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

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

#251

Post by the_af »

TheVespasian wrote: post #234
the_af wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large in part of the world. Not as distinct from basic impulses we can detect in all periods. These terms we use (rightwing, fascist) are new terms for ancient political dispositions. If I describe someone as imperialist, patriarchal, sexist, antisemitic, and racist, am I more likely to be talking about the Nazis, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Abb…

> Not as distinct from basic impulses we can detect in all periods

I disagree. Nazism and Fascism are largely influential today but Caesar isn't.

> My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.

I cannot vouch for your understanding. I do know Nazism and Fascism must be loudly denounced whenever found. They must not be allowed to fester in the darkness.

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

#252

Post by rrr_oh_man »

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…

You might enjoy this: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-wrath-of-...

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

#253

Post by rrr_oh_man »

sinkwool wrote: post #56
adastra22 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but I seriously believe we are likely martians. Early panspermia from Mars settles a LOT of astrobiological questions about origin of life and LUCA complexity. To be clear, Mars’ descent into inhospitality was totally natural and the result of a smaller planet with stripped atmosphere just outside the habitable zone as the Sun cooled. I doubt Martian life developed to be multicellular. But I bet when we go…

so aliens did build the pyramids!

Sholva!

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

#254

Post by the_af »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #236
the_af wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> None lives today who saw Caesar's dictatorship. It's also funny to brand Caesar as an evil dictator. He was a revolutionary with very benevolent tendencies, both toward the masses and to his enemies. Dictatorships like Sulla's, which came before, were the brutal ones. What the people back then saw Caesar as was as a populist hero fixing a crumbling, broken, and corrupt system. Later, the people of the Empire would…

I agree that, with enough distance and with no danger of another Hitler, future historians will be able to see that dark period in human history more dispassionately.

We're not there yet, not when this is still relatively recent history and when we haven't yet dealt with Nazism's offspring.

> Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances.

I don't know about Caesar, but I certainly don't buy this argument for Hitler. The minute he supported the Final Solution or decided to get rid of 80% of Eastern Europe, he crossed the line. There were people at the time of Hitler, even in Germany, who were horrified by Nazism -- not as in "I don't agree with this", but "I cannot believe this is happening". Some were executed for objecting to it. I'm sure more were silently horrified, not brave or reckless enough to openly reject it, but in private repulsed by it. There were people who hid or helped Jews (and I'm not arguing here Jews were the only victims of Nazism, mind you!).

Hitler was a product of his time and upbringing, but he was also an evil man. There are no excuses for the Holocaust or Generalplan Ost or the many evils of Nazism, when we know people from that time were horrified by it. Evil may be banal, as Arendt put it, but it's still evil.

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

#255

Post by laeri »

gmd63 wrote: post #216

Imagine the frustration of our martian ancestors upon learning the richest man on earth is trying to go back to they place they originally launched the seeds from.

*One of the richest men. Bernard Arnault seems to claim top spot currently and the definition of richest man is also very vague in general.

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

#256

Post by roenxi »

dullcrisp wrote: post #240
jjk166 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nurembur…

> Hitler's vice chancellor from 1933 to 1934 and the man who pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to power Are you saying that supporting Hitler before the war should have been a war crime?

I don't see him saying that, so probably not. But being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime either.

Looking at Wikipedia there seems to be something going on with Braun's involvement in forced labour and war prisoners. I don't see an outline of what the problem is; maybe there is something serious but if there is a problem Wikipedia doesn't seem to detail it. If building horrible weapons is a war crime then I think Fat Man and Little Boy probably take the cake.

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

#257

Post by killthebuddha »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #225
killthebuddha wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What you're describing is one possible resolution and part of what's interesting. A very big open question is "which, if any, of the known factors are wildly rarer than we think?". Another possible resolution is that most of our estimates are actually ok and there's some other variable that's going to whack us on the head at some point.

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

#258

Post by dotnet00 »

Qem wrote: post #233
dotnet00 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I feel like if life was definitively detected on Mars, it'd kick off a serious new space race for sending crew there. Nope. More probable for it to get quarantined, for fear of cross contamination. IIRC NASA purposefully doesn't land craft on the locations with conditions closer to habitability in Mars today, fearing stowaway microbes from our probes run amok and eradicate any extant martian biota, just like rabbit…

IIRC a big part of Perseverance's mission is to stash away pristine, provably untouched samples of Mars, because NASA sees a human landing on Mars in the nearish (ie 20-30 years) as an inevitability.

I don't think they'd quarantine the planet due to it, even moreso because even if the US decides to quarantine it, other nations might not and even then, there'd be value to sending a crew to say, a station in Mars orbit or on Phobos/Deimos, for more effective control over survey vehicles and to reduce the feedback loop between retrieving samples from the surface and studying them.

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

#259

Post by adastra22 »

jl6 wrote: post #186
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wouldn't rule out that some part of Earth may have had the right conditions for life right from the beginning Even if it was, it wouldn't have survived the impact that created the Moon.

Bear in mind that hypothesized impact is estimated to have occurred around the 4.5Gya mark. That’s still a lot further back than 3.8Gya. And I still wouldn’t categorically rule out microscopic life/life-precursors surviving the event somehow.

Geological evidence shows that the earth’s crust was molten until 3.8Gya. This corresponds with the ending of the late heavy bombardment on the moon, which Apollo samples dated. It’s hard to imagine life persisting in or around a magma ocean.

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

#260

Post by adastra22 »

acchow wrote: post #249
ceejayoz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how many have been conclusively classified as Martian out of "the 72,000 meteorites [total] that have been classified". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite ) That's obviously not the actual total that have ever made it here. https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/fac... > Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day.…

> Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day. Most of it gets destroyed on entry, right? No organic matter surviving?

No, most are smaller rocks and generally decelerate to terminal velocity in the upper atmosphere. It’s the big ones that have too much momentum and penetrate further at speed, causing them to go boom.

The underlying reason is that momentum scales with volume but air resistance scales with surface area.

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