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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

#221

Post by TheVespasian »

perihelions wrote: post #112
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly worth also including just how controversial Wernher von Braun is. Von Braun is a highly controversial figure widely seen as escaping justice for his Nazi war crimes due to the Americans' desire to beat the Soviets in the Cold War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

- "Former Buchenwald inmate Adam Cabala stated that von Braun went to the concentration camp to pick slave laborers:" - "... also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof. Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his frequent…

> It's a loud silence when someone circles around the topic without mentioning it

It's a unique feature of American/Western historiography that would incline you to believe this. I find it interesting we don't have to tack on similar disclaimers when it comes to any other similarly horrible group throughout history; the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche -- forget about it: we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers. But mere broaching of the subject of the Nazis requires confession that, let's repeat it in unison, they were evil.

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

#223

Post by killthebuddha »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #210
elorant wrote: post #175

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?

I don't understand Fermi Paradox. Why couldn't the chance of life be extremely miniscule, e.g. given all billions of stars and planets, why couldn't there have been even 10% or 0.0001% odds of it happening at all one any given stars or planets? E.g. maybe even it happening on one was such a lucky occurrence? Maybe given even 1,000,000 of observable universes the odds were just 1 out of 1,000,000. How can people confi…

> To me it seems like the probability could have been anything.

The point is that we do know some things about the universe and, given what we do know, we think the probability is high. So we're obviously missing something but we don't know what.

The thing that makes the Fermi Paradox so interesting is that every resolution is either interesting or implies something interesting.

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

#224

Post by bmitc »

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…

> 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.

Life effectively began on Earth around 400 million years after it formed, and that's about the time that Mars' core cooled off and atmosphere got blown away. It seems that there was just enough time for life to start on Mars before it got snuffed out by the planetary geology of Mars and loss of its magnetosphere. If we ever find life on Mars, it's most certainly likely to be single-celled organisms.

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

#225

Post by mewpmewp2 »

killthebuddha wrote: post #223
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand Fermi Paradox. Why couldn't the chance of life be extremely miniscule, e.g. given all billions of stars and planets, why couldn't there have been even 10% or 0.0001% odds of it happening at all one any given stars or planets? E.g. maybe even it happening on one was such a lucky occurrence? Maybe given even 1,000,000 of observable universes the odds were just 1 out of 1,000,000. How can people confi…

> To me it seems like the probability could have been anything. The point is that we do know some things about the universe and, given what we do know, we think the probability is high. So we're obviously missing something but we don't know what. The thing that makes the Fermi Paradox so interesting is that every resolution is either interesting or implies something interesting.

How do we know the probability of chained events required to start life in any given planet with potentially suitable environment?

How do we know that the probability isn't something like 0.01 to the power of some very large number, far higher than amount of total planets etc?

If we don't know the exact mechanism for all we know the odds could be infinitely low, even so low that even after billions of big bangs only 1 would have had life occurring anywhere at all and lower than that. Because maybe the first life form literally had to appear spontaneously from bruteforce chemical reactions with such low odds of ocurring.

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

#226

Post by jjk166 »

pdonis wrote: post #111
pc86 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with the comment you're replying to? Edit: This is an honest question, I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. It certainly doesn't seem like a clear-cut "he was an objectively evil man but we looked the other way" based on the Wikipedia article. It could very well be his account, which from a brief skim seems reasonable, is accurate?

> I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. He was the Nazis' best rocket engineer, responsible for, among other things, the V2s that devastated much of London. By the standards of the Nuremberg trials, he probably should have been tried and convicted. But he was never even accused, because the US wanted his rocket expertise--by the time of the Nuremberg trials, he was already working for the US Army.

> By the standards of the Nuremberg trials, he probably should have been tried and convicted. But he was never even accused, because the US wanted his rocket expertise--by the time of the Nuremberg trials, he was already working for the US Army.

Absurd. For starters, by the standards of the nuremberg trials, there's no way in hell he would be convicted. For comparison, among the men actually acquitted by the nuremburg trials were Franz von Papen, Hitler's vice chancellor from 1933 to 1934 and the man who pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to power, and Hans Fritzsche, a high ranking propagandist who was in the Fuhrerbunker in the last days of the war and after his acquittal took part in a cabal attempting to re-nazify West Germany.

The nuremberg trials targetted only the very highest level Nazis - only the top 5 highest ranking officers in the entire german military were indicted. Even if von Braun had been an enthusiastic Nazi (and there's quite a bit of evidence he wasn't), he was way too low level to have been tried nonetheless convicted by the Nuremberg trials.

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

#227

Post by gloryjulio »

bmitc wrote: post #220

I dislike complaining about titles, but I really wish articles, especially a national laboratory, would be more honest about titles. This makes it sound like this is the new "smoking gun" that Mars was so-called Earth-like early on. However, it was my understanding that this was already known. The largest known waterfall was already previously known to be on Mars at one point, and it was already known that Mars had o…

Just a curious question, is Earth's core cooling off like Mars?

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

#228

Post by Teever »

pc86 wrote: post #95
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly worth also including just how controversial Wernher von Braun is. Von Braun is a highly controversial figure widely seen as escaping justice for his Nazi war crimes due to the Americans' desire to beat the Soviets in the Cold War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

What does that have to do with the comment you're replying to? Edit: This is an honest question, I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. It certainly doesn't seem like a clear-cut "he was an objectively evil man but we looked the other way" based on the Wikipedia article. It could very well be his account, which from a brief skim seems reasonable, is accurate?

A lot of people feel a strong need to participate in a conversation whether or not they have anything to contribute.

So they bring up Von Braun when the topic of space stuff comes up because they don't really know much about space but they want to participate in the conversation so they think of the closest pop culture thing that they can think of.

It's one of my biggest pet peeves when talking about space stuff because I'm a super passionate layman who has taking a few astrophysics and astronomy courses.

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

#229

Post by the_af »

TheVespasian wrote: post #221
perihelions wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- "Former Buchenwald inmate Adam Cabala stated that von Braun went to the concentration camp to pick slave laborers:" - "... also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof. Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his frequent…

> It's a loud silence when someone circles around the topic without mentioning it It's a unique feature of American/Western historiography that would incline you to believe this. I find it interesting we don't have to tack on similar disclaimers when it comes to any other similarly horrible group throughout history; the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche -- forget about it: we can speak of t…

> the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche [...] we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers [...] but mere broaching of the subject of the Nazis requires confession that, let's repeat it in unison, they were evil.

There's the thing about temporal closeness and impact on actual politics and ideology. Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large in part of the world.

And there are still people alive who lived through some of the horrors the Nazis inflicted upon the world. None lives today who saw Caesar's dictatorship. Nobody, to my mind, seriously worships Imperial China or wants a return of the Caesars. There are no Comanche atrocities apologists (of note).

But Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers. It's important to note Von Braun was an unapologetic nazi and that he should not be celebrated as a person.

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

#230

Post by dylan604 »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #219
dylan604 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> considering the tech available, Wow, you're doing some heavy caveating with that comment. Sure, someone today can say that a handheld device to show you the weather in any part of the world seems like a "duh" thing now, but in the 60s when Star Trek came to TV with a tricoder or really a handheld anything was pushing credibility. Computers at the time took up rooms in buildings. Of course zillenials never knowing t…

But how did Star Trek creators come up with this? And how did people come up with things before the sci fi was available like it is now. I just really think influence of sci fi is really overestimated here. In fact people bruteforcing ideas for sci fi before the tech was available proves that you can think of those ideas even if you don't have the tech available. And if you do, it is much easier to come up with all o…

I really think we're talking circles, as you've now just stated what we've said in the first place. SciFi authors thought of something that would be cool to have. Now, we have the tech that makes those scifi things real things. The people making the real things admit they were inspired by the scifi thing rather than it being an original idea to them.

What's your point?

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