141–150 of 329 posts
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.
Maybe we are about to discover that we came to Earth after messing up Mars.
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…
Maybe we are about to discover that we came to Earth after messing up Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Van_Flandern#Exploding_pla...
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…
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.
Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
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How does earth get seeded?
Look up ALH-84001. The debate about whether the structures inside this Martian meteorite are fossils is too long for a HN post. But in analyzing the rock it was shown that the during the entire trip from when it was blasted out of Mars to when it fell in Antarctica would have been survivable for rock boring microbes. Not just theoretically, but hard evidence. There are structures that would have been destroyed if the…
277 total Martian meteorites — with the largest weighing 14.5 kg — is not hundreds of tons yearly.
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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.
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…
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, absolutely mention it and dig into it. I guess the thing I'm having trouble reconciling in my head is the need to, upon a passing reference to someone orthogonal to the main point, say it's "worth including" that they're a controversial figure. The controversy seems irrelevant to me. It seems to border on virtue signaling, this need to say "oh by the way, Nazis are bad" when that (objective fact) has nothing to do with anything.
I see your other comment and I get the point you're trying to make but I don't think it has anything to do with speaking respectfully or with any sort of courtesy about a Nazi, just about trying to make a point.
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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…
Its also why we better be damn sure the mars sample return is absolutely sterile lest we contaminate our planet with extraterrestrial microbes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look up ALH-84001. The debate about whether the structures inside this Martian meteorite are fossils is too long for a HN post. But in analyzing the rock it was shown that the during the entire trip from when it was blasted out of Mars to when it fell in Antarctica would have been survivable for rock boring microbes. Not just theoretically, but hard evidence. There are structures that would have been destroyed if the…
> Hundreds of tons of rock like this from Mars land every year. 277 total Martian meteorites — with the largest weighing 14.5 kg — is not hundreds of tons yearly.
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.
That has been going on for billions of years. If the 277/72,000 proportion holds that's a lot of material.
An oxidizing atmosphere (as Earth and Mars are currently) would actually make it much harder for life to emerge in the first place. Oxidation makes it very hard for complex molecules to remain stable enough for life to emerge in the first place. Before photosynthesis, Earth had a reducing environment. The advent of oxygen is often termed the "Oxygen Catastrophe."