dpi http://www.hasimages.com/images/footpixelchart.htm http://www.novavisioninc.com/pages/info_hologram_typesof.html Seems that 10 microns resolution at 2540 dpi is well beyond what you need for high quality holograms.
Just at thought, at this resolution, you could probably do HOLOGRAPHS too :).
Real time ANIMATED HOLOGRAPHS.
Also of course the 3D specs idea, wearable head sets.
The idea of being able to vary the resolution of your display continuously up to some huge resolution is awesome.
We relay on cleartype at the moment to see many screens reasonably crisply. Presumably really high resolution displays would look much crisper.
If I look at my screen I'm using right now, with a critical eye - though it is much higher quality than my older screens, you can pick out the pixelation if you look carefully, e.g. for brackets (). With higher resolution it would probably look at least as good as a printed page in its crispness.
I think you can't really understand how much better it will be to have higher resolution displays until you can see them for real.
One thing it might do is make it easier for the eyes to focus exactly on the screen, and so reduce the tiredness of the eyes you get from long sessions at the computer.
Have you seen this - relevant to the discussion I think: http://www.livescience.com/space/090718-survivor-microbe.html Could be something like this causing the methane on Mars. And whether or not, is reason to be very cautious about possibly accidentally introducing new Earth lifeforms to Mars in future space missions, until we know what effect they may have on the planet - and perhaps also on Earth if they get returned to Earth after evolving further on Mars. (see my other posts to this topic for why I think this may be a cause for concern and caution until we know a lot more about terraforming).
Of course if you can establish with reasonable certainty that life won't spread, or won't cause inadvertent terraforming that's another matter.
But - the scientists are giving conflicting messages there. They sterilise their spacecraft to make sure no life does get transferred to Mars so clearly believe that is possible - yet at the same time are proposing a human manned mission to Mars which just could never be sterile in the way a robotic spacecraft is.
They also argue that life could exist on Mars because of similarity to Earth conditions - those very arguments also suggest that Earth life could spread widely on Mars.
It doesn't add up. If it matters whether life gets transferred from Earth to Mars, as I believe, don't go there, except via telepresence.
Don't take the risk.
Investigate thoroughly. Find out if the risks are real (as I believe they are). Then if they are real, again, don't go.
If somehow you can establish that it is safe then you can go but only once sure that it really is safe.
The thing that really concerns me is that it is a one off experiment. Once you introduce life to Mars, you can't remove it again, it is done and dusted. And it is our only nearby almost Earth like planet. It may be very valuable in some way or another at some time in the future because of its similarity to Earth, and it would be very easy to spoil it by inadvertently introducing life to it too soon.
I agree with your other reasons as well BTW good points. But for me this is the overriding reason for not going to Mars except by telepresence at our current stage of knowledge of planets and terraforming.
It's an argument for not going anywhere as human explorers where you could inadvertently start off life on a new planet that doesn't have it yet.
Telepresence is okay, same technology used e.g. for exploring the deeps of the sea too deep for human explorers to visit, or nuclear reactors etc, and this technology will surely continue to develop so that it is almost the same as going there yourself - though you would need to be in orbit around Mars to do it because of the lightspeed time lag from Earth to Mars.
You can't rule out an argument just because you don't like the conclusions, if the reasons for it are cogent. I believe the potential dangers are real, hard to quantify but a risk that one shouldn't responsibly take without much more knowledge than we have now.
Conditions on Mars are similar to those in cold Anatartic deserts on Earth where life survives, similar enough so that there is a possibility life may get a foothold there. Then once it does, life has a way of modifying its environment to make it possible to spread.
In that way just a few organisms from earth, from e.g. the faeces of a human explorer or just hijacking a ride on skin cells that flake off the skin could establish a foothold on Mars, then after the first human explorers leave, the most hardy of them could multiply and spread, carried by the wind they could spread widely and fast. Next time you return to Mars, the planet could be covered in patches of organisms derived from skin bacteria or organisms that live on human faeces, but evolved - would evolve rapidly since there are so many generations, similar to the way disease organisms evolve in hospitals.
Mars is cold now but scientists who study it think that it may be possible to make it much warmer by starting some process that gradually releases the CO2 and water vapour into the atmosphere. Life might well do that. After as short a time as a few centuries, it could become as warm as Earth nearly, with dense atmosphere especially at the bottom of volcano craters and water on the surface and running streams. The gas however can only be kept for a few hundred thousand years, then escapes and after that the planet is so dry and with little CO2 left that from then on, the planet is then an inhabitable desert (bar heroic intervention with colliding comets etc).
It would be possible to terraform responsibly, decide what you want to seed the planet with first, choose organisms that you know work well and that will spread, and create good conditions for further development. But I don't think we know enough to do that yet. Also I think the planet may be needed in the future, for the reasons I gave. Do we really want it to be an uninhabitable desert for billions of years into the future after a brief flourishing of a few hundred thousand years of life?
Can still do robotic exploration and explore Mars by telepresence. And there are plenty of places in the solar system that aren't suitable for life such as the asteroids, moon, mercury etc.
In our solar system it only rules out Mars, Europa, Titan just possibly (not the surface can't imagine Earth life would live there but maybe below the surface) and some of the minor moons with active venting - and just possibly the atmosphere of Jupiter too which is fairly warm at some levels.
A remote possibility also for the higher atmosphere of Venus, maybe earth life could survive there.
At least according to current knowledge, the rest of the solar system is likely to be fine for human exploration. Conditions are so harsh that any life we seed will be limited to our habitats (unless life evolves to be able to spread in a vacuum).
Yes I agree, it is probably only single cell organisms if there is life there, since life on Earth took a long time to progress beyond single cells, and probably only single cell organisms could be transported by meteorite to Mars.
But a single cell is a very complex thing, here on Earth anyway so it could be easily ha
Yes I agree. It is something I am quite passionate about.
If people travel to the surface of mars, then they are bound to introduce earth micro-organisems - plant or animal, as soon as they or their spaceship sets foot on the planet - look at how the spacecraft have to be sterilised at present.
There probably has been some transfer of life between the planets through meteor impacts, but rare and only of a few organisms.
This will introduce a whole new biota. It's like introducing organisms from one continent to another on the earth, but far worse. Although conditions on Mars surface are harsh, it seems quite possible that a few organisms will survive, maybe by getting into the ground below the surface so shielded from the sun and the reactive chemicals on the surface of the planet.
If there is any life in Mars, maybe in deep underground aquifers, it is very liikely that it will become extinct as a result of the earth lifeforms invading the planet.
Even if there is no life on Mars, this is like a big uncontrolled experiment in terraforming. Who knows what plant or animal life may evolve from it and spread to cover the entire planet?
Newly evolved Mars organisms may be viruses, fungi, and other disease organisms hazardous to human life and prevent future colonisation of the planet. After all the life would be evolved mainly from micro-organisms that live on human beings. So they may become dangerous to earth life, so that Mars can no longer be visited because of the risk of returning the newly evolved Mars organisms to Earth..
Newly evolved Mars organisms could also release gases and transform the Mars atmosphere in ways that we don't want to happen. They are bound to transform the soil and atmosphere in some way or another if they spread and are prolific.
Or they could be totally benign, improve the soil and atmosphere, evolve in ways that are beneficial to us and to the planet, and produce useful products, even fruit and vegetables etc. But in our present so very limited state of knowledge of terraforming, this isn't the moment to begin an uncontrolled and unintended experiemnt in seeding Mars with a random sample of life from Earth.
Humans can explore Mars robotically as we do at present with great care to sterilise our explorers.
There may be reasons for humans to orbit the planet by spacecraft too, with great care as a crash of a spacecraft with humans on board would be potentially a disaster. But if you orbitted above the planet and explored its moons Phobos and Deimos, you could maybe build a base on them and then explore Mars by telepresence with carefully sterilised vehicles.
Once you know for sure that there is no life on the planet - BUT HOW CAN YOU EVER BE CERTAIN - and also KNOW MUCH MORE ABOUT TERRAFORMING, you could carefully introduce a few selected micro-organisms to the planet perhaps. And establish a benign biota there BEFORE ANY HUMAN SO MUCH AS STEPS ON THE PLANET.
But there are also strong reasons for never terraforming the planet at all. If you do terraform it, then the gases are released. The gravity isn't enough to hold onto them. So within a few hundred thousand years, the gases are all gone. After that point, no future terraforming is possible again, except by heroic methods such as changing the orbits of millions of comets so that they hit Mars.
We - well our descendents - may need Mars later on - when the sun gets much hotter, and Earth is no longer habitable. It may be just the stepping stone we need in our outward migration towards Jupiter as the sun expands to a red giant. And maybe by then we will have the wisdom to be able to do it properly and responsibly.
So probably we should treat it as a preserve, and not terraform it until then, if at all wise.
There are plenty of other places to explore. The moon. The poles of mercury where there is believed to be ice, so could be made short term habitable to humans. Asteroids. Moons of ju