61–64 of 64 posts
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Well, if they could be that alike, then it's not much worth studying anyway...
I think you've just made a compelling case for why we can make every species on earth extinct, apart from us and 'nothing of value would be lost'.
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I think you've just made a compelling case for why we can make every species on earth extinct, apart from us and 'nothing of value would be lost'.
If that's sarcasm, I think you've exemplified the slippery slope fallacy and the straw-man argument.
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That is indeed awesome but I would argue that it also means we would need to undertake a much more thorough search to find out of mars is indeed a dead planet. Once we land a large concentration of biological matter there -- we won't have an opportunity to look again without dealing with massive potential for cross-planetary contamination. Of course, it's a trade off and it's great news if we ever had to undertake a…
If we want to search Mars for life before we contaminate it then we need to launch a crash program to do so now , because our window is swiftly expiring. Right now a small group with minimal resources (on the to build and launch stuff into space scale) could likely launch a cubesat with some sort of bacterial payload that would eventually get to Mars. Such a stunt is only going to get easier in the next few decades.…
Under works: Cliff climbing robots to look at ice and water flows, quads to survey large areas up close and quickly, and man more.
It's progressing as fast as it can, but is often sidetracks by the whims of new administrations (moon! no, Mars! no, Moon!).
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What if it turns out that Earth's life and Martian life share the same origin?
Even if it turns out to be the case, there would be two forms of life separated by billions of years of evolution. Mistaking them would be much less likely than mistaking a cell from the wing of fruit fly from an onion peel cell: while on the outside they may look similar, the DNA of the fruit fly has about 170 million base pairs, while the DNA of the onion has 16 billion of them.