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New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

discover.lanl.gov

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Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#171

Post by dotnet00 »

sgt101 wrote: post #144
baja_blast wrote: post #18

One thing that has annoyed me is in the 1970s the Viking landers did experiments to check for the presence of life on Mars known as the Labeled Release experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_exper... which dropped a nutrient solution with radioactive Carbon-14 to detect if there was any off gassing to detect if anything metabolized the soil. And both experiments showed positive results but…

>But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life? simples. If life is definitively detected on Mars there will never be another mission to determine if life is present on Mars. So what clever scientists have figured out is that they need to do all the science that they want before checking for life.

I feel like if life was definitively detected on Mars, it'd kick off a serious new space race for sending crew there. The prestige of either potentially studying alien life, or of having the ability to set foot on the fundamental origin of life on our own planet would be even more historically significant than Apollo.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#173

Post by dylan604 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #128
nwienert wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question - unless he was directly involved with the genocide, was he not doing the exact same thing the allies were doing? It’s not a war crime to participate in a war for your country. The US bombed German civilians and Japanese civilians in mass numbers.

Many would consider those war crimes also.

yes, but that side "won". so the important take away is that if you're going to commit war crimes, you must win the war to avoid being charged

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#174

Post by trenchgun »

markus_zhang wrote: post #127
pjmlp wrote: post #9

Maybe we are about to discover that we came to Earth after messing up Mars.

Is that the paradise? And Adam's apple might not be an apple, but some important electronic devices that Adam accidentally broke? OK I know it sounds crazy...but it's fun to link legends with science.

Tree of knowledge - thats obviously a syntax tree. Garden of Eden was a simulation. Getting into computing could crash it.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#175

Post by elorant »

This is scary on two fronts. One, whatever happened to Mars could happen to Earth, and two, it puts the Great Filter probably in our future. If our solar system had two hospitable planets then there should be plenty of Earth like planets around in our galaxy. In which case we end up with the Fermi Paradox. If life is so abundant in the Universe how come we haven’t been in contact with aliens?

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#176

Post by kerhackernews »

adastra22 wrote: post #37
NegativeLatency wrote: post #28

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…

Couldn't it just be that simple life isn't rare as long as the conditions exist for it to form. It took a very very very long time for even oxygen producing life to form after that.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#177

Post by e44858 »

somenameforme wrote: post #109
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your actual mechanism for life getting to Earth from Mars?

We already know the meteorites from Mars probably do make their way to Earth on occasion. [1] From there, imagining some primitive life managing to hitch a ride is easy. Even quite advanced life, like tardigrades, have demonstrably survived days of exposure to outer space, and successfully procreated afterwards. [2] [1] - https://www.space.com/mars-meteorites-on-earth-mystery [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardi…

> Martian meteorites experience shock pressures of less than 30 GPa on ejection from the Red Planet

Is that enough energy to boil the living things that might be in the rock?

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#178

Post by throw4847285 »

dylan604 wrote: post #169
throw4847285 wrote: post #166

Sometimes I wonder if Sci-fi has done more harm than good. It provides conclusions that people so badly want to prove true that they will look for any evidence, however meager, to bolster their arguments. Maybe there was life on Mars, but the main motivation to believe that right now is that many people have read about it in fantasy books. Much more devastatingly, Sci-fi has driven what technology people develop, and…

I don't blame scifi, after all it is just fiction. However, I think the blame could go to poor education and being able to know the difference.

Yeah fair point. It's not as if Ray Bradbury was the most subtle writer. You have to try to miss the point.

Then again, I get it. If somebody offered to build me a Gundam I wouldn't think "Oh no, a symbol for the dehumanization of soldiers on the modern battlefield" I'd think "Is the beam saber included?"

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#179

Post by joshuahutt »

pc86 wrote: post #147
perihelions wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The atrocity is that von Braun's V-2 factory was an extermination-through-labor camp. About 12,000 people were forcibly worked and tortured to death to produce those weapons—numerically more deaths than V-2, as a weapon, caused in Britain. von Braun was aware of this, complicit in this, oversaw parts of it as a high-ranking SS officer: his Wikipedia entry quotes a survivor testifying "von Braun went to the concentrat…

Assuming this is true (I have no reason to believe it's not) it's clearly a damning indictment of von Braun himself. And it calls into question his accounts, so it seems like odds are he was "actually" a Nazi as opposed to someone affiliating with the party to avoid punishment or execution. I still don't see what that has to do with the original comment that mentioned him. If we're talking about him in depth, absolut…

I can see your point, but I think it's worthwhile to understand the full context, even if it's irrelevant on the surface.

I wasn't familiar with von Braun before reading this thread, and I appreciate the extra info. Complex figure. Maybe even a really bad guy. But, also interesting that his work was useful in getting us to the moon.

Maybe we can all appreciate that dichotomy.

Even more interesting to note, is without your initial pushback, I wouldn't have read more detail about him, so I owe your resistance to actually exploring this facet of the man's alleged history to getting me to actually read a bit about it.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#180

Post by dylan604 »

throw4847285 wrote: post #178
dylan604 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame scifi, after all it is just fiction. However, I think the blame could go to poor education and being able to know the difference.

Yeah fair point. It's not as if Ray Bradbury was the most subtle writer. You have to try to miss the point. Then again, I get it. If somebody offered to build me a Gundam I wouldn't think "Oh no, a symbol for the dehumanization of soldiers on the modern battlefield" I'd think "Is the beam saber included?"

But at the same time, there's so much real science that has thoroughly been inspired by scifi. Sometimes, you just need to get the imagination juices flowing. "That thingymabob from sciFiTvShow would be really cool to have IRL. What would it take to do that...hold my beer" type thinking has probably given us more than we think. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing the concept too much?
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