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Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then how did life get on mars?
Exactly, panspermia isn't an answer, it's kicking the can down the road. The only thing panspermia can tell us is that it's ok if we can't find evidence for the genesis of life on Earth.
yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points
Going up a few basis points would be like increasing the odds 1,000,000x. I'm not opposed to the idea that life began on Mars, and, I don't know, through some mass ejection a chunk of lifelike stuff landed on earth and seeded it. But it seems like a much harder path to take than to just form life on Earth from the start.
So we messed up Mars, almost done with Earth, where do we go next?
Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
I don't remember where I read it, but somebody wrote that a geologist with a hammer could do more science in an afternoon than all our mars probes have done combined. Its hard to do science with a rc car, even if said car is cutting edge.
Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
Easy peasy. :)
yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points
What are the chances that some type of single-cell critter(s) from Mars were robust enough to:
1) Survive the trip here with the extreme cold of space, AND
2) Survive the searing heat of entering earth's atmosphere, AND
3) Survive conditions on earth, when they were adapted to the martian environment
And that's all premised on a meteor strike on Mars ejecting something with enough velocity to not only escape Martian gravity, but then miraculously happen to score a direct hit on earth (a miniscule angular target to hit).
This combination of low probabilities seems to result in an explanation of lower probability than the alternative (life originating on earth) that it's attempting to explain, and of course life originating on an earth-like Mars in same time frame it would have needed to develop here (or maybe also did develop here) doesn't add much more than historical interest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then how did life get on mars?
Mars had 3/4 billion more years to develop, compared with the Earth. Mars formed first, and cooled first due to its smaller size. One of the outstanding problems in astrobiology I mention is that the Earth was inhospitable until 3.8Gya, and the oldest fossils of presumably DNA based life (since it matches existing life we can study) was 3.7Gya. Mars was hospitable ~4.5Gya. So either life emerged IMMEDIATELY on Earth…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then how did life get on mars?
I get your point, but the idea that life originates on Asteroids and populates planets on impact is, imo, likely. It does shift the question to “how did it start there” :)
yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points
Well, that was H. Beam Piper's premise in his "Terro Human Future" and "Paratime" stories --- see the wonderful novella "Omnilingual" and see the story "Genesis": https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18105
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that was H. Beam Piper's premise in his "Terro Human Future" and "Paratime" stories --- see the wonderful novella "Omnilingual" and see the story "Genesis": https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18105
Anyone remember the title of the short where they explore an ancient martian city and find a periodic table that serves as a Rosetta stone?
See the nicely updated version at: